External hard drives are no news on the market and can be found in many different packages and shapes, but almost all are based on plain hard drives packed in boxes equipped with some interface for computer communication. This time we are reviewing a device like that, which comes from the company Freecom. The whole series of these drives is called Drive Sq and it includes portable hard drives, which are made for desktop and portable devices. The desktop models in which this reviewed unit belongs to are produced in capacities up to 3TB.

First thing that pops out is the design of the housing. The housing has a squared base and has curved edges. The top and bottom side are made out of brushed aluminum, while the edges are made out of black plastic. When you add to that the special design of the USB 3.0 connector you can see that someone has spent a lot of time overlooking the Apple designers over the shoulder.

From the front side there is a knob for power, which doesn’t light up even when the device is working. On the back side there is the power connector and the USB 3.0 connector. On the device you will get the software for Mac and Windows versions of a FHD Formatter and the application Green Button used for setting up options for lowering down the power consumption. The Windows users even get Nero BackitUp & Burn.

When you run all the normal benchmark tests for this kind of device, you will realize why we named it an elephant. Shortly said, it is big and it is really slow. Even though it is slow, the results are in line with the manufacturer’s specifications. It says that it is a low noise producer and a green portable hard drive. Accordingly, it achieves speeds of something above 100MB/s.

When taken into consideration that this is mostly used as a multimedia storage device, the speeds are not that important, the overall space is.