Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 4TB Desk External Drive Review

Performance w/ CrystalDiskMark and ATTO

CrystalDiskMark v3.0.1b

CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive
that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write
speeds.

1000MB Files Test Benchmark on the Seagate GoFlex Desk 4TB:

The very first benchmark we ran on the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 4TB external desk drive was CrystalDiskMark and we saw horrible performance numbers on the sequential read numbers. The Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 motherboard that we were using uses Etron EJ168 controller for the USB 3.0 ports and we were running driver version 1.0.0.101 (6/16/2011) like we have been for the past couple months. We’ve ran into some issues with this controller before, so we figured this might be driver issue and sure enough Gigabyte released driver version 1.0.0.105 (8/23/2011) just a couple weeks ago.

With the latest Etron drivers installed we saw both read and write performance increases and the drive was performing as expected. Be sure to update your USB 3.0 drivers if you start using these new USB 3.0 devices! The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 4TB external desk drive was able to peak at 178 MB/s read and 163 MB/s write in the sequential test.

ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46

ATTO is one of the oldest hard drive benchmarks that is still used today. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that you can easily interpret. The was run with file sized from from 4kb through 8192kb with the total length being 256mb.

Seagate 4TB GoFlex Desk:

Benchmark Results: The GoFlex 4TB Desk Drive was able to run at 192MB/s read and 162MB/s write, which are pretty impressive performance numbers for an external hard drive.