The Seagate GoFlex Slim is a beautiful looking drive with stellar performance. Only the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro and Silicon Power Armor A80 were faster than this drive. But the only kink in this drive is its limited storage which raises its price per GB to a whopping Rs.15. This was the highest cost per GB we came across on any drive, and unless Seagate bumps up the capacity on this one, it makes sense to go for the Hitachi drive, if you are OK with a little flab, but better performing drive.
Design and Build:
This is one of the slimmest external hard drives you will ever come across. It has an anodized aluminum enclosure with a matte finish. At just 9mm thick on the sides, it comes with a matte black finish that looks attractive. It houses a Seagate Momentus Thin 7200 RPM drive inside. The overall build is very sturdy. It comes with a GoFlex USB 3.0 adapter which can be disconnected and you can attach the drive to a Seagate GoFlex media players.
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 298.09 GB. It gave a Read Burst speed of 176.5 MB/s which was slower than that of Hitachi Mobile Touro Pro which gives 182 MB/s. 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 – 105.14 / 108.9 and Read / Write (Assorted) in MB/s –94.85 / 55.35. This performance was at par with the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro drive with only Assorted Write taking a major hit with the Seagate drive. Intradrive transfer rate was around 20 MB/s, but that shouldn’t be a big issue, as most content transfer is going to take place from outside. It took 37.76 secs to open a 1 GB PSD file when used as a scratch disk.
Verdict
The Seagate GoFlex Slim is a beautiful looking drive with stellar performance. Only the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro and Silicon Power Armor A80 were faster than this drive. But the only kink in this drive is its limited storage which raises its price per GB to a whopping Rs.15. This was the highest cost per GB we came across on any drive, and unless Seagate bumps up the capacity on this one, it makes sense to go for the Hitachi drive, if you are OK with a little flab, but better performing drive.
Features: 3/5
Performance: 4/5
Build Quality:4/5
Value: 2/5
Overall: 3.5/5
Price: Rs. 4,500