Freecom Mobile Drive CLS 250GB review

If you have more than one or two external hard disks, you’ll quickly discover all the attached cables add a lot of clutter. In addition, finding files which could be stored on any one of a number of disks can be a chore. You could just buy a JBOD or RAID-capable external hard drive array, but these desk-bound disks are expensive and not very portable.

Freecom’s latest portable USB2 hard disk product, the Mobile Drive CLS, doesn’t have either of these issues. It consists of a USB dock with cradles for up to three portable disks. The dock then connects to your computer using a single USB cable which is used for both power and data. The spine of each disk has a removable paper label too, so you can clearly mark each ones contents.

The CLS is very expensive, though. A 250GB disk costs a staggering £69, or 28p per gigabyte, which is what we would expect to pay for a 500GB disk. A 500GB Freecom CLS disk is available, but costs an extortionate £95. Plus, the dock has to be bought separately for an additional £16. Only Freecom CLS disks will fit the dock, so you can’t buy better value disks from other manufacturers.

Another flaw of the CLS system is that since multiple disks are sharing the same USB connection, copying data to more than one disk will slow performance. When copying data to one disk, performance was in line what we’d expect from a USB portable disk – large files were copied at an average speed of 29.6MB/s while small files were transferred at 17.2MB/s. Copying data to another CLS disk simultaneously however resulted in speeds dropping by around 7MB/s. To be fair, this performance drop isn’t as large as we’d feared and would affect any group of USB disks connected to a computer through a USB hub.

The Mobile Drive CLS system is a neat idea that we really wanted to like, but it’s simply too expensive to recommend. The easiest way of keeping external hard disk clutter to a minimum is to simply replace smaller disks with larger ones and keep all your data on the newer larger disks. Finding files is simply a matter of using software tools such as Windows 7’s search and labelling each disk with some masking tape.