Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex USB3.0 Cable Performance Test With a Random Drive Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
960 words · ~4 min read
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so in the comments to my Seagate free agent glex Ultra portable drive unboxing
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and First Look I actually had someone ask me a very interesting question and
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while I don't always reply to comments and messages I do make a point of trying
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to read them they said okay well you've
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got just a SATA interface at the back of this external hard drive so what would
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prevent you from using these modular seate cables uh which are very nice and
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very convenient with just any old drive so I said well gee I don't know why not
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um now while they may not work with desktop drives due to the power
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requirements and this may sound very very strange but I actually had an SSD
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lying around but not a single desktop Drive um at home here so I've already
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tried this but I'm just going to demonstrate for the sake of uh for the
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sake of demonstration so you go ahead and just plug it into the back of any
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old 2 and 1/2 in Drive fits right in there real nice the light goes on and
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then the computer detects local dis e
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and if I can my mouse then I'd be able to show you this oh I went and hit that
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stupid button hold on yeah there we go back to Auto excellent okay so here you
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can access local dis e and we can do a quick you know what why don't we do a
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quick speed test okay so big files uh
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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
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time it because you know YouTube oh man this is going to take a
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while okay well you can see our transfer speed is around 30 Megs per second
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um which is pretty typical for USB 2.0 and I hope
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I'm able to find something to talk about here um I could show you the cats okay
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here what okay while while this is running I'm just going to hold on I'm
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going to go uh go to the bathroom where I keep all
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of the cat toys hold on a second and I'm
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going to get their favorite toy here
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which oh see here they come running they know they know what I have hey guys you
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like this one don't you oh oh he's got it already got their feather which is
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very exciting for them they like to fight it and let's see if the uh file
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transfer is done it is not so okay I'm
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going to let you guys see the state of disrepair that my floor is in right now
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I've been doing unboxings and the thing about unboxing is you end up with a lot
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of boxes and I don't really know what to do with them all all the time oh man wow
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they're fast today hey oh it fell apart
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oh their toy broke this is a disaster
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hey now he's eating it hey get off that get get get off that
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no give me that give me ah he got me hey
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don't growl at
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me give me that
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rotten things okay here we go file transfer is done okay so it took
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approximately that long so what I also
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discovered is that yeah whatever oh for don't come up
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on my get back here enough out of
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you these guys are just ridiculous okay
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I put that in my pocket hi rotten cat
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okay come with me okay come here there we go got the cat okay
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so now why don't we take that drive and go plug it into the USB 3 version which
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I have plugged into a test PC all right
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so we unplug that and I hit that stupid button again
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that makes it so yeah here we go okay so the USB 3.0 version is plugged into a
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test PC here which supports USB 3.0 my computer actually does not support USB
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3.0 it's is a little bit older than that
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so we'll go ahead and plug this in there we go it will be hopefully
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perfectly well supported there we go it's detected already we open it up and
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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
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of it this time but I think the general point should be that it goes much faster
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this is USB 3.0 so we are seeing much much higher transfer
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speeds oh as high as a mouse cursor
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meaby per second uh no we're seeing up to about 110 to 120 megabytes per second
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so the total transfer is going to take probably about 105 seconds so much
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faster than USB 2.0 if you're actually trying to move around substantial
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amounts of data in fact this may even be bottlenecked by the vertex one 120 gig
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hard drive that I'm using in the test PC so that is done just now when I F took
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the camera away again so thank you for checking out this sort of followup to
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the free agent uh what is it called free agent
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glex and so it looks like all those cables can actually be used with other 2
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and 1/2 in drives just as easily as they can be used with the free agent glex
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itself