Product Category: Portable storage device

Manufacturer: Seagate

Where to Buy: Amazon.com (affiliate)

Price: $90 to $170 USD depending on storage size of hard drive, $99 for the Net Media device, $130 for the GoFlex TV HD, and $20 to $40 for the different cable options

System Requirements: Windows® 7, Windows Vista®, Windows® XP (32-bit & 64-bit) operating system or Mac® OS X operating system 10.4.9 or higher and a USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 800, or eSATA port.

Specifications: The GoFlex Ultraportable drive: Height - 111mm (4.39 in), width - 83mm (3.19 in), length - 14mm (.57 in), and weight - 150g (.33 lb).

Pros:

• Wide variety of attachments and accessories that actually extend the capabilites of the drive;
• The GoFlex Net Media Sharing Device is an easy and fun way to share your files on the network;
• Using the optional cable attachments can greatly increase the performance of the drive.

Cons:

• User Interface for the GoFlex TV HD Media Player needs work;
• Taking advantage of all the accessories the product has to offer can get expensive.

Summary: Seagate has a family of portable storage devices and accessories that are aimed at keeping up with technology, making networking your storage devices easy, and delivering the media content on that storage to the place it is most useful, your TV. I got the chance to test and review these products to see if they can deliver what they promise. Was I disappointed or did they succeed at what they were designed for? Read on to find out.

A New Way to Combat Future Obsolescence

I'm an absolute pack rat. I keep just about everything that I get my hands on and I have problems throwing anything away. This is evident in my real life as well as my “virtual life”. I still have every file I have ever created, even going back to the days when I used computers that most people either haven’t heard of or have forgotten about by now.

So as you can imagine, storage space has always been a big deal to me. Over the years I have invested heavily in floppy disks and hard drives. I jumped on the Iomega bandwagon when they introduced the Zip drive, and I thought the Jazz drive was the greatest thing since sliced bread. The hard drives of the time were adequate but they lacked portability and the floppy was starting on its long journey to obsolescence. Time marches on and now we find ourselves flooded with different portable storage options ranging from USB flash drives to hard drives measured in terabytes and everything in between. So now it becomes important for a storage device to stand out in other ways or just get lost in the flood of other products out there. Seagate tries to do this with their FreeAgent GoFlex Ultraportable line of hard drives and peripherals.

The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultraportable line of external hard drives range in size from 320 GB to 1 TB. The drives are small enough to fit in a pocket and have capacities equivalent to the internal hard drives found in desktop systems. But really, this is nothing new; there are plenty of other manufacturers out there that make a similar product. So what makes the FreeAgent GoFlex Ultraportable drives special? It’s the interchangeable cables they can utilize to work with different technologies. Out of the box the drive can support your standard everyday USB 2.0 port, but say you have a computer which has ports that support some of the newer technologies out there and you would like to take advantage of this. Well with the right cable, you can.

The GoFlex drives can support USB 3.0, FireWire 800, and eSATA with the correct cable attachment. Why might you want to invest more of your hard earned cash in a different cable when your system already supports USB 2.0? Well the answer to that is speed and future compatibility. USB 2.0 is still pretty much the standard for now, but as always with technology, times are changing, and at some point in the future, USB 2.0 might be as relevant as those old ZIP disks and drive that I invested so much money into a long time ago. That being said though, for most daily types of file use, USB 2.0 is still fine, but if you are into video editing or managing extremely large files, technologies like FireWire 800, eSATA, and USB 3.0 are definitely worth looking into.

Packaging: A Way to Inspire Confidence

Right away I was impressed with the retail packaging of the device. Some people might wonder how relevant packaging is, since most likely it is just going to be thrown away, but as Apple well knows, packaging is key to your initial impression of a product and its quality. A well dressed product promotes confidence in the consumer. Realistically this should not be the case, but in general we are visually oriented and first impressions are very important to us. They can often influence a purchase decision over similar products if you are having problems deciding. The box that the GoFlex drive comes in is as visually attractive as it is well built, which in turn made the unpacking of the product that much more of an enjoyable experience.

The box itself contains the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultraportable Drive, a matching USB 2.0 cable attachment, and a quick start guide. The drive is available in a range of sizes and it also comes in a range of colors. Interestingly, the size of the drives affects the choice of colors you can get it in. All the drives come in black, but the 320 and 500 GB models have more choices, with the 500 GB model having the most. The 320 GB model comes in either black or silver, while the 500 GB comes in black, red, silver, or blue. For this review I was sent the 500 GB silver model. The USB 2.0 attachment that came with the drive is silver, but the other cable attachments I received to test with were all black. When I checked the website about this, I found that the extra cable attachments only come in black. Since all the other cable attachments and accessories were packaged pretty much the same way as the drive, I won't go into any more detail on unpacking everything for this review.

Figure 1: An example of Seagate's packaging for the FreeAgent GoFlex family of products. Attractive and well built.