Compatible with both PCs and Macs, via special adapters

May 5, 2010 06:37 GMT  ·  By

Not long ago, Seagate revealed that the storage market had resumed its growth and reached a stage where supply couldn’t keep up with the growing demand. Now, the company seems to be putting an effort into alleviating this issue, even by a tiny bit, by unleashing not just a new HDD lineup, but also a slew of adapters, cables and other products meant to enhance their performance and compatibility. The new HDD family is known as GoFlex and is made up of both portable as well as larger desktop units.

“The explosive growth of video capture and multimedia collecting is expanding personal digital libraries to terabytes worth of content within the home,” Dave Mosley, executive vice president, Sales, Marketing and Product Line Management at Seagate, said. “These trends are driving demand for high-capacity, high-performance storage. The GoFlex family of storage products meets this need by delivering simple, USB 2.0 storage and backup devices, with the flexibility to adapt as interface technology advances by using the various GoFlex cables and accessories to access content stored on the same drive.”

The GoFlex series contains 3.5-inch Desk drives of 1TB and 2TB capacities, as well as 2.5-inch, portable devices with capacities of 320GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB. These products can not only connect directly to PCs and Mac systems, but they can also gain extra functionality.

For example, by using the GoFlex TV HD media player, stored music, movies and pictures can be streamed directly to the TV. Another option is to connect the HDD to the network via the GoFlex Net media sharing device. One can also use the GoFlex intelligent dock to transform an ultra-portable drive into a desktop unit. Finally, there are, of course, a variety of cables and adapters that will let the hard drives communicate with host systems via not just USB 2.0 ports, but also eSATA connectors and FireWire 800.

The 2.5-inch drives have prices of $99.99 (320GB), $129.99 (500GB), $169.99 (750GB) and $199.99 (1TB), whereas the 1TB and 2TB 2.5-inch models carry tags of $119.99 and $189.99, respectively. As for the accessories, the GoFlex TV HD costs $129.99, whereas the GoFlex intelligent dock and GoFlex net media sharing device are priced at $29.99 and $99.99. Naturally, full information may be found on the official website.