The World's First 3TB HDD: Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB Review

The GoFlex Desk

After putting the drive back together I decided to look at the product for what it is: an external 3.5” drive enclosure.

Seagate does nothing to hide the fact that this is a standard SATA drive in an enclosure. The SATA data and power connectors are clearly visible on the base of the enclosure. While you can plug a SATA power cable directly into the drive, the enclosure prevents you from sticking a SATA data cable in there - not without trimming away part of the plastic surrounding the cable’s SATA connector at least.

To mount the GoFlex Desk drive you just line it up with the dock and push down - the drive snaps into place. With a driver installed the dock can display how much of the drive is in use via a set of LEDs. These can be turned off in software.

The GoFlex Desk 3TB kit comes with a USB 2.0 dock ($350). You can buy the drive itself (in its GoFlex Desk enclosure) for $320.

The docks aren’t cheap, the basic USB 2.0 dock will set you back $30, while the USB 3.0 and FireWire 800/USB 2.0 docks are $40 and $50 respectively. And of course Seagate doesn’t make a dock with all three connections, the closest you can get is the FireWire 800 dock which has a USB 2.0 port on it as well.

The docks all use the same AC adapter. Power consumption at idle is around 10W, and the highest I saw under load was 14.3W.

There’s a fairly high performance 3.5” drive contained within so it’s not silent. I measured sound pressure in a room that measured 39.6 dB(A) with everything off:

If you’re using a well designed notebook with its fans spun down, the GoFlex Desk is audible. If you’ve got another desktop or something else running in your room, you won’t notice the drive.

The drive ships with three pieces of software on it: Seagate’s Dashboard, Memeo Backup and Trial software, and a Mac OS X NTFS driver.

The Dashboard gives you basic info about your drive. You can control the LED lights on the GoFlex Desk dock - either keep them on or turn them all off.

The Memeo Instant Backup software is pretty basic. When configured it runs in the background and will automatically backup all non-system or program files. In other words it copies your documents, pictures, music and downloads but it won’t back up your OS, logs, or installed applications.

The backup happens automatically whenever files are saved/added. There’s a CPU usage penalty when this happens of course. Memeo Instant Backup uses around 11% of my quad-core Core i7 975 while backing up on the fly. It’s not an issue on a high end system, but lower end and single core machines for sure will have issues with the auto backup.

The final piece of software is nice for users who have both Macs and PCs. By default Macs can’t write to NTFS formatted volumes - they are read only under OS X. Seagate ships Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X v8.0.0 with the GoFlex Desk, normally $40, for free. Paragon NTFS lets you write to NTFS partitions as seamlessly as you’d write to a HFS+ partition in OS X. Just install the driver, reboot, activate, reboot once more and you’re good to go. There’s no performance impact vs. writing to HFS+ partitions.

You can also apparently activate it on multiple computers, so you can use it if you’ve got a Mac/PC household with multiple Macs.