Seagate trots out 1.5TB portable external drive with USB 3.0
updated 08:30 am EDT, Tue September 21, 2010
Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex portable reaches 1.5TB
Seagate this morning reached another record for storage with a 1.5TB version of the FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-portable drive. The disk is the first 2.5-inch drive to reach the density and still claims a possible edge in speed. It ships with a USB 3.0 cable that gives it a theoretical 5Gbps peak speed, and as a GoFlex drive it can switch to FireWire 800 or another high-speed format.
The cabling is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and effectively gives all owners a free upgrade path if their computers aren't ready. Seagate formats the drive with Windows' NTFS by default but still includes an optional NTFS driver for the Mac for those who need to use it with both platforms.
Only black is available as a color, but the 1.5TB FreeAgent is already available and costs $250 with a preloaded copy of the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie onboard. Every portable GoFlex drive from now on will have the USB 3.0 cable included by default.
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tested the firewire 800 capability
the first test (which I'm guessing was a warm-up), when pitted against the Hitachi G Drive with firewire 800, received 5GB of video from a seagate 7200RPM external drive in 4 min 15 secs (4:15) while the G Drive did 2:02. The second did 2:15 while the G Drive did 2:04. The third did 2:10 while the G Drive did 2:02. While definitely better than USB 2.0, the firewire 800 capability was slower than a different firewire 800 drive (I was thinking it was because firewire 800 is native to the G Drive, but it also has a USB 2.0 dock, so I guess that theory's cancelled out).