The USB 3.0 Upgrade Kit

The biggest advantage of the Seagate GoFlex system is that if you are unhappy with the Seagate FreeAgent drive's performance, you can buy upgrade kits to boost its performance. Amongst the available options is the USB 3.0 upgrade kit, which works for both the "regular" Seagate GoFlex drives as well as the Seagate GoFlex Pro drives.

Inside, you will the USB 3.0 adaptor plus a quick start guide and a warranty booklet. The USB 3.0 adaptor looks similar to the standard USB 2.0 adaptor but it's easy to differentiate the two - the USB 3.0 cable is much thicker. The USB 3.0 cable plug also has a blue interface, instead of the usual white interface. This is how the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drive looks like with the USB 3.0 adaptor attached (left), compared to the same drive with the USB 2.0 adaptor attached (right).

The standard USB 2.0 adaptor has a maximum theoretical throughput of 480 Mbits/s or about 60 MB/s. However, you would be lucky to get 33 MB/s out of any USB 2.0 interface in real life. This makes the USB 2.0 interface the performance bottleneck of any external hard disk drive, because even the slowest 5400 RPM hard disk drive can do better than 33 MB/s.

Upgrading the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drive with this USB 3.0 adaptor should greatly improve its performance as the USB 3.0 interface offers a ten-fold increase in bandwidth. With a maximum theoretical throughput of 5.0 Gbits/s, the USB 3.0 interface should offer a real-world throughput of about 400 MB/s, or about 12x greater than that of USB 2.0. We will see just how much faster this drive performs with the USB 3.0 adaptor, as opposed to the standard USB 2.0 adaptor.

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