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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
81 Comments
View All Comments
Quilty997 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
I notice some posters have commented on using RAID 5 with very large disc sizesIf you do the math using the drive specs and published bit error rates you will find that a RAID 5 array using 1Tb+ discs very soon has a probability not possibility of having a disc error when rebuilding the array.
For this reason I went to RAID6. (using a dedicated controller to handle the parity calculations).
Please remember that RAID arrays are not a backup device.
Michael REMY - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
i can't image the day, even not for my ennemy, where it comes a 3TD hard drive will fail...What a lost it will be !
mindless1 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Why would you store valuable data on any one drive alone? Backups, backups backups.JonnyDough - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Until Seagate fixes their longevity issues and can offer a five year warranty that has a better failure rate I'll be sticking with other companies like Western Digital and Hitachi. I used to love Seagate. :(loekf - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Anand, did you actually review the power management features of this drive ? I had the 2 TB model.I noticed the same temperature issues and slowless at high temperatures. In my case I got 65 celsius as well.
Bigger issue I found the power management features, or better said lack of or poor implementation of them. This drive is supposed to be left attached to your PC. There's no on/off switch. So it will power-on and off depending on whether you switch your PC on and whether you access the drive.
Funny thing it will completely behaves by itself, it has its own will.
It willl automatically power on again after you SHUTDOWN your computer and you leave it plugged into the mains.
If you enable sleep mode, it will disable itself when it is not accessed for the specified period. But... it won't go into a sleep mode (= shutting down the drive), no it will unplug in Windows, and after a short period automatically re-insert itself. This means you will see popups or hear beeps indicating that device manager is triggered.
This is just plain stupid and indicating it's a bad product......
mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
I've never seen a drive that has an on/off switch! Except for the kind that you have to plug in separately, and that kinds of ruins the point of an "external drive" in the first place. Some public places don't even have accessible plugs, they literally put a lock on them. In other words no one would ever buy one unless they just don't know drives sometimes have separate plugs and therefore don't exhaustively evaluate the packing to ensure that the one they are getting doesn't.Aikouka - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Anand, I was curious if you were going to talk about the current USB 3.0 implementation and I was quite glad to see that you did make a note of it! :) But I'm curious... do you know of any motherboard manufacturers that have a better USB 3.0 implementation on the P55 chipset? I know the P55 is literally the red-headed stepchild in regard to its PCI-E bus compared to the X58 (uses PCI-E 1.1 compared to actual 2.0 lanes, has far fewer, etc), but as an example, my ASUS P7P55D-E motherboard uses that "combiner thingy-ma-bob" to combine the PCI-E lanes for SATA 6Gbs functionality. Do any boards do that for USB 3.0?loekf - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Not sure what you mean here. I know for a fact that AMD boards with ATI chipsets use a real PCIe 2.0 x1 lane to the NEC USB 3.0 host controller.There is no chipset yet with native USB 3.0 support. All motherboards maker use the same NEC USB 3.0 controller. Though, it seems there are controllers from VIA around, but I didn't see them yet.
GeorgeH - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
They're talking about P55 and LGA-1156. AMD hasn't made an Intel-compatible chipset in a very long time, and even if they had a P55 compatible license and the desire to make one, LGA-1156's PCIe controller isn't on the chipset.As a side note, that's also why LGA-1336 is going to be dead soon after LGA-1155 replaces LGA-1156; the Sandy Bridge derived Nehalem/Westmere replacement is going to have the PCIe controller on die.
snakeInTheGrass - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
I understand saying that Seagate hasn't released this as a stand-alone drive because the PC hardware just isn't ready yet, but I was hoping they'd try it out on a Mac as well since it sounds like it should just work. It's a shame they won't sell it stand-alone and just label it 'For Intel Mac with EFI' (or hell, just sell it online with a note "For EFI machines only" label for PC users that do have working EFI or an extra internal disk) for the time being because I really don't want to buy another external case.