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Review on 💽 Fantom Drives GFP3000Q3 - External Hard Drive 3TB 7200RM, USB 3.2 Gen 1 - 5Gbps, eSATA & FireWire, GForce 3 Aluminum, Black, Compatible with Mac, Windows, PS4, Xbox by Corey Krull

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Here's how I set it up for a 32-bit machine running Windows 7: Pay attention to the allocation unit size!

I have a nine year old Dell XPS 420 with Windows 7 32-bit and knew I wanted to try my luck. I bought it to backup all my data and leave enough space for video projects. Here's what I did to set up this hard drive, including what they don't tell you in the install guide. I plugged it in and connected it to my computer with an eSATA cable. I plugged in the drive and after a few seconds my computer recognized it and installed the driver software. I went into Disk Manager and saw a new drive with a 200MB ESP partition and a 4+TB GUID partition. I checked the Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Disk feature and found that the drive is not working. t there. I didn't want to use this drive with a complex power down procedure, so I turned off the drive, removed the eSATA cable, and connected the drive to FireWire 400. I turned on the drive and it reinstalled the driver software and this time I was able to eject the drive using the Safely Remove Hardware and Media feature. I unplugged and plugged the firewire cable back in to get the drive back. I then went to Disk Manager and again saw the new hard drive as above. I right-clicked a large multi-TB partition and selected New Simple Volume. When I went to the "Format Partition" section, I selected "Allocation Unit Size" 2048. This allows for an NTFS volume of up to 8 TB. It is very important. The default allocation unit size resulted in a volume of less than 700 GB. I had to delete and start over. If you choose an allocation unit smaller than 2048, you will end up with an NTFS volume that is much smaller than the entire drive. This is not in any of the instructions that came with the drive. I had to seek and learn from my own experience. I then selected Quick Format, named the volume, and within a minute or two my new drive was up and running. I tested it and it works fine. Now it's working and I can't hear it at all. Time to start backing up!

Pros
  • Host Interface: eSATA / FireWire 800 (2) / FireWire 400 / USB 3.0
Cons
  • Some errors