Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter Now Available

A few weeks ago at CES 2012, Seagate showcased their GoFlex Thunderbolt adapters. They come in two flavors: the GoFlex Desk Thunderbolt adapter takes 3.5" drives, requires an external power supply, and has two Thunderbolt ports; the GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter is suitable for 2.5" drives, is bus-powered, and has a single Thunderbolt port (i.e. no daisy-chaining).

The GoFlex Desk adapter won't be available until later this month, but Seagate has now updated their accessory page and started shipping the 2.5" GoFlex adapter. It's available from Seagate's online store for $100 (no cable included, so that's another $50), which is quite a lot more than a $15 USB 3.0 enclosure, but at least this is better pricing than the LaCie and Promise solutions we have seen so far. Unfortunately, you are still limited to using Seagate's GoFlex drives, but fortunately they are reasonably priced. By way of comparison, a solution using the GoFlex TB adapter and 1TB GoFlex external would cost around $230, whereas LaCie charges $400 for a similar setup.

UPDATE: It appears that a GoFlex drive is not needed and any 2.5" SATA drive should work.

MacWorld has already received a review unit and run a few basic tests. As you might have expected, Thunderbolt is noticeably faster than USB 2.0 but not much faster than FireWire 800. In terms of raw numbers, USB 2.0 had a maximum throughput of 33.7MB/s while FireWire and Thunderbolt had 70.3MB/s and 81.3MB/s respectively. Obviously, the 500GB 2.5" 5400rpm drive is the bottleneck here—the gap would be a lot bigger with a 3.5" hard drive, or better yet, an SSD.

To be honest, the GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter isn't really worth it unless you plan on using an SSD, which requires you to open the GoFlex enclosure and change the hard drive to an SSD, which is not supported by Seagate and may void your warranty. In the case of regular 2.5" hard drives, you're better off with the GoFlex FireWire 800 adapter ($50 from Seagate's online store and no $50 cable required), assuming you have a Mac with FireWire 800—otherwise USB 2.0 should be sufficient as well. For those not using Mac hardware, Thunderbolt may have more bandwidth, but right now USB 3.0 is a far more economical solution.

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Seagate's GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapters

Finally, we're getting somewhere. After seeing nothing but Thunderbolt storage devices with built in, overpriced drives, Seagate is going to be delivering the first GoFlex docks with Thunderbolt support. Granted you'll still have to use a compatible GoFlex drive, but this is at least a step in the right direction.

There are two models: the GoFlex Desk Thunderbolt adapter and the GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter, priced at $190 and $100 respectively. The GoFlex Desk Thunderbolt adapter will support 3.5" GoFlex Desk drives, while the standard GoFlex adapter will support 2.5" drives. The 2.5" GoFlex is bus powered and only has a single Thunderbolt port, while the GoFlex Desk adapter requires external power and has two Thunderbolt ports. 

The pricing is still a bit high, but Seagate blames the cost of the Thunderbolt controller for that. If true, I hope Intel will deliver a cheaper alternative later this year like we've heard.

The GoFlex Desk Thunderbolt adapter will be available in February, while the GoFlex adapter will be available in two weeks. 

Gallery: Seagate's GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapters

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Understanding Wireless Storage: Kingston Wi-Drive and Seagate GoFlex Satellite

Let me pose a hypothetical situation: say you bought an iPhone or iPad, but cheaped out and got a 16GB model. You’ve got around 10GB worth of music, a few gigs in photos and applications, and you lose the rest to formatting and the OS itself. Basically, you’re maxed on capacity. Day-to-day, this isn’t a huge issue, but let’s say you’re going on vacation and want to have some movies to watch so that you can avoid the customary in-flight chick flick [or replace with whatever type of movies you dislike]. HD movies aren’t storage friendly, they take a solid chunk of storage space, and you don’t want gut your portable music library for the sake of watching a couple of decent movies on the plane. So what do you do?

Fret not, there is now a solution to that dilemma by way of Kingston and Seagate, among others. Both have recently launched wireless storage devices, streaming your media files to your mobile device via WiFi. Now, both of these are non-ideal solutions to a relatively marginal problem, but that’s to be expected in any newly conceived market. With the shift to cloud-based data and media streaming for mobile devices, there is going to be a gradual de-emphasizing of local device storage. We’re already seeing that in a big way with Google’s Cloud OS and Apple’s iCloud service, so wireless storage technologies are going to play an important role in handling media streaming for the future. The two devices we’re looking at today are pricey and aren’t perfect by any means, but they point the way to what the future of local media storage might look like. Interested? Keep reading to find out more.

