Fantom Drives 10TB External Hard Drive - GFORCE 3 Pro Review: A Powerhouse for Storage and Performance

I bought this for my Xbox One to store some additional games. Aside from looking like a boss hard drive, it's also the first result when you search for "7200rpm external hard drive". I imagine that's why you see so many reviews from fellow Xbox One owners. Anyway, my Xbox One's internal storage was 92% filled up so it was time to upgrade. Pros 1. The thing feels really solid. The actual external closure is made out of metal while the stand is made out of plastic. The connections in the back, the power switch, and all of it feels like a complete and sturdy package. I imagine it'll last for a long time if I treat it right (assuming the drive isn't a dud, which happens from time to time). It looks awesome sitting next to my xbox one. 2. 2TB as advertised and so far it's taken all the games I own (about 12, of varying sizes) with about 75% of its capacity left to play with. Transfers have been (relatively) quick and painless. The formatting process on the Xbox One was also quick and painless. 3. The drive turns off when the console turns off. Woot! 4. The 7200rpm vs 5400rpm debate is long and tedious. I will say this. On an old 3TB 5400rpm drive, I got exactly ONE bit of stutter while playing a game on NHL 16. With the 7200rpm, I got no stutters on that game. So even if the benefits are minuscule, sometimes that's enough to even out the rough edges. Glad I went 7200rpm. 5. Unless I update and say that the drive failed, assume the drive continues to live :) Cons 1. I wish the USB 3.0 cable were a bit longer. Kind of limits my placement of this device. I may have to buy a slightly longer one if my current placement doesn't work out. 2. A mode to turn the blue light off would've been nice. It is kind of harsh. Some things of note: 1. This really is just a 7200rpm hard drive wrapped up in a really cool, all metal enclosure. By that I mean (I'm like 95% certain) that there's no difference between this and a 7200rpm drive you buy for your desktop computer. In reality, you could probably pick up a 7200rpm drive, buy an enclosure, and create something like this yourself if you're tech-savvy DIY type. I'm tech savvy, but I'm notoriously bad at DIY which is why I got this one. 2. Because it is pretty much a standard, desktop-grade 7200rpm hard drive, the snicks and wizzes that people are hearing are actually totally normal. That's what desktop HDDs sound like. Some may think it's too loud or worrisome, I can tell you it's not. That's what my computer hard drive sounds like and it's still ringing after 5 years. Overall, I'm currently super happy about my purchase. It's working very well and my games play extremely well off of it. Don't listen to the debates, there's really not much of a real-world difference between 5400rpm and 7200rpm, but if you're like me and you want to go that "little, itty bitty" extra mile with your Xbox One, this is a good drive to do it with. Just point the light the other way so it burns holes in your walls instead of your retinas! :D

I purchased this drive with the intention of backing up all of my photo data once a week. What drew me especially to this drive were two things: 1) It used a Type B USB3 plug, which is much sturdier than the thin USB3 ports (USB3 Micro-B) on other mainstream external hard drives such as WD and Seagate. 2) The presence of a power switch. I cannot overstate my annoyance with recent external hard drives that lack on/off switch. I like to keep my external hard drives plugged in all the time but I don't want to go back there to unplug it and plug it in to my computer every time. In addition to the points above, I've been using another Fantom drive (3 Tb) for a couple years (for backup as well) and it has been running fine so far. The first thing I did when I received it was run it through a bunch of SMART tests, which came back all green, so hooray. The second test was a full surface scan, which looks at all of sectors and makes sure none of them are bad. 9 hours and 45 minutes later (would have been closer to 6.5 hours if I wasn't running some other very processor-intensive programs) it detected 0 bad sectors. Hooray again! I decided to run it through HDDScan's surface test results as well (which also shows the distribution of response times of all the sectors) and everything looked great. Checking the drive properties, it appears the disk used is the TOSHIBA MD04ACA400 4TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive. Both HDDScan and the Toshiba HDD listing (on Amazon) reports the drive running at 7200 RPM which gave me additional confidence. The drive I got had a slightly different design on the back, with the power and USB plugs above the power switch which made it slightly more difficult to turn it on when the drive is sitting on its side. Also the drive came pre-formatted in NTFS, with only one text document on the drive (explaining what NTFS is and what to do if you have a Mac). There's no other bloatware, backup software trials, etc. etc. Design-wise the brushed aluminum case is really nice, just like my previous Fantom drive. When running the surface scans the drive warmed up quite a bit, so I aimed a fan at it to keep it cool (which it did very effectively on the lowest setting). The drive also came with a stand which was nice. Also note there is a blue LED at the front which blinks when it's being accessed.

As soon as I took it out of the box I knew it was worth money, its got some weight to it. Has a solid buil not cheap or flimsy at all pure aluminum case, also help to keep the heat down. I bought this for movie storage, has no problem what so ever keeping up with me running 3d 4k movies on two screens at times. True plug and play no drivers or updates. Speed are really fast for a HDD drive Copying movie files around 10gigs at 100mbps and much faster then that for smaller files. Totally recommend. Ps also comes with a neat little stand to have it vertical.

El copiado de archivos muy rápido, si es un poco ruidoso pero como ocupo para respaldo no tengo tema

Es bueno, pero también ruidoso

Ordered this as a replacement drive, price was acceptable and delivery next day, but no UK power adapter (blade) was provided, the drive is also a little noisy when in use, let's hope the longevity is good and this is a reliable drive to keep my data

I've owned many external usb drives over the years and find the Fantom line to be very reliable and long-lived. Out of 8 Fantom green drives owned since 2011, only one has failed to date - all the rest are still in service and I expect this new addition to be the same. I highly recommend Fantom drives where reliability is needed at a competitive price.