I have the fortunate pleasure of testing a lot of kit in the Geekanoids studio, with absolutely tonnes of hard drives coming my way. It is not very often that I get something a little different to play with, so for this special occasion I wanted to put pen to paper, well actually fingers to keyboard (you know what I mean) and write up a review for a change.
Seagate very kindly sent me a couple of their ultra-portable external hard drives to test. They come in a variety of colours and I received a rather fetching 500GB red model (you can also get blue, black or silver). The hard drive is very small and glossy and has no external power supply. Instead it is powered from the USB 2.0 port on the back of the unit. It feels very well made and is just 111x83x14mm in size, so perfect if you are on the move. At just 150g it is pretty light too.
In use it performs very quietly, just a slight spinning sound of the tiny 2.5-inch hard drive doing its job. Actual data performance is nothing to dance or shout about, but what would you expect? after all it is just a hard drive. Hold your horses! Don't stop ready so fast! The GoFlex moniker on this hard drive is very important. What Seagate have done is develop a complete range that interact with each other. They have done a similar thing with their desktop range too. You can purchase add-on cables that slot onto the back of the hard drive and change the interface to USB 3.0, eSATA or FireWire 800. Not only does this change the physical connection, but also the data transfer performance too. So you can start off with USB 2.0 and then when you get that super duper new laptop with USB 3.0, spend another twenty quid and you get a faster hard drive. How cool is that!
On top of all this improved speed, Seagate also have a couple of other products worth mentioning. They have the GoFlex TV (review coming soon) and the GoFlex Net Media. GoFlex TV allows you to dock one of these tiny hard drives and access its content on the big screen, in up to 1080P resolution. GoFlex Net Media lets you dock up to two of the hard drives and access the content from your networked computers, mobile phones, or in fact from any connected computer wherever you are.
So, this hard drive is not the run of the mill offering. It starts off as a simple hard drive and then opens up all sorts of possibilities. A very good buy if you ask me.
Product: Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-portable 500GB Hard Drive
Supplied by: Seagate
Price: Expect to pay around £55-£60
