I'm off to IDF this week while Ryan and Brian cover Microsoft's BUILD conference, so expect lots of CPU and Windows 8 news in the coming days. Just before I left however Seagate sent me a review sample of its recently announced GoFlex Desk 4TB drive. Eager to find out if anything had changed since I reviewed last year's 3TB model I dove right into testing.
The GoFlex connector standard
Seagate's GoFlex Desk is a line of external 3.5" hard drives with interchangeable GoFlex Desk docks. Internally all GoFlex Desk drives have a standard Seagate 3.5" SATA hard drive; it's the GoFlex Desk dock that converts SATA into USB 3.0, USB 2.0 or FireWire 800. Since 3.5" drives require more power than you can get out of a single USB port, Seagate's GoFlex Desk requires an external power adapter that comes with the drive.
Although the SATA power and data connectors on the GoFlex Desk are in a standardized location, to date all 3rd party implementations of Seagate's GoFlex spec have been designed for 2.5" drives. As a result the only real advantage to this being a GoFlex drive is that you can swap out docks to get support for different interfaces.
By default the GoFlex Desk bundle comes with a USB 3.0 dock that's obviously backwards compatible with USB 2.0 ports. Seagate offers an optional USB 2.0/FireWire 800 dock, presumably for Mac users with FireWire 800 ports. The dock features five LEDs, one for power and the other four indicate capacity used in 25% increments.
Seagate sent me the standard 4TB USB 3.0 bundle; with it you get the drive, power adapter and a USB 3.0 cable. The drive comes preloaded with Seagate's Dashboard as well as Memeo Instant Backup. Seagate will part with a 4TB GoFlex Desk bundle for $249.
As I mentioned in our initial post on the 4TB GoFlex Desk, Seagate uses a 5-platter 7200RPM 3.5" 6Gbps SATA Barracuda hard drive inside the GoFlex Desk. At 4TB that works out to be 800GB per platter.
The spec for hard drive storage capacity is done in base 10 where 1TB = 1 trillion bytes. That works out to be 3725GiB of storage on the GoFlex Desk 4TB. We've addressed the issue with hard drives greater than 2TB in previous articles
A Redesigned Chassis
Despite retaining the name, the 4TB GoFlex Desk introduces a new external enclosure. It's sleeker and more angular than last year's, but more importantly it has better cooling properties. For now it looks like you can only get the new chassis if you buy the 4TB drive, the smaller capacities still ship with the old chassis.
Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB 2010 (left) vs. GoFlex Desk 4TB 2011 (right)
In our review of the 3TB GoFlex Desk we found that under hours of continued use the drive got quite warm: up to 69C. The high temperatures resulted from two things: the GoFlex Desk enclosure had very little ventilation and the 5-platter 7200RPM drive inside put out a lot of heat. With the move to 4TB Seagate stuck with a 5-platter 7200RPM design, but gave the enclosure more holes for ventilation:
Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB 2010 (left) vs. GoFlex Desk 4TB 2011 (right)
The top and back of the new GoFlex Desk are vented to bring down drive temperatures. The old design had dents that looked like holes but they were simply to give the plastic texture, they weren't functional. Western Digital's My Book Essential is still better ventilated but this is definitely a step in the right direction.
Hooray, vents!
The new chassis definitely keeps temperatures cooler for longer under light usage, however if you're copying a lot of data to the GoFlex Desk temperatures will climb. After one hour of sequential writes over USB 3.0 I measured a drive temperature of 63C. In just under 2 hours the drive got up to 67C, a bit lower than last year's model but still troubling. The good news is unlike last year's model, the drive will continue to operate at full performance in this state. When testing the 3TB version last year we found that sequential write speeds dropped to 50MB/s when the temperature got into the upper 60s.
