Seagate 3TB external vs internal performance?

[MIDIman]

Has anyone seen any reviews of the Seagate 3TB drive in its various forms? USB3, eSata, Thunderbolt, and internal.

I just bought one of these drives in its external form. Firstly, it comes strangely formatted. It is pre-formatted with MBR and at 3TB - which is odd because it should require GPT and most reviews I've seen mention that something fancy is going on within the external cage's hardware to make this happen. IMHO - sounds like something that might affect performance.

But considering this drive's price in its sata3 6gb/s external form, I'm considering purchasing a second, partitioning it, and getting rid of my old 2TB and 1TB internal drives.

My question is - what would the performance difference of this drive be between USB3 external, internally on a SATA III 6gb/s connection and internally on a SATA II 3gb/s connection?

The problem is I only have two sata3 ports, one of which is occupied by a sata3 SSD, so if I put both drives internally (my preference), one of them would have to go on a sata2 port.

For a quick look, I'm currently transferring a 1.3TB set of randomly-sized files from a Seagate 2TB 5900rpm on sata2 to this drive on USB3 external and I'm getting around 55mb/s according to Win7.

 

[paperwastage]

any 7200rpm single HDD has transfer rates below the SATA 2 standard (this answers one of your questions)

 

[LeftSide]

I have a 3tb Hitachi 5 platter 7200rpm drive and get ~150mbs peak, average around 120mbs. You should be getting much higher than 55mbs. Are you using a usb3 cable? Sounds like it's limited to usb 2.0 speeds. (right around 50mbs)

 

[MIDIman]

I have a 3tb Hitachi 5 platter 7200rpm drive and get ~150mbs peak, average around 120mbs. You should be getting much higher than 55mbs. Are you using a usb3 cable? Sounds like it's limited to usb 2.0 speeds. (right around 50mbs)

Was using the included cable.

Maybe it's a limit of the drive it's reading from? They are old Samsung Sp2405c 250gb and might be limited at these rates.

One weird annoyance...when I do a cold boot, the drive won't get recognized and I'll see an error about it in win7. I have to disconnect and reconnect the USB cable. Do you have the same problem?

 

[MIDIman]

Just did an ATTO Benchmark on the drive and its definitely performing correctly. Getting 35-40MB/s at 4.0, 65-70MB/s at 8.0, 103-111MB/s at 16.0, 150-158MB/s at 32.0, and 175MB/s for the rest.

I'm still miffed about the powering issue. Have posted on the Seagate forums. Basically if I leave the drive unused for a period of time, the GoFlex becomes "unrecognized" and shows up as "Device could not start" in Device Manager. When it does this, the only way to restart the drive is to unplug the USB3 cable and plug it back in. Even restarting the system doesn't work.

 

[MIDIman]

And to anyone interested - this was an official reply from Seagate:

Hello,

We do have a file that I will send to you that disables the sleep setting on the drive for Windows computers. Here is the link.

http://www.seagate.com/support/external-hard-drives/portable-hard-drives/expansion-portable/drive-settings-master-dl/

The name of the program is called Seagate Drive Settings. You can disable the sleep with this program.

Let us know if that does not resolve your issue, or if you have any other questions.