Taking the Hard Out of Hard Drives- Seagate Replica and FreeAgent Theater
Seagate is well-known for their hard drives, and we’ve previously reviewed their FreeAgent Go, an attractive portable drive with handy docking and plenty of space for even media-hungry folks. Now, they’ve continued to up the ante, breaking free from the PC space and aiming at your home theater with a new set-top box that can serve as an easy plug-and play media box. At the same time, they’ve recently released the Replica system, offering a dead-simple backup system that can best be compared to Apple’s Time Machine for ease of use and classy outfitting.
We’ll start with the FreeAgent Theater, a device that often felt like the first version of a product that had room for improvement. The hard drive itself is the 250GB version of the drive already reviewed, and works great. But you’re really buying the ability to easily store and then play your media on your TV, and our problems were three-fold: first, the lack of HDMI was a major issue for a device aimed at serious audio/visual folks. Composite, component, and s-video are offered though, along with digital optical audio.
Second, file support is pretty good, but still lacking. DivX and Xvid are handled, and you can plug in your digital camera or other USB devices, even other brands of hard drives, and the HD media player will easily recognize them and hopefully play the files back. But some filetypes, even fairly common ones, have issues- .MOV files, for instance, and some RAW images, not even Apple’s AAC files (unprotected or protected). Mac users are also in a bit of trouble, as FAT32 or NTFS are the only partitions accepted.
Finally, though the player is sturdy and the dock attractive and easy to use, the software wasn’t quite as clean or fun to use. Previews are a bit awkward, and the remote as well is somewhat weak for a device that might be intended to serve as a movie box. Overall, at around $150 without a drive or $220 with, it’s a nice in-between option- but much pricier and it would make more sense to get an Xbox 360 which can handle media in some ways better, and play games besides.
But if the Theater doesn’t quite knock it out of the park, the Seagate Replica is harder to find fault with. It doesn’t work for Macs, but they have their Time Machine to serve a similar function. The big issue that is probably a deal-breaker for many people: you can’t selectively backup files easily. It’s mostly an all-or-nothing deal, and that simplifies everything but might annoy power users. For those folks, find another system, but most of the rest of us just want our stuff backed up regularly without mess or fuss, and that is handled with aplomb by the Replica.
Incremental backups are a primary feature, allowing you to find older versions of files if you should accidentally save over your thesis. A boot CD allows you to use the device as a true recovery system, should the worst happen. On Vista or XP, you didn’t need to worry about the interface at first- just plug it in, agree to some terms and conditions, and the fun has begun. You won’t even notice, really- it didn’t make much a difference on system resources even on our slower test systems. 250GB and 500GB versions are available, the latter better capable of handling multi-PC backups, and priced around $150-$200. Easy on the eyes and the wallet, and this is a no-brainer for folks without backups.