Granted that's after copying nearly 1TB of data without pause, so you shouldn't see these numbers other than the very first time you copy all of your data to the drive. During normal use and even when moving around a couple hundred GB of data the 4TB GoFlex Desk kept to 51C and below. I'm happy to see that Seagate redesigned the chassis, but I'd still feel more comfortable with even more ventilation or at least a cooler running drive inside.
The internal Barracuda + USB 3.0 dock consume 11.9W at idle and 13.7W under load. The drive whine is audible when on but it's not overly loud. If you're using anything other than a very quiet notebook you'll likely not be too bothered by the drive.
Performance
There's no point in looking at USB 2.0 performance since all drives there are limited to under 40MB/s thanks to the speed of the interface. Over USB 3.0 however we're able to talk to the drive at much closer to its native performance:
| Windows 7 Performance Comparison | |||||
| Seagate GoFlex Desk 4TB (USB 3.0) | Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB (USB 3.0) | ||||
| Sequential Read | 174.6 MB/s | 151.9 MB/s | |||
| Sequential Write | 137.2 MB/s | 151.2 MB/s | |||
| Random Read | 0.21 MB/s | 0.30 MB/s | |||
| Random Write | 1.14 MB/s | 0.93 MB/s | |||
Sequential read speeds are very high over USB 3.0 at 174.6MB/s. Oddly enough sequential write speeds are noticeably lower, perhaps a limitation introduced by the USB 3.0 controller inside the GoFlex dock. Max sequential write speed is lower than last year's 3TB model while read performance is improved.
Random performance is also a mixed bag. We got better random write performance but slightly lower random read performance than last year's 3TB model.
We turned to HD Tune once again to plot out performance vs. logical block address. Last year we had a somewhat odd graphs from the 3TB drive where performance dropped down to 16MB/s as we wrote to the inner most tracks of the platters. The 4TB solution doesn't have that problem but it does exhibit its own strange behavior:
Write performance remains relatively flat over the majority of the LBA range of the drive. Performance should decrease almost linearly but instead we get consistent performance across the first ~3TB of the drive. It's only in the last 1TB that performance falls down to 75.8MB/s. As I mentioned before, I suspect we may be bottlenecked writing to the GoFlex's USB 3.0 controller which results in this behavior.
Read performance is both higher and linear, indicating once again this issue seems to only limit write speed.
If you're migrating from a 3TB GoFlex Desk, do expect to see a tangible decrease in write speed but once you've got your data on the drive expect to be able to read it back faster.
Final Words
As the world becomes more mobile, external storage becomes even more important. Having moved to a notebook-as-a-desktop usage model myself, I completely understand the need for high capacity external drives.
Seagate is certainly pushing the envelope when it comes to capacity with the GoFlex Desk. Just a few years ago I had to build a file server with multiple drives to reach 4TB and today Seagate is delivering it in a small, single drive enclosure. If you need a ton of storage in a relatively compact space, the 4TB GoFlex Desk gets the job done.
The usual caveats apply however. There's always a price premium for these high capacity external drives, although Seagate is only charging an extra $50 for the 4TB version compared to the 3TB model. If you wanted to buy a standalone drives however you could easily buy two 2TB HDDs for less than half the cost of this 4TB external drive. Granted there is the convenience of having an all-in-one package with a single drive but you're almost always better off financially buying internal drives and sticking them in a cheap chassis. Then there's the problem of finding a good way to back up 4TB worth of data.
Finally there's the issue of cooling. If you're going to be constantly reading/writing terabytes of data from/to the GoFlex Desk then you'll want to look elsewhere. Seagate's modified chassis does keep the drive cooler than its predecessor but it's just not designed for extended heavy use. Google's study on hard drive reliability showed that average temperatures above 45C corresponded with an increase in failure rate, particularly for drives that had been running for 3 or more years.
I suspect most users of the GoFlex Desk will be fine however. Moving a couple hundred GBs here or there never resulted in any dangerously high temperatures. Given that this isn't an enterprise drive, I wouldn't expect most users to continuously write 1TB to the drive with any sort of regularity.
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