Seagate outs first 1.5TB 2.5-inch portable hard drive

Matthew DeCarlo

Posts: 5,271   +104

Seagate has expanded its range of FreeAgent GoFlex portable hard drives, adding the industry's first 1.5TB external 2.5-inch HDD -- a form factor that has been stuck at 1TB since Western Digital launched its 1TB Scorpio Blue last July. Offering some insight on just how large 1.5TB is, Seagate says its new drive can hold up to 60 HD movies or what amounts to years of music.

Along with being today's most capacious 2.5-incher, the new FreeAgent GoFlex model is among the handful currently available with the latest USB specification. The drive can utilize USB 3.0, but unfortunately, the press release only cites theoretical transfer rates and omits real world figures.

It comes formatted with NTFS, features backup and encryption software, measures 120 x 89 x 22mm (4.71 x 3.51 x 0.87in), weighs 280g (0.62lbs). You can currently purchase the 1.5TB FreeAgent GoFlex (only in black if that matters at all) through Seagate's online store for $229.99.

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Ugh, Id just hate to have 1.5TB of stuff to wind up just gone because if a drive failure... I only see a sense in smaller portable drives as all my backups are in a mirrored raid. (and thats only 500GB itself)

I'd also like to know the real world figures... what's USB 3.0 speeds average real world figure anyways?
 
I imagine this is one of the 12.5mm 2.5" drives, so it won't work in a lot of notebooks.

I understand the argument of having such a large drive fail, and thus you lose a lot of data at once. But really, thats how it has always been. If you want a large drive and not have it fail you have to have redundancy, and that becomes expensive. But in reality, I think on average these new drives aren't going to fail any more often than a small drive, so its no more of a risk failing, its just the amount of loss.

So really, if you don't need 1.5TB then just stick with more than one of a smaller drive. But for some of us, being able to have more than one large drive is wanted/necessary.
 
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