Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex review

Most portable hard disks have capacities around 500GB, but Seagate has blown that figure out of the water with the latest FreeAgent GoFlex. It’s hardly any bigger than a regular 2½in mobile disk, but packs in a massive 1.5TB of storage. If you’ve got a mountain of files you want to take with you on the move, this could be a great way to do it.

Because it uses the same replaceable connection system as other GoFlex products, the USB3 adaptor can be swapped for eSATA or FireWire if you have compatible ports on your computer. There’s little reason to do this if you already have compatible USB3 ports though, as it’s much faster than the alternatives.

In order to fit such a high capacity disk inside a 2½in external hard drive enclosure, the GoFlex is almost twice as thick as some other disks. It might have USB3 connectivity for faster data transfers, but the hard disk inside the enclosure spins at a relatively slow 5,400RPM. In spite of this, large files were written at a rapid 69.3MB/s and read at 111.7MB/s. Small file reads were equally fast at 60.7MB/s, but the disk struggled with writing small files. 11.1MB/s makes it one of the slowest external disks we’ve seen in this particular test, but overall performance was still very good.

Seagate bundles its proprietary Dashboard software with the disk; aside from the very simple Maemo backup, all the included applications are simply trial versions that aren’t worth installing. At £122, the GoFlex is roughly £50 more than the Freecom Mobile Drive Classic 3.0; unless you need the extra 500GB, the cheaper disk is a much better choice.