Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3TB

[Rob Williams]

With our media collections growing larger by the day, it's sad to look at a 2TB hard drive and picture it as not being "large enough" for our goods. To help remedy things a bit, Seagate recently released a 3TB external drive, and it today remains the only 3TB single drive offering. Let's take a look at and see if it's worth your consideration.

You can read our full look at Seagate's largest hard drive offering and then you can discuss it here!

 

[Unregistered]

Heat

Love the drive but as you point out heat appears to be a major issue. Mine shows 64 degrees even when not using the drive. Seagate says this is "normal" with this drive. Maybe so, but heat is always an enemy of longevity. I am considering breaking down the case to drill some small holes on the top of the enclosure or even trying to figure out a way to mount a fan. Last resort would be to buy another USB 3.0 enclosure with fan and try that out, but a waste of the money for the initial cost of the drive. It does seem to work very well - fastdrive. Thanks for the review.

 

[Rob Williams]

To be honest, I'm not sure using another enclosure would work, because from my understanding, the dock on this product is what makes the 3TB density possible on all PCs that can't usually handle that much space. I could be wrong, though. I don't have the drive at the moment (staff member has it for testing), but I'll test it as soon as I get it back.

I agree on the heat issue... it's a big one. I haven't seen proof of that, but I just can't see it being healthy for HDDs to be running at such a high temperature for so long. As for adding a fan, I am not even sure how much that'd help, and the solution you'd have to use wouldn't look too attractive. Even running the drive outside of the enclosure doesn't help a great degree... it's just a freaking hot drive!

 

[Kougar]

Most PC's can access the drive okay except for Windows XP. The main issue is if the drive is used as an OS boot drive. Vista 64bit and Windows 7 64bit won't have an issue with a 3TB drive, but 32bit OS's will. The whole thing is a mess to keep track of!

The drive should work fine in another enclosure if you do go that route, but I'm not sure it would drop temps by more than a few degrees unless it had a fan moving air. I gotta agree with Rob, those 3TB Seagate drives tend to run warm by themselves even without a plastic housing around them.