Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex USB 3.0 1.5TB Hard Drive review

Portable Hard Drives aren’t the sexiest of gadgets, but until we manage to move everything into the cloud (which is slowly becoming a Dropbox-based reality) physical hard drives are with us. I don’t use USB keys anymore as it’s pretty easy to move small documents around from my desktop to my smartphone or my tablet (for the second time in this paragraph I have to give a shout out to Dropbox?). But media files are a little different. Since the advent of HD (and HD encoded matroksa files) file sizes of over 7GB or more are not uncommon.

The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex is the world’s first (according to Seagate) 1.5TB ultraportable hard drive. The same size as most other portable hard drives, the FreeAgent GoFlex gives you a massive amount of potential in your pocket. If you use RAW files or HD or general creative media work … or even if you just use a lot of high quality media whilst on the go, then these drives are amazingly useful and 1.5TB is actually a decent amount of storage for semi-professional use.

Even more exciting, the GoFlex has a USB 3.0 connection. A drive using a USB 3.0 connection can transfer a 25GB file in under five minutes versus the 14 minutes it would take using a traditional USB 2.0 drive Based on an average transfer rate of 30MBs for USB 2.0 and 100MB for USB 3.0. Although if you have a Mac, feel free to stare wistfully at your USB 2.0 ports and rue The Steve’s decision to forbid you the joys of USB 3.0. And try not to think about the lack of BluRay either. However, the magic of the GoFlex system means you can swap out the leads for *whatever* lead you want. And by whatever, I mean firewire 800 or e-sata. But that is still amazing.

All 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drives are compatible with both the Windows® operating system and Mac® OS X computers. Each drive includes an NTFS driver for Mac, which allows the hard drive to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without reformatting. The NTFS driver is simply installed once on the Mac® OS X computer, allowing it to read and write files on a Windows formatted3 drive.

The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex USB 3.0 1.5TB hard drive is amazing. Get one.