Freecom Hard Drive Quattro 3.0 review

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Verdict:

Quick over USB3 and very flexible, but it's expensive

Review Date: 23 Aug 2012

Price when reviewed: £129

Supplier: http://www.amazon.co.uk

Reviewed By: Tom Morgan

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

User Rating

If you want flexibility when it comes to external storage, Freecom’s Hard Drive Quattro will almost certainly have you covered. As well as USB3, it also has eSATA, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 connections, providing compatibility with several generations of hardware.

We ran our storage benchmarks over USB3, as it’s the fastest of all four connections with a maximum bandwidth of 5Gbit/s. Large files were written at 98.6MB/s and read at 109.5MB/s, compared to small files which were written at 20MB/s and read at 43.8MB/s. Expect slower speeds if you use eSATA or FireWire, or if you connect the disk to a USB port.

It isn’t the most comprehensive backup tool we’ve used, but the free copy of Nero BackItUp & Burn Essentials is still more than adequate for performing daily backups. You can set it to automatically back up according to a schedule, to either the 1TB hard disk or to CD, DVD or Blu-ray disc. Unfortunately you can’t restore your backups without going through the program, but it’s a simple process.

It’s fairly quick and very flexible, but the Hard Drive Quattro is very expensive for a 1TB disk. Compared to the Seagate Backup Plus desktop 3TB, you get a third of the storage for roughly the same price. If you don’t need eSATA or FireWire, it’s a much better option.

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