Seagate adds Turbo to its GoFlex family
Seagate announces a new drive in its GoFlex family of portable hard drives, the GoFlex Turbo.
If you've been in the market for a portable hard drive, you've surely heard of Seagate's GoFlex family. These portable drives offer not just storage space and portability, but also flexibility that others can't even come close to.
Today, the company adds another member to that series, the
The new portable drive is similar, if not basically the same, as other drives in the family, such as the
I got a hold of one a couple of days ago, and in our testing, the drive was indeed faster than previous models via USB 3.0. It wasn't the fastest we've seen, however, and when used with USB 2.0, the drive could use some improving. To make up for this, Seagate, for the first time, bundles with the drive's two-year warranty its SafetyNet data recovery services, similar to what ioSafe has for its disaster-proof external hard drives.
Seagate's data recovery service, however, offers only one free data recovery attempt, regardless of the cause, be it due to human error or drive affect. This doesn't mean the company is responsible for the integrity of the data you store on the Turbo, however. Nor does it mean Seagate can guarantee the recovery of lost data. So make sure you don't use it to hold the only copy of your important information.
Similar to the rest of the GoFlex family, the GoFlex Turbo drive comes in two parts: the hard drive and the adapter. The hard drive is a 2.5-inch high-speed SATA internal hard drive housed in a plastic chassis. At one side, the chassis has a small opening to reveal the internal hard drive's standard SATA female connector. The adapter part has a male SATA connector and a Mini-USB 3.0 port. These two parts fit tightly to form the GoFlex Turbo external hard drive. With this flexible design, the drive can support any connection type besides the included USB 3.0, such as FireWire or eSATA, simply by using other adapters.
The new GoFlex Turbo Performance drive is available now in 500GB an 750GB capacities that are estimated to cost $120 and $140, respectively. These are high prices compared with similar drives on the market, such as the
To find out more about how the drive performs and its other features, check out CNET's