GoFlex™ 320GB and GoFlex™ 1TB For Mac Review by Alan Meban

A by-product of reviewing Seagate's FreeAgent GoFlex™ TV HD Media Player was that I got to play with a couple of their portable hard drives.

The FreeAgent GoFlex™ 320GB drive is aimed at PC users, and comes pre-formatted NTFS. Mac's can natively read NTFS. So it was nice to see that the drive came pre-loaded with a Mac NTFS driver that once installed allows you to write to NTFS drives from your Mac. Bonus! Of course, you can quickly reformat the drive to suit your purposes.

The 320GB drive is small – 11 cm x 8cm x 1.5cm – light, black and glossy. Cunningly, the USB2.0 connector section clips off from the back of the 2.5" drive, allowing you to swap it for optional FireWire or USB 3.0 connectors which should future proof it for some time to come! And with the connector removed, the portable drive can be slotted into various products in the GoFlex™ family, including their GoFlex™ TV media player and network sharing server.

Seagate have also introduced some Mac-specific drives. I tried out their 1TB GoFlex™ for Mac ultra-portable drive. Compared to its 320GB cousin, the 1TB for Mac drive is less glossy (and doesn’t pick up fingerprints!). It’s just a few millimetres thicker than its 320GB cousin – imagine a 1TB drive fitting in your pocket! – and matches well with Apple’s brushed aluminium look. The Mac drive comes with software to allow PC’s to connect.

The Mac version is bundled with both USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 interface connectors.

Speed wise both drives performed faster than my 3 year old 80GB portable USB drive! While not as scientific as a lab-based performance test, I times copying a 1.7GB video from my Mac Mini across to the drives (and back) and compared it with my old (non-Seagate) 80GB USB drive.

Connected by USB 2.0, the FreeAgent GoFlex™ 320GB was the fastest, writing the video to its disk in 75 seconds and sending it back to the Mac Mini in 59 seconds.

Also connected by USB 2.0, the larger 1TB for Mac drive was marginally slower, writing the video to disk in 78 seconds, and took 56 seconds in the other direction.

For comparison, my old 80GB USB drive took 105 seconds to write the video, and 68 seconds in the other direction.

Both drives are a great size, and the ability to change the interface from USB 2.0 to Firewire and even USB 3.0 means the drives will make them usable long into the future. Very impressive drives.

GoFlex™ 320GB and GoFlex™ 1TB For Mac Review by Alan Meban
http://alaninbelfast.blogspot.com/