We haven’t seen a terabyte-sized portable drive before, and it looks as if Seagate has struggled to squeeze the capacity into this package: the 1TB GoFlex has a bulging design, and at 22mm high it cuts a distinctly stout figure compared with the 500GB model.
That larger size also means the connector at the rear doesn’t hook up quite so neatly – it goes into a recess, rather than simply snapping onto the end of the drive – but overall, in this suitably slimming black trim it’s still an attractive drive.
We’ve seen in the past that higher capacity can translate to higher performance, so our hopes were high for the 1TB GoFlex. And in our large-file tests the 1TB GoFlex acquitted itself perfectly well, with above-average read and write scores that placed it second among this month’s four portables. It came second in the small-file read test too.
Unfortunately, when it came to writing small files, the drive collapsed. Across 12,000 files it averaged a dismal rate of just 3.7MB/sec – around 20% of the speed of the next slowest drive. The GoFlex controller had no such problem when connected to the 500GB drive, so evidently it’s a problem with the drive itself.
That’s a shame, because at 27.3 cents/GB it’s a much better deal than the 500GB model, and we do like the idea of having this much storage in a pocket-sized drive. Hopefully, Seagate can improve performance in future revisions. For now, though, we can recommend this drive only for a role where speed is of no importance, or for storing a library of large files.
