Seagate announces first 3TB external hard disk

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Posted on 30 Jun 2010 at 10:37

Seagate has launched a 3TB version of its FreeAgent GoFlex Desk external hard disk. The GoFlex range was launched in May, and means that you can pair the drives with a selection of interfaces, USB2, USB3 or FireWire 800, depending on the transfer speed you need.

A USB2 interface is included with the drive, with the USB3 adaptor costing £30 from www.maplin.co.uk. Both adaptors have LEDs to show the remaining free space on the disk.

"Consumer capacity demands are quickly out-pacing the needs of business as people continue to collect high-definition videos, photos and music," said Seagate's Dave Mosley. "Seagate has a tradition of designing products that break into new storage frontiers to meet customer requirements and the 3TB GoFlex Desk external drive is no exception – delivering the highest-capacity storage solution available today."

Although it's possible to create your own 3TB (or larger) external disk using an enclosure or a barebones NAS, the convenience of having a ready-made USB disk is what's important if you have lots of videos, photos, music and documents to back up. With the increasing capacities of hard disks inside PCs and laptops, you could quickly fill a 3TB by backing up just one PC and a laptop.

Plus, the new disk measures just 158x124x44mm, which is considerably smaller than a two- or four-bay NAS. Although Seagate hasn't confirmed which disk is used, we suspect that it's a single 3.5in drive with five 600GB platters. If this proves true, it will be by far the largest capacity 3.5in disk yet, beating existing disks by a full Terabyte. There are various problems putting such a disk inside a PC with a 32-bit operating system, and you can read about these on Thinq.co.uk if you're interested in the details, but it may be a while before we see an internal SATA3 version of this disk.

A recent report by Parks Associates suggests the average household will see its digital media storage needs grow to nearly 900GB by 2014, driven in large part by video downloads, managed copies of Blu-ray Disc, and increasing use of DVR recording capabilities.

"As the definition quality of digital cameras increases, playback devices such as digital photo frames and MP3 players proliferate and the use of the Internet for downloading music and video continues to grow, more files accumulate in the home," said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principle analyst of Parks Associates.

Seagate bundles its Dashboard software with the disk, allowing users to schedule backups and encrypt them for security. Currently, the drive isn't available to buy in the UK, but various retailers are listing it as 'out of stock' for around £190. Assuming this includes the USB2 interface and isn't the bare drive, it works out at a decent 6.3p per gigabyte.

We'll test the disk with the standard USB2 as well as the USB3 interface and bring you a full review as soon as we can.

Author: Jim Martin