Freecom 56067 2TB Quattro eSATA/FireWire 800/USB 3.0 3.5 Inch External Hard Drive

It linked well using a usb 3 connector - all the leads were included - I have windows 7 64 bit and it connected ok.
When you have it installed and turn the computer back on next day it doesn't auto connect and show in 'my computer'. I have to disconnect its lead and reconnect - then it loads. Possibly I can make some adjustment in windows to get it to connect as I turn on the system but I havn't worked that out. The windows 7 'back up' system works and a file was produced on the drive taking about an hour (I have 1T of data on an i7 and 8meg ram).I tried to copy over some large files but it would not take them - I had seen this before and realised the Freecom drive was formated as FAT32 so it links with mac or windows - trouble is FAT32 has a 4gig limit on the file sizes that you can copy, and my movie files are bigger than that. So I copied the software that comes on the drive to my desktop - following the instructions in the manual (in the software) I reformatted the whole drive to NTFS so now the file copy size is unlimited although I only want it for windows. I put the sofware back on the drive.

There are a great many external hard drives on the market and many have USB 2 interfaces. this is fine if you are using them to store photos, mp3s etc but not so great if you have a lot of data - such as holiday videos - to move around. USB 2 is just too slow.

Freecom make this drive in several capacities, 500GB 1,2 and 3 TB. This review is for the 2 TB drive.

At 2TB(ish see below) this drive is near the top end of those currently (as of May 2012) available and has a surprising number of connection options: USB 3, eSATA, Firewire 800 (two ports) and Firewire 400. You can daisy chain firewire devices together so the addition of a 2nd 800 port is a nice touch.

The drive comes with all the cables you could possibly need to connect it, although the USB 3 one is rather short, perhaps this is normal - I'm not sure, so you'll need to site the drive close to your computer for USB 3.

Although it states it's a 2 TB drive, you actually get 1.8 TB once it's formatted. That's still a lot, but I do wish that manufacturer's would play fair and state a more accurate capacity. As mentioned by another reviewer it comes formatted as FAT32 - which restricts the largest file size to 4gb - so you will need to reformat if you want to save larger files. The manuals, a copy of NeroBackItUp, Freecom's own format utility (you don't need this, windows format works but it appears to give a slight increase in capacity over Microsoft) and a utility that allows the drive to spin down after a time when not in use are actually on the drive so copy these somewhere else before you format.

It's a fanless unit and in use is almost silent, there is no access noise and an almost nonexistent hum from the spindle motor. The very robust casing only gets slightly warm to touch and it looks a very well made piece of kit. There is even an on/off switch on the back. Looks are let down somewhat by the standard grotty power adaptor and the rather thin power cable. Its OK but I would have preferred the cable to be thicker to cut down on the chances of it getting damaged.

It's a fast drive, though this depends on how you connect it to your computer. I have a PC with USB 2,3, eSata and firewire as I do a lot of video work. The drive's box states that USB 3 is the fastest way of connecting, but I didn't find this.

I copied a 25 Gb directory of videos and jpg pictures from the PC to the drive though the various options and found the eSata to be the fastest with peek of 105MB a second for large files dropping to 74 for small ones. The other connection options came out as below

USB 3 - peak 80MBs dropping to 57 for small files
Firewire 800 - peak 60Mbs dropping to 44
USB 2 - peak 42MBs dropping to 27.

The firewire 800 speed was a pleasant surprise as firewire on windows 7 is notoriously flaky requiring various techie tweaks to get it to behave. As a comparison copying the same data internal sata to internal sata peaked at 115MBs, dropping to 98.

So to round up. It's fast, silent, has a great capacity and has a lot of connection options, recommended if your computer can use the faster interfaces but not if you only have USB2 there are cheaper USB 2 drives available.

I bought this as my home server has a eSATA connector on the back. I use some backup software that can do disk to disk encrypted backups and had previously being using relatively slow USB drives.
What a difference the Quatro makes. It is very fast and with the 4 interfaces on the back it will connect to almost anything.
I was really impressed with it's speed so much I bought another and now have "offsite" storage by alternating drives and backups.