Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Home Network Storage System Review – NAS At Its Finest

REAL-WORLD TESTING

Since the device is a NAS, I decided to test the network portion of the drive, instead of hooking it up and testing it via SATA. Three setups were used, each with a separate connection type: a desktop hardwired, a desktop hardwired via powerline, and a laptop via wireless:

Desktop [Wired]: ~12-13 MB/s

As expected, the hard-wired connection has the best speeds out of the three. There was essentially no fluctuation of speed when transferring.

Desktop [Powerline]: ~11-12 MB/s

The powerline connection is what I was most interested in testing. The Western Digital Livewire application shows a speed of 192 MB/s out of a possible 200 MB/s, so the powerline kit is well connected. My reasoning was that it would give a good indication between wireless and wired, and the results did:

The file transfer was huge, roughly 330 Gb in size. As shown by the graph, the speed was rock solid, with extremely miniscule bumps in speed. I was expecting a network crash, loads of fluctuations in speed, and an overall painful experience getting that much data to transfer over. Thankfully, the GoFlex Home performed exceptionally throughout the entire process, while maintaining virtually the same speed as the hard-wired transfer:

Laptop [Wireless]: ~8-9 MB/s

Not surprisingly, the wireless transfer had the slowest speeds. Still, 9 MB/s is a respectable rate of transfer for a wireless connection. Again, there were no drops or any other problems getting the data onto the GoFlex Home.

NASPT BENCHMARKS AND DLNA SYNTHESIS

A final speed test was done using Intel’s NAS Performance Toolkit (NASPT). It is is a file system exerciser and analysis tool designed to enable performance comparisons between network attached storage (NAS) devices. NASPT focuses on user level performance using real world workload traces gathered from typical digital home applications: HD video playback and record, data backup and restore utilities, office productivity applications, video rendering/content creation and more:

The speeds are virtually the same as seen in the above tests, reaffirming the real-world transfer rate. The NASPT transferred a folder worth 30 Gb in files, which took roughly an hour to transfer, as is reaffirmed in the powerline test.

When turned on, the GoFlex makes a few startup noises, but is silent after, making no detectable noises. This leaves the temperature and power consumption tests:

The GoFlex uses very little power, especially on load. It also runs pretty cool for a passively-cooled device, especially considering it only uses ventilation holes for air flow.

Additional DNLA media devices tested include a PlayStation 3 system running firmware version 4.11, and an iPod Touch running iOS 5.1.