Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB External Hard Drive Review
Performance
The performance is nothing short of what you would expect from a mass storage device. While it is understandable that they are not as fast as conventional system drives, we do tend to want all the speed we can get. The performance numbers below, show that the FreeAgent Go is a very capable device.
The benchmarks we ran on the unit are as follows:
- HD Tach
- HD Tune Pro
- CrystalDiskMark
HD Tach 3.0
HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software and get as close to the physical performance of the device as possible.
Here are the results, first the Quick Bench (8MB zones) and then the Long Bench (32MB zones):
HD Tune Pro 4.60
HD Tune is a hard disk utility with many functions. It can be used to measure the drive’s performance, scan for errors, check the health status (S.M.A.R.T.), securely erase all data and much more.
Today, we are mainly interested in the performance-related tests. Here are the results:
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CrystalDiskMark 3.0
CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software that also measures read and write speeds, both sequential and random.
Here are its results:
With all these results to consider, the safe conclusion is that the drive is very consistent. All the numbers fall within a tight range and this is rather admirable. The speed is not class-leading but it is easily above the average of other drives I have come across. However, they were not available for testing and as such I am unable to show a direct comparison.
Personally I prefer to roll my own external drives. I always think it is a rip off that products like this one do not include an e-sata port on them, like my Vantec NexStar CX housing does and it wasn’t an expensive housing either.
To be fair to Seagate, they are hardly the only vendor of pre-built external drives that don’t include e-sata, but that is still no excuse when you consider the profits over the bare drives these external products rake in for the vendors.
Well I would imaging that some of the products of this type would support e-SATA but that is where it comes down to you, the consumer. Either shop around for what you really want or you make do with an option that fits your pocket.
I also had an enclosure that had both USB and e-SATA support but for some really strange reason, I have never been able to get my e-SATA working. Weird!
What I’m really waiting for is for Seagate to move the industry to total solid state drives.
hi, great blog post. will come back later.