Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 26 October 2008 15:21
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
The world’s largest hard disk manufacturer, Seagate, has introduced its
second-generation of portable and desktop “FreeAgent” drives, bringing
style and convenience to the humble hard drive, while introducing a
1.5TB option. Is space no longer the final frontier?
Ok, ok, so outer space is still a largely unexplored frontier for human beings, but when it comes to storage space the amount we need just keeps on getting bigger, because we humans are great at collecting a whole heap of stuff in the form of bits and bytes!
If you look at your own storage requirements, chances are that you already have at least a terabyte of storage (if not more) when you add the hard disk(s) in your computer (or computers), external hard drive(s) and USB flash drives together.
Heck, my Nokia N96 is equipped with 32GB of memory all its own, thanks to 16GB internally and a 16GB microSD card, and having a phone with 100GB or more in the not-too-distant future is an obvious development.
The explosion of digital content and data has driven a boom in hard disk sales the world over, with 1TB drives now commonly available in stores at remarkably cheap prices.
Indeed, the end of the gigabyte hard drive era can surely only be a two or three years away at most, when hard drives simply won’t come in gigabyte sizes any more, with 1TB set to become the smallest size available for consumers, not the still rather large capacity it is today.
That said, hundreds of gigabytes is still the norm, and advances such as
Seagate’s “dockable” portable hard drives make life a bit easier for consumers.
Dockable drives aren’t new, of course – Iomega tried them years ago, but in an era when 20GB was big and still expensive. Today’s drives are all hundreds of gigabytes in size, vastly cheaper and available from almost any computer store, unlike Iomega’s earlier dockable disk options which didn’t really take off with any great popularity.
Seagate’s, however, are likely to be much more popular, given that they are “the slimmest” external drives available today, are only 12.5mm high to “fit into a pocket” and yet still come with “all the advanced shock and vibration protection” Seagate says its drives offer.
They can also be plugged into a separately purchasable “dock”, designed to free you of the “hassle of fumbling with cables and locating USB ports” while still being able to plug in a standard USB cable when on the road, sans dock at hand. Seagate are calling the dock a "world's first", and for modern drives, they are - despite Iomega's dock of old.
Pat King, senior vice president of Seagate’s Consumer Solutions Division said: “The first FreeAgent storage solution offering, introduced in 2007, unquestionably made a mark for Seagate in the consumer space, demonstrating that hard drives can be designed to provide a stylish complement to a computing environment. This second-generation of FreeAgent storage solutions takes the extra step of providing easy-to-use technology in a consumer-friendly package.”
So, what sizes does the FreeAgent Go come in, what do they cost, how much is the dock, and what PC, Mac and desktop drives are also available in the new “second generation”?
Please read on to page 2.
