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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Pastuch - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
I am very confused on why the 3tb drives were not released as OEM. People looking for this kind of space are not looking to put the OS on that drive.Why not release the 3tb drives now, let us create GPT partitions in Windows and use the storage space. I need 12 terabytes ASAP! I would rather 4 drives instead of 6. Hopefully WD catches up soon.
Bytales - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 - link
I didn't knew long heat means performance degradation in such a way that it reaches the jaw-dropping 1mb/s.In these cases, flash ssd seem to have the advantage. However, we still have to wait until ssd become more capacitous than hdd, to the point that creating a hdd is no longer worth it.
loekf - Sunday, August 29, 2010 - link
Get a Western Digital MyBook 3.0, they only come in 1 TB and 2 TB flavours, but these keep itself cool. After copying 700 GB of data, temperate was steady at 43 celsius.mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Except, don't, because they require a separate plug, are absolutely humangous (literally, about 3" in DEPTH!), and will last about 2 weeks.dragunover - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Not.Seagate is terrible. In my own experience, it's been the only hard-drive out of many to fail. By far, I've had at least 4 Hitachi, 4 WD's, and a Samsung and none of them have failed. Then again, there's also the user-reported failure rates which report Seagate among the top...
MrSpadge - Saturday, September 4, 2010 - link
Hey Anand,you're doing a really great job on SSDs, but heres one paragraph I really disagree with:
"... and sequential performance is actually down from the 2TB drive due in part to the fact that we've got a smaller cache and generally less performance optimized drive with this external 3TB unit compared to the 2TB internal drive. Over USB 3.0 we actually get much better sequential performance apparently due to some additional buffering done by the USB 3 controller."
You're running into some bottleneck here using the internal SATA for the 3 TB drive. Was it in IDE mode? Or maybe just SATA1? If you take a look at the performance over capacity using this SATA port I bet you'll see a straight line at ~120 MB/s until about 1.5 TB and then a drop similar to what you're showing on the page "Performance vs. Capacity".
The reason is simple: on that page you're showing the drive hitting performance >120 MB/s over the entire first 1.5 TB using the USB 3 connection. This test is a sequential test over the entire drive, so ne pauses in between. Were this speed due to a buffer it had to be at least 1.5 TB big. Otherwise what you're seeing here is the real sequential performance of the drive.
And HDD caches influence real world benchmarks, but do not influence such sequential tests (think of it: even 64 MB are filled in just 0.5 s for such a drive, afterwards it's just plain "write them as fast as you can").
Best regards,
MrS
Rloew - Friday, October 1, 2010 - link
With some minor modifications to the MBR and FIlesystem code, the bare Hard Drive can be booted from without EFI and used in DOS and Windows 98SE. The USB 2.0 Interface can be used in Windows 98SE with a couple of Patches.Agent24 - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
It makes no sense, unless they just didn't think to test what might happen to the drive temperature when stuck inside that little box and made to write data (who does that?)If it was cost, then that's stupid.
I expect these are quite expensive already, being new and 3TB. What's an extra $50 or whatever to get a decent case with some proper cooling vents or even a fan?
I definitely wouldn't buy one of these, not until they made a better case, and even then, I want to see the reliability of the drive itself.
The Sorcerer - Saturday, December 25, 2010 - link
On the 2 paragraph, 4th page you said:"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."
You don't need to trim it. The SATA cable from the Asus boards are slightly thinner connectors. You should be able to do it. I've done it on the Seagate GoFlex 500GB PRO review:
http://www.hardwarebbq.com/2010/12/seagate-freeage...
Infact, when you run Crystal DIsk Information even when the drive is connected via USB mode, it detects the model but it will show that its scaled down to SATA 150 (I got a USB 2.0 as a sample).
Just my 2 cents :).
infoage2000 - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I have (or had) this 3 TB drive, and three months later it has died. The error; drive needs formatting. So in hopes it was the enclosure I bought a USB to SATA tester and have confirmed it is the drive. I knew better not to stray from the 1 and 1.5 TB drives which have always been reliable. The one lousy time I don't have backups for two directories I copied over....shaking my head in disgust.