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
Final Words
I like the design of the GoFlex Desk line. The drives look cool and the docking system is functional. I like the capacity lights on the docks as well. I would’ve preferred it if Seagate had made the SATA data/power connectors on the drive more accessible so you could plug directly into a system if you wanted to. I love the performance of the GoFlex Desk over USB 3.0. While you can get better performance out of an external SSD, you have to pay much more.
Unfortunately, despite the performance USB 3.0 offers and the compact design of the GoFlex Desk, the penalty you pay in heat may not be worth it. The temperatures I reached in my testing were unacceptably high for prolonged use. While Seagate insists that even my peak 69C value was ok, I'm concerned about how long a drive would last at those temperatures. To Seagate's credit, many external 3.5" drives aren't well designed from a cooling standpoint - but that doesn't mean we should be ok with it.
It's really the initial copy to the drive that's the most concerning. If you've got several hundred GB of data that you want to load on this thing at the start, you should plan on spacing the copy out at least as to not run into the heat issues I did. For light use it wasn't a problem - the drive usually hovered around 54C, but while copying hundreds of GB the drive got far too warm.
Even if you go to a cooler drive I’m just not comfortable with Seagate’s enclosure design, there’s not enough ventilation for a hot 3.5” drive. While the design keeps the GoFlex Desk as compact as possible, I don’t believe the tradeoff is worth it.
For light use it may be acceptable, but I’m not convinced users who need 3TB of external storage intend to use it lightly.
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zdzichu - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
In first performance table you switched results for SATA and USB3.0 of 3TB drive.oc3an - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
The maximum integer which can be represented with 32 bits is 4294967295 i.e. 2^32 - 1 which allows for 4294967296 values. The article is worded incorrectly.mino - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
"...so the largest partition you can have in a MBR partitioned drive is 4294967296 * 512-bytes or 2,199,023,255,552 bytes..."Are you sure that is an incorrect wording?
mino - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
BIOS does support booting from GPT.It is the Windows boot loader that cannot boot from GPT on BIOS systems.
As a matter of fact I am writing this from Gigabyte 780G board running Ubuntu 10.04 on top of GPT(on top of LVM on top of MD on top of GPT).
yuhong - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
To be more precise, all that BIOS does is read the first sector of the drive, check for the signature at the end, and if it matches, then it jumps to the real mode x86 code at the beginning. It is actually partition scheme agnostic. Now some BIOSes are not quite partition scheme agnostic and will rely on the contents of the first sector being in the MBR format, luckily GPT support a protective MBR.baker269 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
I would love to see what the Ethernet speeds are like. Not that great I would guess since it's not a true NAS, but still would be nice.mindless1 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
?? It doesn't have an ethernet interface does it? Speeds would be similar enough to any current-gen 7200 RPM drive already in a system on your LAN.baker269 - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
From the forth paragraph of the article."The drives themselves are standard 3.5” hard drives in a plastic enclosure designed to mate with GoFlex Desk adapters that add USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 800 or Ethernet connectivity to the drive."
It"s not as easy as just plugging in a hard drive with a RJ45 to a router, there needs to be some kind of CPU in between the two. NAS performance through Ethernet varies greatly.
derkurt - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Is it such a big deal that Windows doesn't boot from GPT drives if the BIOS is not EFI-capable? Whoever spends 400+ USD on a drive probably just needs lots of storage space for plain data. It's unlikely that there is no fast boot drive present in any system this drive is plugged into. Actually, since the first expansive 3 TB drives are bought by enthusiasts, chances are that the customers are already using an SSD as a boot drive.That said, in a realistic setting for a performance workstation with Windows 7 x64 installed on a 80+ GB SSD, there won't be a problem. You can connect the drive to the internal SATA connector, partition it with GPT and start using it, while your BIOS doesn't need to know anything about EFI or GPT. The heat issues might also look better when using the drive internally.
I don't understand why Seagate is holding back with selling the internal model. An estimated 95% of users will never even try to boot from it, and for the rest (who do want to boot from it but don't know about the 2+ TB issues), there could be a red warning note inside the box explaining the juicy details. After all, those who spend such an amount of money on a hard drive are not exactly the kind of people who have no clue about hard drives at all.
dryloch - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
One of Seagates biggest advantages has been that their external hard drives come with a 5 year warranty. Why would they go to a two year warranty on the most expensive drive they sell? If anything they should have at least gone with three years. If they don't even trust this drive then I sure won't. I'll be waiting for Western Digital to have their drive out.