Seagate's FreeAgent GoFlex: Modular External Storage

Benchmark Results: Real-World Copy Testing

Small Files

Small file copying is clearly better on the Ultra-portable drives with USB 3.0 than eSATA. And once again, you can see that 3.5” drives are significantly faster than 2.5” products. However, write performance isn’t always higher on the faster interfaces when only small files are involved. Results here list average throughput, which we calculated by relating the total amount of data to the time required for this test.

JPEG Image Files

Read performance on files is much superior on 3.5” drives if the files are at least 2 or 3 MB. Only USB 3.0 and eSATA can take full advantage of the larger drives’ performance.

Again, we found that write performance lags read performance. USB 3.0 and eSATA are still fastest in the GoFlex family, but know that throughput is lower.

MP3 Audio Files

Our test set of 365 MP3 files includes file sizes of up to 10 MB. Predictably, the 3.5” drives with fast interfaces come out on top.

As mentioned, write performance is rather limited on the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex products.