Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Review of Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1TB



Seagate Expansion 2.5 Inch is a plug and play portable external hard drive with 1TB storage capacity and comes in a sleek glossy finished casing. It supports USB 2.0 interface that ensures quick transfer of data. This hard drive can store upto 1,000 hours of videos, 25000 hours of digital music, 250 DVD movies of 2-hour and 320,000 numbers of digital photos. It requires no external power supply and comes integrated with Built-in power management feature for efficient energy operation. It is compatible with Windows Vista, Windows XP, or Mac OSX 10.4.8 or higher.

Specification :

  • Brand : Seagate
  • Color : Black
  • Capacity : 1 TB
  • Connectivity : USB 2.0
  • Dimensions : 80.01 x 17.6 x 141.29 mm
  • Form Factor : Portable
  • Model : ST910004EXM101-RK
  • OS Supported: Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X v10.4.8 or higher
  • External Power Required : No
  • RPM : 5400
  • Size : 2.5 inch
  • Warranty : 3-Year Limited Warranty
  • Weight: 160 g
  • Retail Price : Rs 6,200/- (Including Tax)
Most USB 2.0 external hard drives still use Mini USB connections and cables for connecting up to compatible devices and GoFlex seems no different.  Seagate sells a variety of different connection adapters for the GoFlex line. So it might start life as a USB 2.0 drive, but you can change that up for eSATA, USB 3.0 or FireWire as you need it, and changing the drive is as simple as pulling off the unwanted connector and popping on the new one.

Seagate supplies a small suite of software add-ons including backup and encryption for the drive, none of which are necessary for standard file operation. The drive itself is formatted by default as NTFS.

Performance Test :

Its read speed, tested with HDTach came out as a average 36.4Mb/s, and its write scores (with a 499Mb AVI file and 1.6GB folder) of 21.97Mb/s and 17.47Mb/s were much low for any USB 2.0 drive.

Switching out the USB 2.0 connector for a USB 3.0 connector, read speed jumped from 36.4Mb/s to 68.2Mb/s. The write speed for the AVI file went up from 21.97Mb/s to 60.12Mb/s, although the the folder of files only increased in speed from 17.47Mb/s to 27.66Mb/s.

Conclusions :

The FreeAgent Goflex HDD feels a bit heavy in the hands. It gets slightly warmer in USB 3.0 interface. We like the idea of being able to interchange the connections at will, but it's a missed opportunity for Seagate not to have made USB 3.0 the default. The drive itself certainly performs well, and for those who regularly interface with systems with better-than-USB 2.0 connections it's well worth considering. The drive performed swimmingly. Less platters and the greater aerial density seemed to help out a bit. 

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