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Seagate's GoFlex drive goes superslim

Seagate announces a new superslim member of its GoFlex family of portable drives.

Dong Ngo SF Labs Manager, Editor / Reviews
CNET editor Dong Ngo has been involved with technology since 2000, starting with testing gadgets and writing code for CNET Labs' benchmarks. He now manages CNET San Francisco Labs, reviews 3D printers, networking/storage devices, and also writes about other topics from online security to new gadgets and how technology impacts the life of people around the world.
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The new superslim GoFlex portable drive from Seagate.
The new superslim GoFlex portable drive from Seagate. Dong Ngo/CNET

LAS VEGAS--Seagate made a huge splash in the pond of external hard drives during 2010 with the GoFlex family, which includes the GoFlex Desk and the GoFlex Ultra-portable. These new drives don't just look good and offer high capacities; they are also superflexible, allowing for use of virtually any type of connectivity via interchangeable adapters.

Seagate GoFlex Slim (photos)

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The company today announced a new member of this GoFlex family of portable hard drives: the GoFlex Slim, which is arguably the slimmest portable drive that's based on the 2.5-inch internal hard drive. The new drive is just 9 millimeters thin, about 38 percent slimmer than the current GoFlex ultraportable drives. It's just slightly larger than the iPhone 4.

The slim design does come with some shortcomings, however. According to Seagate, the new drive will come with just 320GB of storage space, compared with the top 1.5GB of the GoFlex Ultra-portable. Other than that, it also comes equipped with a USB 3.0 interface and works with both Windows and Mac platforms, though it's formatted in Windows' NTFS file system.

By default, Macs can only read drives formatted using NTFS, but the GoFlex drives come with software included that allows Macs to both read and write on NTFS. This is a great bonus, as originally a drive needed to be formatted using the FAT32 file system, which is much more limited than NTFS, to work this way.

Designwise, the new thin GoFlex drive comes in a black, brushed aluminum enclosure with tuxedo-black lining, making it the most stylish of the GoFlex drives. The drive will be available sometime with Sprint. It's currently unclear how much it will cost.