It's a glorious time for storage, as we're recalibrating from gigabytes to terabytes, now even for personal drives at a cost coming under $100. The Seagate GoFlex Desk External Drive brings desktop drives to 4 TB, and includes the GoFlex Storage System with interchangeable cables and desktop adapters so the same drive can work with different interfaces (see previous post).
But what about more portable drives, to cram lots 'o bytes into a handheld device that fits in your bag to go?
No problem -- the Seagate GoFlex Portable Drive offers up to a wonderful 1.5 TB of storage for only around $155. With the same GoFlex design, you can use additional adapters to swap it between USB 3.0 / USB 2.0, FireWire 800, and/or powered eSATA.
Or if you're looking more to maximize transfer speed over these fast interfaces, rather than maximum storage, the recently-introduced Seagate GoFlex Turbo Portable Drive features a 7200 RPM high performance drive for up to 40% faster file transfers than standard 5400 RPM drives. It's available with up to 750 GB for $139.
The Turbo drives also bundle SafetyNet Data Recovery Services free for 2 years, to rescue damaged or deleted files, whether by accessing your drive over the Internet, or by shipping it in for service.
I've been successfully using several of these drives to manage large amounts of data on the road. That 1.5 TB works well for both for building up a sizable archive of files as a backup disk, and for leaving plenty of headroom to add more files on an active disk.
See my Portable Storage Gallery for more on portable drives, from USB keys to desktop drives.
And see my Holiday Gadgets 2011: Portable and Wireless feature for more on storage and other holiday goodies.
Find the Seagate GoFlex Portable Drive on Amazon.com