Seagate has upped the portable drive ante again with their new 1.5TB FreeAgent GoFlex. The new drive comes with their GoFlex interface connected through a USB 3.0 (which is also 2.0 compatible). Though that won’t be of much use to Mac users at the moment (maybe in October?), the size will turn some heads. It is 50% bigger than any other portable hard drive on earth.
If you are like us, you are wondering if you can pull this thing out of its case and plop it in your MacBook Pro. The good news is that Seagate’s Go Flex interface is just a snap on for a SATA connection and will work with any standard SATA drive. It also means that you can pull these drives out of their case and use them as internal drives.
I’ve contacted Seagate who’ve given me the dimensions of the external enclosure which are:
4.71in L x 3.51in W x 0.87in D (120mm x 89mm x 14.5mm), Weight: 0.62lb (0.28kg)
Update: Seagate has confirmed to me that the Internal Drive height is 12.5mm meaning that it will fit into a Unibody MacBook/Pro.
List price however is a hefty $249.
Press release follows:
SEAGATE INTRODUCES INDUSTRY’S FIRST 1.5TB PORTABLE EXTERNAL DRIVE
New FreeAgent® GoFlex™ Ultra-Portable External Drive Packs a Punch with Pre-loaded Paramount Pictures Films, Unprecedented Amount of Storage and Blazingly Fast USB 3.0 Connection
SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. – September 21, 2010 – Designed to address the explosive worldwide demand for digital storage, Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) today launched the world’s first 1.5 terabyte (TB) 2.5-inch portable external drive. Available immediately, the new 1.5TB FreeAgent® GoFlex™ ultra-portable drive delivers an all-in-one, technically advanced solution to help jump-start, build, store and enjoy libraries of digital content in one’s preferred medium-whether on a Mac or PC, or a television, at home or on the go. With 1.5TB of capacity people can now store and carry up to 60 HD movies, 750 video games, thousands of photos or tens of thousands hours of digital music.
“Today’s announcement is a ‘triple-crown’ of consumer technology-packaging record breaking capacity, blazingly fast USB 3.0 connectivity and the bonus of major motion picture entertainment-making the 1.5TB GoFlex™ ultra-portable drive an unprecedented and innovative solution,” said Darcy Clarkson, vice president of Global Retail Sales and Marketing for Seagate. “Bringing this solution to market on the heels of our 3TB GoFlex™ Desk drive and the Momentus® XT solid state hybrid drive is proof of Seagate’s continuing technology leadership and tradition of setting storage industry milestones.”
Shipping now in the United States and rolling out globally later this year, all 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drives will ship with a USB 3.0 interface cable, accelerating the transfer speed of a drive up to 10x when connected to a USB 3.0 port, when compared to a USB 2.0 port. For example, a drive using a USB 3.0 connection can transfer a 25GB HD movie in under five minutes versus the 14 minutes it would take using a traditional USB 2.0 drive . In
addition, all GoFlex ultra portable drives will now also ship with the new superspeed USB 3.0 cable, which will still continue to work with existing USB 2.0 ports.
“Consumers continue to push the growth of digital music, photos, and video content, and increasingly want access to this content from a variety of CE devices, including a PC,” says John Rydning, IDC’s research director for hard disk drives. “Higher capacity disk drives in combination with higher bandwidth interfaces like USB 3.0 will help to make a greater number of large multimedia files more accessible from multiple devices in the home.”
A key addition to the GoFlex™ family, the new 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drive delivers ultimate flexibility in how people collect, protect, share and enjoy their digital libraries, all in a convenient compact package. In addition to coming bundled with USB 3.0 connectivity, the drive can be used with an array of add-on cables and accessories such as the GoFlex™ Net media sharing device and the GoFlex™ TV HD media player, that provide the flexibility to enjoy your content on a TV, a network, using a mobile device, or via the Internet.
Continuing the special offer with Paramount Digital Entertainment, a division of Paramount Pictures Corporation (PPC), specially-marked packages of the new 1.5TB and the 1TB GoFlex ultra-portable drives will contain Paramount Pictures’ popular film, Star Trek (2009), which can be activated free of charge. Each drive will also contain an assortment of 20 Paramount Pictures movies that can be easily and securely unlocked by purchasing a license key online. The films will be licensed for multiple devices to allow for portability and enjoyment on a Windows® OS desktop computer, laptop computer, or widescreen television, by connecting the drive to one of the two available USB ports on a GoFlex TV HD media player . Paramount content will also be added to additional capacities of the GoFlex Pro ultra-portable drive in October.
All 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drives are compatible with both the Windows® operating system and Mac® OS X computers. Each drive includes an NTFS driver for Mac, which allows the hard drive to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without reformatting. The NTFS driver is simply installed once on the Mac® OS X computer, allowing it to read and write files on a Windows formatted drive.
The 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drive with USB 3.0 adapter is available in black and can be purchased on Seagate.com and through select retailers for $249.99.
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