Seagate GoFlex Home Reviewed

Introduction

According to Seagate, the average household currently has 2.33 computers.  If you're a typical consumer faced with increasing demand for storage for those multiple computers, the latest crop of consumer-oriented NAS products provide a perfect solution. 

Previously, we reviewed the Seagate Dockstar, a networked docking station for Seagate's 2.5" FreeAgent Go drives and Seagate's FreeAgent GoFlex Net Media Sharing Device, which is replacing the Dockstar. This time, I'm looking at the Seagate GoFlex Home. 

You can think of the GoFlex Home as a single-drive version of Seagate's GoFlex Net Media Sharing Device that works with its GoFlex Desk drives, which use 3.5" Seagate Barracuda drives. Both the GoFlex Net and Home get their respective drives onto your network for sharing with MacOS and Windows machines and any other devices that support SMB/CIFS networking.

But instead of basing the GoFlex Home on the Pogoplug platform that the GoFlex Net and Dockstar use, Seagate for some reason decided to give Axentra's HipServ 2.0 OS a spin for the GoFlex Home. If HipServ rings a bell, that's because NETGEAR uses it on its Stora. And, as you might suspect, this gives the GoFlex Home and Stora very similar feature sets (except for the Stora's ability to support mirroring to a second drive).

The GoFlex Home consists of a networked docking station and, depending on the model you purchase, either a 1 or 2 TB GoFlex Desk drive.  The drive mounts into the dock using an SATA connection.  Figure 1 shows a front view of the GoFlex Home.  On the front panel there's a "GoFlex Home" status indicator as well as an indicator for status.  The drive status does not show disk activity - only whether the drive is ready.

Figure 1: Seagate GoFlex Home Dock and Drive

Figure 2 shows a rear view.  The rear panel has a power button, power port, a Gigabit Ethernet port with link and activity indicators, and a USB port for sharing an external drive or printer.  On the side, there's a recessed reset button.

Figure 2: Seagate GoFlex Home rear view

On The Inside

Figure 3 shows the GoFlex Home motherboard.  It's a fairly standard hardware platform commonly found in many consumer NAS products.  The processor is a Marvell "Kirkwood" 88F6281 running at 1.2 GHz, 128 MB soldered RAM (Nanya NT5TU64M16DG), 512 MB of flash and a standard 10/100/1000 Marvell 88E1116R Gigabit Ethernet port.  Like many consumer NAS products, the GoFlex Home does not support jumbo frames.

Figure 3: Seagate GoFlex Home inside

If you're worried about power consumption, the GoFlex Home consumes very little power.  With the drive spun up, it consumes a miserly 10 W.  There's an automatic drive spin down (~ 30 minutes, not programmable) that drops power consumption to 5 W.  So the GoFlex runs cool and quiet.