Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1.5TB Review
If you are out in the market to look for the highest capacity portable drive, Seagate GoFlex Ultraportable is right up your alley. But the high capacity comes at a price of around Rs.8.94 per GB which is comparatively higher than WD My Passport Essential SE and ADATA Classic CH11. But its performance is better than both of its competitors and you also get the option to use USB 3.0, eSATA and FireWire ports if you have them on your motherboard.
Design and Build
The drive is quite bulky thanks to the capacity and the GoFlex adapter. It has a glossy black finish which is a fingerprint magnet. The drive comes with a USB 3.0 GoFlex adapter that snaps into the SATA port on the GoFlex Ultraportable drive and you can connect the drive to USB 3.0 port on your system. You can also pair an eSATA or FireWire GoFlex adapter with the drive. You can also use the GoFlex adapter to connect it to any internal hard drive in case you want to quickly access its data without shutting down your system. Overall build quality of the drive is pretty sturdy.
Test Setup:
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K @3.4GHz
Motheboard: Intel DP67BG
RAM: 2x2GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 RAM @1333MHz (timing: 9-9-9-24)
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
OS Drive: Intel SSDSA2H080GIGN (80 GB SSD)
RAID 0 Combination: 2 x 300GB WD Velociraptor
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6850
Power Supply: Corsair HX620W
Performance
The drive gives unformatted space of 1397.26 GB. It gave a Read Burst speed of 184.4 MB/s which was the highest among competing portable drives. In the real world testing which involved transferring 4GB sequential and assorted files from the WD drive to the RAID array and back we got the following scores. Read / Write (sequential file) in MB/s – 89.68 / 87.48 and Read / Write (Assorted) in MB/s –83.77 / 50.58. This performance was better than the ADATA Classic CH11 and WD My Passport Essential SE. It took 30.17 secs to open a 1 GB PSD file when used as a scratch disk.
Verdict
If you are out in the market to look for the highest capacity portable drive, Seagate GoFlex Ultraportable is right up your alley. But the high capacity comes at a price of around Rs.8.94 per GB which is comparatively higher than WD My Passport Essential SE and ADATA Classic CH11. But its performance is better than both of its competitors and you also get the option to use USB 3.0, eSATA and FireWire ports if you have them on your motherboard.
Features: 4/5
Performance: 3.5/5
Build Quality: 3.5/5
Value: 3/5
Overall: 3.5/5
Price: Rs. 12,500