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Seagate GoFlex Satellite Mobile Wireless Storage Review

Legit Storage Reviews

My 500 GB Apple iPad 2!

Wouldn't it be great to watch any one of many HD videos you own while on that 1 1/2 hour subway ride?  Well now you can.  Seagate recently released the latest addition to their GoFlex line of external hard drives, the Seagate GoFlex Satellite mobile wireless storage system.  The key words here are "mobile" and "wireless". 

This 500GB external HDD is more than just a shell on a 2.5" hard drive supporting USB 3.0 connectivity and external power brick.  This drive has its own battery supply and integrated 802.11n wireless access point all in the same form factor as other external drives in the GoFlex line. 

Since companies like Apple release fixed configuration devices such as the iPad and iPhone Seagate saw a need for people with large libraries of multimedia beyond the maximum 64GB on the largest iPad.  Since all these modern devices support 802.11n, Seagate thought: wireless + hard drive + battery = success.

The only limit is you can only stream to 3 devices at a time and the Lithium Ion batteries provide a maximum of 5 hours of streaming.  Each of the three devices are able to watch the same or different content so it is like your own local cloud storage service.  To supplement this, Seagate provides a wall to USB power plug and 12 volt car plug to USB power so you can take the Goflex on longer trips.

To transfer files onto the GoFlex Satellite, Seagate provides a USB 3.0 connection that is ultra fast giving me over 170MB/s transfer rates.  My 650MB file took mere seconds to copy onto the Satellite.

Seagate has the GoFlex Satellite at an MSRP of $199.99 and due to this being a very new device that is the price we found it at the few retailers that currently carry the GoFlex Satellite mobile wireless device.   I am sure once inventories increase we will see it avaliable in more stores.

Current Seagate GoFlex Satellite pricing:  

The GoFlex Satellite comes with a 3 year warranty from Seagate.

In order to show you all the features, the interface, and set up we did this review as a HD video that you can watch below.

Next Page - Final Thoughts and Conclusions

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Computex 2011: Antec Implements Seagate GoFlex Standard

At this year's CES Seagate announced its intentions to open the GoFlex connector standard, enabling devices and other drivemakers to build products around its GoFlex removable drive standard. We've seen limited public uptake thus far, but at Computex Antec announced its intentions to include a GoFlex drive bay in some of its future cases:

The bay can accept either GoFlex compatible drives or, with the swap of an insert, standard 2.5" SATA drives. With a standard 2.5" drive in place, the bay can also accept another 2.5" drive internally.

The GoFlex or standard SATA drive plug into a PCB backplane which connects to your SATA controller via a standard SATA cable. No word whether or not Antec's solution will support 6Gbps SATA at this point or how well tested it is with SSDs.

Antec expects GoFlex to debut in cases by the end of the year, perhaps on the new Solo II.

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Seagate GoFlex Slim 320GB portable hard disk launched

Seagate has attain something quite extraordinary with the readers Slim GoFlex.The Goflex Slim 2.5-inch exterior hard drive is a mere 9mm thick, manufactured to be as thin, light and moveable as capable of becoming to go together with your laptop or netbook.Depending to Seagate the portable hard drive is the width of a pencil, creating it 38 percent thin than the firm's current Goflex hard drive.

The Seagate GoFlex Slim uses USB 3.0 which can passing files 10x faster than in accordance with tradition USB 2.0. Don’t worry if your computer doesn’t support USB 3.0 since the GoFlex Slim is backward sutable with USB 2.0. You just don’t get the longed for speed of having a USB 3.0.

At only 0.354-inch thick and determining weight at only 160 grams, the GoFlex Slim is one of the meager and lightest transferable drives out there.its speed of 7200 RPM, has so far stated to be all time a happy to use. Testing USB 2.0 passing rate, we saw an have a median of 37.5MBps 27.6MBps and speed read and write correspondingly. As anticipated, the USB 3.0 speed were meaningfully to a greater degree 82.3MBps 102MBps read and write.

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