Go-flex lives on in the form of USM

It seemed as if the Seagate line of portable Go-Flex have been discontinued. You can often find 1TB Go-Flex drives in the bargain bins of Target for as low as $39.99. At first, I was very disappointed. I invested in a few Go-Flex docks and adapters; including the Thunderbolt Adapter.

To my surprise, my fears were misplaced. Go-Flex lives on but in a different name and different format. It is thinner, smaller and more compact. It is called USM (Universal Storage Module). In fact, there is a newer Thunderbolt Adapter (STAE128 instead of the STAE121). Seagate didn't do a good job of informing the consumer about this.

Well today, I picked up a USM drive and I didn't even know about it. The Go-Flex drives have been replaced by the new line of Backup Plus drives. They're thinner and more compact as seen below.

Compared to an original Go-Flex drive.

Here it is attached with older Go-Flex attachments like the Thunderbolt STAE121 adapter.

Old Go-Flex Firewire adapter works just as fine.

As I wrote earlier, Seagate didn't do a good job of informing consumers about USM.  After a few googling, a few other companies are implementing the USM format. Here are some examples of other USM products in the market place. There are Pogo plugged devices, desktop computers with slide-able docking bays, media players and NAS servers that now employ USM.

(image from Anandtech)

USM is basically a small format enclosure for 2.5" drives. They have interchangeable dock connections via standard SATA. The key thing is the standardized size.

When you look for an enclosure or portable drive, give USM a consideration. The ability to switch between USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, direct SATA and future connectors is pretty compelling.

Some reading links on USM:

http://www.sata-io.org/technology/usm.asp

FAQ: http://www.sata-io.org/documents/SATA-USM-FAQ_FINAL.pdf

http://www.seagate.com/solutions/usm/partners/

http://www.seagate.com/solutions/usm/products/

Portable hard drive recommendation: Seagate Go-Flex

People often ask me for an opinion on what hard drive to get. They need something simple, portable and good enough to carry their music collection.

My blog pretty much covers fast drive setups such as SSDs and Thunderbolt but for most people, they want something with more storage at a reasonable price.

My recommendation would be the portable Seagate Go-Flex hard drives.

They come in 5400 rpm so they aren't blazing fast but they offer great flexibility and they often go on sale. 1TB normally goes for $70 and can be as low as $60 (discounted at Target). Why do I like them?
Well, I like the detachable end-piece that allows me to connect drives to a variety of different computers.

Picture below is an illustration of what I mean.
You can get end piece connectors that swap out for any computer configuration.

• Firewire 800 adapter
• USB 3 & 2
• Thunderbolt
• and even eSATA

I have an old Mac Mini and FW800 is the way to go. Some of my PC's have USB 3 so the USB 3 adapter comes in handy. The end pieces are easy to replace and there are even 3rd party docks and adapters that work with the Go Flex drives. You can even park them in and convert them into NAS drives as well. The great thing about Go-Flex is that you can use the adapters on other 2.5" laptop drives. Hence, you don't have to worry about future proofing your investment.

I have 8 of these drives and so far, they work great for storing music and files.

Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter (STAE121) review w/ Samsung 830 SSD

This is another web review of the GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter. Here is a short summary: It is SMOKING FAST.

After accumulating over 7 or so 2.5" Seagate GoFlex drives, I decided to take one of these for a spin.
I love the idea of the GoFlex and I've been happy with mix and matching drives (USB2, USB3, and Firewire 800 connectors).

With 8 SATA6 SSDs lying around, Thunderbolt was the next logical step to take advantage of them. If you've been reading my blog, I've tried everything with my SSDs - enclosing them in eSATA RAID enclosures, chaining up in striped RAID over USB 3.0, and other means of squeezing out the most performance externally. Now, I've given up and have gone Thunderbolt and for good reasons. With an SSD, it is fast (scroll to the bottom).


Go-Flex adapters have SATA on one end and a connector (usually USB) on the other. This one is slightly larger with a bottom base (to house the Thunderbolt electronics). The great thing is that they will also work with any 2.5" standard SATA drives found in laptops and this includes SSDs.

Here it is pictured next to a USB 3.0 Go-Flex adapter.

Furthermore, I should note, the expensive Thunderbolt cable is not included and you will need to source one before using this adapter.

As for speed, you won't be terribly impressed with the adapter using  a standard HDD drive. The normal  Go-Flex 1 TB drives run at 5400 rpm so they will perform as fast as a drive connected internally.

First of all, with the standard a standard 1TB Go-Flex drives, I was getting some 80MB/s read and write using BlackMagic's speed tesk. These aren't that better over a standard connection like USB 3.0.

USB 3.0 yielded slightly slower benchmarks that you won't notice too much in real world situations.

You will need SSDs to see how wonderful Thunderbolt really is. I paired up some Samsung 830 128GB SSDs to both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 to see how they performed.

 

Here are some preliminary results:

Using Thunderbolt, you will see in excess of 300 MB/s reads and writes. 360 MB/s read was normal after several runs.

Now here is USB 3.0 speed for reference and comparison. 180-200 MB/s write and reads. Clearly, Thunderbolt is superior.

Synthetic benchmarks is one thing. What matter how will it perform in the real world. My typical use case would be  copying large files like virtual machines, system clones, and large media files.

For my test, I copied a 30GB Vmware VMDK file from my boot drive which is a M4 512GB SSD capable of 500 MB/s reads.


From my internal 512GB Crucial M4 SSDs to SSD via USB.
2:24.7

From my internal 512GB Crucial M4 SSDs to a Samsung 830 SSD using Thunderbolt.
1:31:3

63% faster with Thunderbolt.

Now lets compare with a standard 7200 rpm drive connected directly to my notebook on the fastest SATA6 bus.

From my internal 512GB Crucial M4 SSDs to a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid 7200 rpm drive.
7:46.8

If you are not using SSDs, expect your time to be 10-12 minutes with standard hard drives.

In another test, I copied a 6GB Windows 7 VM image on to the SSD. Total time to copy was 12 seconds. Booting from the same Virtualized image of Windows 7  off a Thunderbolt SSD took 11.3 seconds to boot to the log in screen. This is faster than most of the computers on my company's network. Let repeat that again. It took 11.3 seconds to boot a virtualized Windows.

There you have it. Thunderbolt is smoking fast. Thunderbolt vs USB 3.0. There is no contest.
It totally obliterates USB 3.0. More importantly, Thunderbolt now makes external bootable drives a reality. You can safely boot off an external drive with little or no performance penalty. In some cases, the external Thunderbolt boot drive will be faster than the internal drive as it is in the case of my 27' iMac which still uses a regular hard drive.


I will update this blog later as I get two more high performance Thunderbolt drives : LaCie Big 2 and Drobo 5D in the coming days.