While searching for an external harddisk to replace my broken DAT streamer I found the Seagate FreeAgent Pro. Because the price of the 750GB version seemed to be reasonable and reviews on the Internet suggested that the noise emission is low I ordered one online.
The harddisk arrived yesterday and I tried it out on the same day. The case looks nice enough and appears to be robust. It starts glowing when you power up the disk and connect it to a computer. The light effect results in a high WAF according to my wife. I would personally have prefered a full size USB socket on the case but its micro USB socket works fine so far. And last but not least: the harddisk works fine with my server.
After partitioning and formatting the drive (newfs -i 1048576 saves a lot of time when you create a 698GB filesystem under NetBSD) I started my backup script. Three hours and over 150GB later I had a complete backup. Copying the most important filesystems (about 25GB) to the DAT streamer would have taken twice as long. And there is still free space for three more backups on the external harddisk.
Overall I’m happy with FreeAgent Pro. It works fine, offers a lot of diskpace and isn’t noisy.