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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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.