Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 4TB Desk External Drive Review

HD Tune Pro and Sandra 2011 Benchmarking

HD Tune Pro 4.61 is an extended version of HD Tune which includes many new features such as write benchmark, secure erasing, AAM setting, folder usage view, disk monitor, command line parameters and file benchmark.

Read Performance Testing

Benchmark Results: The Seagate GoFlex Desk 4TB Drive had average read speed of 137.2MB/s with a burst speed of 187.4MB/s and an access time of 20.2ms. The read performance is fairly linear and what we expected to see with this hard drive.

Write Performance Testing

Benchmark Results: When it comes to write speeds the performance was relatively flat for the first terabyte, but then started to drop off linearly like expected. Since the line is flat for so long it shows that something strange is going on with the Logical Block Addressing (LBA) on the drive. We weren’t the only ones to see something like this as Anandtech also ran into similar issues on the write test. Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 4TB Desk is pretty darn quick despite being such a massive drive!

Sandra 2011 SP4

Read Performance Testing

We also ran the SiSoftware Sandra 2011 SP4 Physical Disk Benchmark on the Seagate GoFlex Desk 4TB external drive. The drive had an average read speed of 138.13 MB/s and that the performance was rather linear across the drive, which is similar to what we saw in the read test with HD Tune.

Write Performance Testing

The write test was also similar to HD Tune Pro as we saw the drive flat line at around 150 MB/s for roughly the first 50% of the drive platters and then performance started to drop off linearly. In benchmarks like ATTO and CDM we saw write speeds above 160MB/s, so we would expect the performance to start out right around there and then decrease linearly. These results left us scratching our heads a bit and we have asked Seagate if they know what is going on here.