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Everything in IT storage keeps getting smaller, lighter and more capacious, and Seagate’s latest portable drive is no exception to this trend.
Seagate on April 5 started shipping its newest GoFlex Slim portable hard drive, a 2.5-inch HDD which is a mere 9mm in thickness and 3.25 inches-by-5 inches in size. The 320GB version retails for $100.
They are so thin that two or three of these could easily slip into a front pocket; the USB 3.0 connector that comes with it now seems oversized.
The GoFlex Slim, originally announced at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics show in January, is roughly the width of a pencil. It features a 7200RPM drive and a USB 3.0 interface that can accelerate transfer speeds up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0, Seagate said.
While the faster drive speed takes full advantage of the plug-and-play USB 3.0 interface, it maintains compatibility with older USB 2.0 ports.
The GoFlex Slim portable drive also features interchangeable use between Windows and MacOS computers without formatting or performance loss, Seagate said. The drive comes equipped with backup software for automatic and continuous backups; it also can encrypt files and folders.
Seagate said it will make available in May 2011 a version of the GoFlex Slim specifically for use with Mac OS X devices.
The GoFlex Slim for Mac will be HFS+ formatted to make it compatible with Apple Time Machine backup software. It will maintain the ability to work across both Windows and Mac OS X computers, Seagate said.
Seagate’s GoFlex Slim is literally the width of a standard pencil.