With the rise of 'digital entertainment', the amount of data in the form of photos, music, movies etc that a user saves everyday has increased drastically and so have storage requirements. FreeAgent Extreme from Seagate has a compact design with jazzy light effects and can be kept both horizontally or vertically depending on the space available. Under the sleek black color casing of this product is placed a shock absorbing mechanism that can easily be felt while moving around the device, when in use; thereby protecting data from perilous effects of jerks. The external drive is also extremely silent and emits negligible heat while in operation. The Xtreme provides users with three interface options: USB 2.0, FireWire and e-SATA for lightning fast transfers between itself and the computer but one has to shell out extra money for the e-SATA cable as it is not shipped with the product.

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It also comes with software which lets one control the time after which the drive goes into sleep mode, creates backups and also has security features such as file encryption. We tested the drive on an AMD Athlon X2 dual core processor based machine with 2GB DDR2 RAM using HD Tach, WinBench99 and Everest benchmarks. The avg read speed with HD Tach was 46.1MB/see which is quite good as compared to other external HDDs we reviewed in past. It managed to get 14.8 and 34.1 MBps on the Business disk and high-end disk tests respectively on the WinBench99 benchmark. The avg access speeds were around 13.2 ms.