CNET Product Spotlight: Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-portable
Hello, my name is Dong Ngo and today, we'll take an in-depth look at the FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-portable External Hard Drive from Seagate. Now I have here a regular internal hard drive, one that you can find inside your laptop. It's also the one used in most portable external hard drives. External hard drives connect to a computer via a peripheral port and there are quite a few of them--USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, e-SATA, and so on.
For this reason, a big concern when buying a portable hard drive is the type of connection it supports. This one here, for example, has support for only USB 3.0 and this one here supports both USB 2.0 and FireWire, but how about a drive that supports all types of ports? This is when the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Portable Hard Drive comes into play. All drives in the GoFlex family come in a super flexible design. The drive has two parts. One of them is just the hard drive itself, housing the chassis. Underside, as you can see here, is an opening to the SATA port of the hard drive inside.
The second part is the adaptor which fits and stays firmly connected to the first part to form the portable hard drive. It's the adaptor that determines the type of connection the drive will support. Now, the beauty of this design is the fact that you can make the hard drive work with any type of connection just by swapping out the adaptor. I have here another adaptor that supports FireWire and by swapping out this with this one, I have just changed the drive from supporting USB to supporting FireWire.
This flexibility also allows for using the drive with multiple computers that has a different type of ports and that's not all. Any of these adaptors will work with all of the FreeAgent GoFlex portable drives and they can also work with any internal SATA hard drives. This is a great feature in case you want to quickly pull data off an old hard drive before giving it away. There are many versions in the GoFlex family of portable hard drives and this GoFlex Ultra-portable here is one with the largest capacity, 1.5 terabytes. It is also the first in the family that comes included with USB 3.0 adaptor.
You can of course purchase other adaptors such as one that supports e-SATA or FireWire to go with it. Seagate partnered with Paramount Pictures to preload 21 movie titles with the drive. These are proper titles such as Star Trek, Ghost, Shooter, G.I. Joe, and so on. Only one of these movies is free with the drive, the rest you have to purchase and activate them before you can play it back using a computer or a media player such as the GoFlex TV.
The GoFlex Ultra-portable is the most expensive in the family and costs around $200.00. The rest of the drives cost significantly cheaper depending on the capacity. All of these drives will make a great gift for anyone who needs to expand storage of their laptop or to bring data on the go. Once again, I'm Dong Ngo for CNET and this is the FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-portable External Hard Drive from Seagate.
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