The World's First 3TB HDD: Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 23, 2010 12:39 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Seagate
- HDDs
- GoFlex Desk
USB 2.0, 3.0 and FireWire 800 Performance
Seagate sent all three docks for review and I benchmarked the 3TB GoFlex Desk under both Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6.4 to get an idea for its performance. The full results are below, but I’ll give you the gist of it here.
USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 docks (left and right)
Over USB 2.0 I got around 30MB/s for sequential reads/writes. That’s 240Mbps, about half of the USB 2.0 spec maximum.
| Windows Performance Comparison | |||||
| Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB (USB 2.0) | Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB (USB 3.0) | ||||
| Sequential Read | 33.1 MB/s | 151.9 MB/s | |||
| Sequential Write | 26.9 MB/s | 151.2 MB/s | |||
| Random Read | 0.30 MB/s | 0.30 MB/s | |||
| Random Write | 0.93 MB/s | 0.93 MB/s | |||
USB 3.0 performance is just awesome, the drive performs just like an internal hard drive. It's a shame that USB 3.0 isn't more ubiquitous because this is great performance not to mention that you get backwards compatibility with USB 2.0 systems. The only issue is you need to make sure you don't lose the USB 3.0 cable since the drive-end of it is not backwards compatible.
I actually got better performance over USB 3.0 than I did with the drive connected via SATA at around 150MB/s for sequential reads/writes. The SATA to USB 3.0 bridge does some additional buffering that may be the cause of the improved performance here. Random performance remained unchanged regardless of what interface I used.
The USB 3.0 cable that ships with the GoFlex Desk USB 3.0 dock. It works in both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports.
On the Mac, without Iometer I had to resort to XBench for the performance numbers. All of these are written via the filesystem but are uncached:
| Mac Performance Comparison - XBench 1.3 | |||||
| Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB (USB 2.0) | Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB (FireWire 800) | ||||
| Sequential Read | 17.0 MB/s | 74.9 MB/s | |||
| Sequential Write | 15.8 MB/s | 47.6 MB/s | |||
| Random Read | 0.68 MB/s | 0.73 MB/s | |||
| Random Write | 1.80 MB/s | 1.78 MB/s | |||
USB 2.0 performance was aroun 15 - 17MB/s while FireWire 800 managed 47.6MB/s for sequential writes and 75MB/s for sequential reads. Copying files to the drive manually I saw very similar numbers over FireWire 800 (53MB/s writes, 78MB/s reads). Note that performance was identical regardless of whether I was using Paragon’s NTFS driver or I formatted the drive in OS X’s native HFS+ file format.
FireWire 800
What this tells us is that, at least compared to FireWire 800 on a Mac Pro, the USB 3 connection in Windows is still the quickest way to write to the drive. There is one more stipulation that I must bring up. Most mainstream motherboards with an Intel chipset don’t give USB 3 controllers enough bandwidth to deliver these sorts of results. I was using a Gigabyte X58A-UD5, but many other boards dangle the USB 3 controller off of a single PCIe x1 lane running at 250MB/s (250MB/s each direction). In these cases you’ll still get better than USB 2.0 performance but you may not see the same numbers I got here.
I wrote about this issue while talking about 6Gbps SATA controllers on Intel motherboards here, but the same problem documented in that article applies to USB 3.0.
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mindless1 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Too many platters, contributing to bearing wear and heat. IMO, the high price is partially to offset the higher chance of failure/RMA replacement cost even with a mere 2 year warranty. Of course it's also due to being the biggest drive available, the high end capacity luxury tax.shin0bi272 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
why not just get a raid card that has 64big lba and raid the drives in a raid0? I got a software raid5 card with pci-e 4x speed and 4 sata ports on it for 130 bucks. Its not a 3ware but it writes just as fast as my other computer can send it data. Plus if youre looking for that much space a raid is probably a good idea and you should get 3x 2tb drives and do a raid5 anyway for redundancy.shin0bi272 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
64bit* lba ... cant type before coffee sry.ClagMaster - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
You say 9.4ZB is an absurd amount of data.I say that 2TB is an absurd amount of data.
I have been using a 160GB drive paritioned into 3 partions and for six years I am not challenged with space.
shin0bi272 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Ive got over 1tb in just my music collection so 2tb isnt really that big of a number.mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Not really, just 200 or 300 songs in a proper format and your drive will be filled...mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
No wait, 300 songs is only 15 CDs, so let's say 1,000 or so songs, but either way that's a hell of a lot less then how many songs you're actually going to want, if human brains were actually capable of remembering all of them and if computers were capable of finding and properly formatting all of them.cjs150 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Ripping Blu-ray disks chews through a lot of hard disk space. Add in a daughter with lots of music and 2TB is not enough.I am looking for 6TB storage in a RAID 5 for my home as enough to keep me going at least for the next 5-6 years
abrar - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Isn't there any program that you give it the files (suppose your are going to copy / backup ~ 3TB of data ) you are going to copy , and set a temperature threshold , so that when it reaches that temperature, it stops , or reduces the speed of , copying and when temp. gets normal and it cools down, continues in normal mode. ?!that is quiet and idea !
mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Uh I thought SpeedFan did that.