Seagate Offers Up Pocket-Size Terabyte Drive

Storage capacity continues to rise in ever smaller form factors. Indeed, it was only about two years ago that deploying a 250GB portable storage drive the size of a standard hardback novel was pretty much the state of the art in the personal desktop storage sector.

Even though those machines generally served their purposes, their time has come and gone. The form factors and the ever-increasing demand for capacity have continued to change this business in remarkable fashion.

Portable Terabyte

On 18 October, Seagate jumped ahead to introduce what it described as “the world’s slimmest 1TB portable storage drive,” the FreeAgent 1TB GoFlex. It can easily slide into a shirt or coat pocket and is compatible with Seagate’s new GoFlex HDTV media player.

This latest GoFlex features an all-new 2.5-inch drive with two 500GB disks. It has the same dimensions as Seagate’s previous 640GB-and-less capacity GoFlexes.

Continued areal density advancements in disk drives, due largely to the perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technique, and other improved engineering methods are to thank for these continued storage capacity improvements.

Areal density, also sometimes called bit density, refers to the amount of data that can be stored in a given amount of hard disk platter “real estate.” Since disk surfaces are two-dimensional, areal density is a measure of the number of bits that can be stored in a unit of area. PMR creates additional space on the disk to add more bits.

USB 3.0

At the retail price of $170 (£108), users get a USB 3.0 cable for faster transfers. The drive also is upgradable to FireWire 800 or eSATA by using the appropriate GoFlex upgrade cable. It also features preloaded backup and encryption software.

The same drive with USB 2.0 and without the other cables is available for about $100 (£64) on other retail sites.

As do most GoFlex drives, this one comes preloaded with a list of popular movies. “Star Trek,” however, is the only one available for no additional cost. The other 20 must be purchased and viewed separately.

There are several new choices on the market when it comes to high-capacity, low-cost  personal or small-business storage drives.

Seagate launched a 1.5TB portable GoFlex (not pocket-sized) with USB 3.0 in September. Iomega recently came out with its own 1TB portable drive, the eGO 1TB, which is only slightly larger than an iPhone. Both retail for $250 (£159) or less.

Chris Preimesberger

Editor of eWEEK and repository of knowledge on storage, amongst other things

Recent Posts

Australia Rejects Elon Musk Claim About Social Media Ban For Under-16s

Government minister flatly rejects Elon Musk's “unsurprising” allegation that Australian government seeks control of Internet…

2 hours ago

Northvolt Files For Bankruptcy Protection In US

Northvolt files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States, and CEO and co-founder…

3 hours ago

UK’s CMA Readies Cloud Sector “Behavioural” Remedies – Report

Targetting AWS, Microsoft? British competition regulator soon to announce “behavioural” remedies for cloud sector

19 hours ago

Former Policy Boss At X Nick Pickles, Joins Sam Altman Venture

Move to Elon Musk rival. Former senior executive at X joins Sam Altman's venture formerly…

21 hours ago

Bitcoin Rises Above $96,000 Amid Trump Optimism

Bitcoin price rises towards $100,000, amid investor optimism of friendlier US regulatory landscape under Donald…

22 hours ago

FTX Co-Founder Gary Wang Spared Prison

Judge Kaplan praises former FTX CTO Gary Wang for his co-operation against Sam Bankman-Fried during…

23 hours ago