Freecom Hard Drive Quattro 1.5TB review

The Freecom 1.5TB Hard Drive Quattro has a sleek design and metal construction that looks great and feels robust. Previous Freecom desktop disks looked very similar, but the Quattro is more refined and addresses design flaws that plagued those earlier models such as the fiddly, easy-to-break power switch.

The Quattro gets its name from its choice of four interfaces. This external hard drive has USB2, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and eSATA ports. There are two FireWire 800 ports so the Quattro can be daisy-chained with other FireWire 800 peripherals. There’s only one FireWire 400 socket, but the Quattro can still be daisy-chained with other FireWire 400 devices by using one of the FireWire 800 ports and a FireWire 800-to-400 adapter cable.

Overall, the Quattro’s performance in our file transfer tests was very fast. When connected using eSATA, it pulled ahead of other eSATA disks in all our tests except when reading small files where it lagged behind a little at just under 80MB/s. When connected over USB, it transferred large files quickly, averaging around 30MB/s, but was a little slower copying small files than we expected, averaging around 20MB/s. The Quattro excelled when connected over both types of FireWire – in almost all our tests it was one of the quickest FireWire 400 and 800 disks we’ve seen.

NTI’s Shadow backup software is bundled in the box. It’s a feature-packed program which can back up your files according to a schedule as well as supporting both incremental and versioned backups. The interface is rather cluttered though, which makes it a little more cumbersome to use than it should be.

At £137, the Quattro seems reasonably priced for 1.5TB of storage. Its price per gigabyte of 9p is a little high, though, since you can buy a 2TB external disk for only £13 more. These models only have USB interfaces though, so the Quattro may still be appealing if your computer already has eSATA or FireWire and you want the extra speed. However, if you’re not tied to either connection and have this much money to spend, a similarly USB3 model would be a better buy in the long term.