Into The Terabyte Territory - Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1.5TB

Introduction and Physique

Progress

Just a few years ago, having a 500GB hard drive inside your PC was something you could brag about to your techie friends, but these days 500GB seems to be the just the standard for the portable external drives that have become all but commonplace in the age of high definition videos and BitTorrent. The next storage frontier is the terabyte country, or roughly 1000GB. Along with this is the advent of SuperSpeed USB 3.0, which can transfer files 10 times faster than USB 2.0 or about 4-5Gbps. In keeping with the times, Seagate has updated its FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-portable hard drive, which now goes up to 1.5TB and comes standard with USB 3.0 interface.

The external storage market is generally homogeneous, since the products on offer basically do the same thing. It is pretty much dominated by two main companies - Western Digital and Seagate. While other manufacturers resort to eye-catching designs to differentiate themselves, the big two have their brand name to lean back on, so design-wise their portable hard drives are usually generic-looking black slabs of plastic. The Seagate GoFlex Ultra-portable is no different, encased in a glossy black shell with rounded edges, measuring 120mm (4.7 inches) long and 89mm (3.5 inches) wide. As for thickness, it measures 22mm, or just under an inch. These dimensions make it relatively large among the current crop of portable hard drives out in the market today.