VERDICT:For this capacity and performance, one has to be willing to shell out a good bit of money. This terabyte monster is priced at Rs 14,500. This is a lot more than a proper desktop hard drive. A missing feature is the network connectivity. With it, the high price tag would be better justified. Still, if you need large capacity and portable drives with some sense of style, then this drive is the right one for you.
Bigger Is Better And Now It Can Be Smaller Too!
External hard drives based generally tend to miss out on capacity or on style. It always seems like portable drives are lagging behind somewhere or the other. The Seagate FreeAgent XTreme 1000 GB is one of the most stylish drives to see the light of day. The 1 TB of space should please many.
In size, the FreeAgent XTreme 1000 GB case is fairly large but thinner than before. The drive stands vertical on a thin support platform. This setup makes it very simple to pack up and carry along with you. Setting up the drive is simple. The drive with all three interfaces — USB, Firewire and eSATA.
Performance isn’t shabby either. SiSoft Sandra recorded a drive index of 33 MBps and a random access time of 13ms. HDTach recorded a higher ave
rage read speed of 36 MBps. We then did a test of copying 4 GB of data using a single file and then same with multiple smaller files. A 4 GB file could be written in two minutes thirty four seconds and copied back in a minute twenty four seconds. Writing of smaller files took two minutes forty nine seconds and reading two minutes twenty one seconds. These are very good but nowhere as close to internal desktop drives. We even tried connecting the drive using Firewire. There was only a two to three per cent improvement in performance. The drive comes built-in with software for security and also to help sync data when you use the drive on another system.
