Freecom Hard Drive XS 3.0 1TB review

In contrast to some of the more elaborate external hard disk designs, the Freecom Hard Drive XS 3.0 has a featureless plain black appearance. This external hard drive is made out of a soft rubbery material rather than metal or plastic.

We’ve seen this design before on Freecom’s portable disks, where the sturdy rubber makes sense for a disk designed to be carried around regularly. We’re not convinced it’s a wise choice for a desktop disk though, since the rubber design doesn’t have any cooling vents. Although it didn’t become terribly hot during our tests, it’s hard to be convinced about its long-term durability.

There’s no stand, so it can’t be positioned vertically to save space on your desk. No backup software is included either, which is odd since backup software is bundled with other Freecom disks we’ve seen.

As its name suggests, the XS 3.0 is a USB3 hard disk and it performed well in our large files test. It wrote large files at just under 92MB/s and read them at 107.1MB/s. It was a little slower than we expected when writing small files, managing 57.9MB/s.

This is still faster than any eSATA disk, but not by much. We suspect this performance hiccup may be due to the fact that the Samsung hard disk inside the XS 3.0 uses a power-saving 5,400 rpm spindle speed instead of a quicker 7,200rpm. We didn’t see any issues when reading small files though, with a result of 81.8MB/s.

The 1TB Freecom Hard Drive XS 3.0 is very fast, as we’d expect for a USB3 disk, but there’s no compelling reason to choose it over any other USB3 disk. It’s quite expensive at 12p per gigabyte and the lack of vents is a touch worrying. Unless you can find it cheaper elsewhere, Buffalo’s cheaper DriveStation USB 3.0 1TB is even quicker. If you have more money to spend, Western Digital’s 2TB My Book 3.0 is better value.