Laptop Thoughts: News & Reviews on Laptops, Netbooks, Slates, and More.

"Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) today announced it is shipping a new 4TBGoFlex® Desk external hard drive - the highest capacity hard drive in the industry. This latest addition to the GoFlex Family of external hard drives showcases Seagate's new desktop design. The streamlined industrial design delivers a smaller footprint and better reflects the aesthetic of today's modern offices while still providing all of the benefits of previous generations of the GoFlex drives. The new 4TB GoFlex Desk is now available from www.seagate.com and will be available from select online retailers next month for a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $249.99 USD. The entire line of GoFlex Desk products will also adopt the new industrial design in the coming weeks. The GoFlex Desk for Mac featuring both Firewire 800 and USB 2.0 will be available in Apple stores by the end of the month."

And the march toward larger and larger storage goes on. It's impressive to see a 4 TB hard drive, though the number of end users that need that kind of storage can't be very big. I'm personally looking forward to 4 TB hard drives because I've been ripping my DVDs and Blu-ray discs to ISO format and space vanishes quickly when you've got 8 GB (DVD) and 50 GB (Blu-ray) ISO files. 99.999% of people aren't going to do that though, so how many of you need/want a 4 TB storage drive?

If you're looking for the most portable hard drive on the planet, look no further: Seagate has released the GoFlex Slim. It's a 320 GB, 7200 RPM hard drive that even inside the enclosure is only 9 mm thick. I'll be writing a brief review about this product in the coming weeks, but let me say this: it's crazy thin, and crazy fast - the USB 3.0 connection slurps down big files at over 150 MB/s based on a test I just did. Pricing is reasonable at $99 USD, and the drive has a really nice anodized finish. Mac compatibility right out of the box as well of course!

"Sabio Products, a leading provider of external storage solutions for digital imaging, creative professionals, offices and ‘prosumers' who need large capacity, high speed, professional grade content protection, announced the availability of the DM2PT - an extremely small footprint, 2 drive, RAID enabled external storage solution with exceptional data transfer rates of more than a 115MBps. This all-in-one, high capacity, portable content backup and storage solution has been specifically designed for the studio, office, home or field environment and because of its built in RAID controller with RAID 0, 1, JBOD and span configurations is ideal for any data imaging, HD 1080 video editing, DSLR photography, JPEG/RAW imaging or straight forward media protection and back up application."

The design isn't quite as slick as Seagate's Data Lunchbox prototype, but the basic functions are all there and I'll take a real product that I can buy over one I can't any day. However, it's weird not to see USB 3.0 supported - and what's with the 115 MB/s data rate? What type of connection did they use that on? That's about half what the Seagate Data Lunchbox was doing over USB 3.0 in RAID 0, but 115 MB/s is more than you'd get over USB 2.0...so is that over eSATA? I'm also unsure of the price - I did a little hunting and couldn't come up with anything. I think Seagate's GoFlex solution is more elegant - there's no point having a drive with all those connectors if you don't need them.

While at CES 2011, one of the more interesting things I saw was a Seagate product that's in the prototype phase - it's affectionately called the "Data Lunchbox" product. In short, it's two 7mm Seagate Momentus hard drives (320 GB or 500 GB capacity) in a single external USB 3.0 drive chassis, along with a RAID controller chip. When configured in RAID 0 for speed, the product - remember it's still in the prototype stage - can hit 235 MB/s read and 228 MB/s write speeds. That out-guns the Intel SSD they were benchmarking it against, which hit 203 MB/s read and 154 MB/s write speeds. If you've ever needed to move big files in a hurry, you'd appreciate that level of speed. Alternatively, the product can be configured for RAID 1, which would mean as you put data onto it, you'll have a duplicate of every file.

What's particularly exciting to me about this product is that it's exactly what I've wanted for quite a while - when I travel and I shoot photos and HD video, hard drive space runs out quick...especially when I only have a 128 GB SSD in my laptop. The ability to put that media content on an external drive, and have it backed up to a second disk, would be fantastic. Add in Seagate's GoFlex technology - which allows you to swap out different cables for connectivity - and you have a solution that I think a lot of photographers and videographers would be excited to purchase.

Want to see this product come to market? Send a message to @seagate on Twitter and tell them that you want to see the Data Lunchbox product get released. Let's make this happen!

"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® GoFlexTM 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."

There's not a lot you can do to make hard drives exciting beyond offering them with more storage, or faster speeds - but Seagate is giving it their best shot with the FreeAgent GoFlex drive, which offers both. First we have the 1.5 terabytes of storage - that's an amazing amount of storage for a drive that you can fit in your pocket! They've added speed as well with the USB 3.0 connection; I don't have a single computer with USB 3.0 yet - and realistically, USB 3.0 won't be common until Intel and AMD support it at the core chipset level - but it's important for accessory makers like Seagate to bring products like this to the market to drive adoption. The nice thing about USB 3.0 is that it's backwards compatible with USB 2.0, so you're not losing anything by purchasing products with it - and when you to get a computer with USB 3.0, products like this one will become even faster. Nice!

Like all Seagate GoFlex drives, it comes with an OS X NTFS driver, so it will work on both your Mac and PC without re-formatting. And you can swap the cable for Firewire 800 (it's an additional accessory) if you're so inclined to get a boost in speed over USB 2.0 on your Mac.

A little bit of extra icing on the cake: you'll get a free digital copy of the most recent Star Trek movie, and the option to purchase unlock codes for 20 other Paramount movies. I wonder if it's an HD copy of the movie? I suspect not. Still, not a bad little bonus!

Full press release after the break. Read more...