so in the comments to my Seagate free agent glex Ultra portable drive unboxing
and First Look I actually had someone ask me a very interesting question and
while I don't always reply to comments and messages I do make a point of trying
to read them they said okay well you've
got just a SATA interface at the back of this external hard drive so what would
prevent you from using these modular seate cables uh which are very nice and
very convenient with just any old drive so I said well gee I don't know why not
um now while they may not work with desktop drives due to the power
requirements and this may sound very very strange but I actually had an SSD
lying around but not a single desktop Drive um at home here so I've already
tried this but I'm just going to demonstrate for the sake of uh for the
sake of demonstration so you go ahead and just plug it into the back of any
old 2 and 1/2 in Drive fits right in there real nice the light goes on and
then the computer detects local dis e
and if I can my mouse then I'd be able to show you this oh I went and hit that
stupid button hold on yeah there we go back to Auto excellent okay so here you
can access local dis e and we can do a quick you know what why don't we do a
quick speed test okay so big files uh
you know what let's yeah let's do the big files test so I'm going to drag this over to my desktop and I'll let you guys
time it because you know YouTube oh man this is going to take a
while okay well you can see our transfer speed is around 30 Megs per second
um which is pretty typical for USB 2.0 and I hope
I'm able to find something to talk about here um I could show you the cats okay
here what okay while while this is running I'm just going to hold on I'm
going to go uh go to the bathroom where I keep all
of the cat toys hold on a second and I'm
going to get their favorite toy here
which oh see here they come running they know they know what I have hey guys you
like this one don't you oh oh he's got it already got their feather which is
very exciting for them they like to fight it and let's see if the uh file
transfer is done it is not so okay I'm
going to let you guys see the state of disrepair that my floor is in right now
I've been doing unboxings and the thing about unboxing is you end up with a lot
of boxes and I don't really know what to do with them all all the time oh man wow
they're fast today hey oh it fell apart
oh their toy broke this is a disaster
hey now he's eating it hey get off that get get get off that
no give me that give me ah he got me hey
don't growl at
me give me that
rotten things okay here we go file transfer is done okay so it took
approximately that long so what I also
discovered is that yeah whatever oh for don't come up
on my get back here enough out of
you these guys are just ridiculous okay
I put that in my pocket hi rotten cat
okay come with me okay come here there we go got the cat okay
so now why don't we take that drive and go plug it into the USB 3 version which
I have plugged into a test PC all right
so we unplug that and I hit that stupid button again
that makes it so yeah here we go okay so the USB 3.0 version is plugged into a
test PC here which supports USB 3.0 my computer actually does not support USB
3.0 it's is a little bit older than that
so we'll go ahead and plug this in there we go it will be hopefully
perfectly well supported there we go it's detected already we open it up and
then why don't we do a quick speed test here and I'm hopefully going to be actually there for the uh the conclusion
of it this time but I think the general point should be that it goes much faster
this is USB 3.0 so we are seeing much much higher transfer
speeds oh as high as a mouse cursor
meaby per second uh no we're seeing up to about 110 to 120 megabytes per second
so the total transfer is going to take probably about 105 seconds so much
faster than USB 2.0 if you're actually trying to move around substantial
amounts of data in fact this may even be bottlenecked by the vertex one 120 gig
hard drive that I'm using in the test PC so that is done just now when I F took
the camera away again so thank you for checking out this sort of followup to
the free agent uh what is it called free agent
glex and so it looks like all those cables can actually be used with other 2
and 1/2 in drives just as easily as they can be used with the free agent glex
itself