To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more

Freecom Mobile Drive Mg review

Freecom Mobile Drive Mg
Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £95
inc VAT

The Mobile Drive Mg is stylish, but offers poor value in light of other drives with greater capacities

It might have been designed to sit alongside an Apple MacBook, but the Freecom Mobile Drive Mg will work on any PC or laptop with a USB port. The magnesium finish looks great and feels reassuringly solid – it should protect the 750GB hard disk from a few scrapes.

Since this external hard drive is aimed primarily at Mac users, it comes formatted in the OS X-compatible HFS+ file system. To use it with Windows, you’ll need to reformat it to a file system Microsoft’s operating system can recognise. We were a little surprised that an external disk aimed at Mac owners featured USB3 connectivity, as the format isn’t currently supported on any Apple device. It’s better news for anyone that has a Windows-based PC will benefit from significantly faster file transfer speeds, as long as they have the appropriate ports.

Freecom Mobile Drive Mg

On our USB3-equipped PC, the Mobile Drive Mg managed 102.3MB/s write and 66.8MB/s read speeds in the large file transfer test, which is slightly above average. Small files were written at 33.4MB/s and read at 42.4MB/s, which again is middle of the road. These results are mainly due to the slower 5,400RPM hard disk, but performance was still reasonable for a 2½in external disk.

As is the case with most Apple accessories, the Mobile Drive Mg carries a noticeable price premium over other external hard disks. The Freecom Mobile Drive Classic 3.0 has faster transfer speeds and a larger capacity for around £25 less. It’s clearly the better choice.

Basic Specifications

Rating ***

Storage

Hard disk Seagate Momentus ST9750420AS
Capacity 750GB
Formatted capacity 698GB
Price per gigabyte £0.13
Disk size 2.5in
Interface USB3
Power connector USB from host
Spindle speed 5,400rpm
Cache 8MB
Seek time 12.0ms
Weight 200g
Size 12x81x15mm
Power consumption idle 1W
Power consumption active 3W

Buying Information

Backup software included Freecom Backup Software 2.08, Freecom Personal Media Suite 2.5.1.1
Price £95
Warranty two years RTB
Supplier http://www.ebuyer.com
Details www.freecom.com

Read more

Reviews