Most netbooks ship with 160GB to 250GB of storage space. Get a pricier, larger laptop and maybe you’ll get a 320GB or 500GB hard drive. But what if you want enough hard disk space to store 120HD videos? Then you might want to look into getting an external hard drive, like say, the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk hard drive, which is now available in 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB varieties.
The 3TB model is the first external hard drive I’m aware of that comes with quite so much storage on one disk. You can pick one up today from Seagate for $250, but I suspect if you wait a little longer you’ll be able to find it for a few bucks off from other retailers.
The hard drive connects to your computer over a USB 2.0 connection, although the Seagate press release mentions the ability to upgrade to Firewire or USB 3.0.
I was not able to find information about what actual HDDs are inside this external drives (neither 2TB version, nor 3TB). I couldn’t even find how many HDDs are inside: 1 or 2.
I called Seagate’s pre-sales support, and the script monkey told me “It’s a proprietary information”.
– But I can open the enclosure and see what’s inside!
– You can do that but it will invalidate the warranty.
That’s idiotic.
I understand that Seagate may want to vary/change what drives they stock inside, but I don’t want to buy a pig in a poke.
Especially since I remember some of the previous external storage devices made by Seagate that had very inefficient/problematic HDDs inside.
Seagate: do the right thing!
Update:
I was able to find that the 2TB version had only 1 HDD inside:
Apparently, the 3TB version will also have a single HDD
It is a lot of space to backup a lot of computers. One would not have to worry about online backup sites and fees when one just backups ones data to this drive. In hard drives, size does matter. 🙂 Since it is a USB drive, it should be – in theory – be used by any computer running any operating system; which is good news, since I use a variety of operating systems. 🙂
Rather terrifying amount of data not to be RAID-ed…
A lot of data to loose in case of a crash, especially taking into account large portion of crashes in the recent high-capacity HDDs.
Even RAIDed HDDs can fail (just observed 3 HDDs failing at the same time in a 10-HDD RAID array).
BTW, 3TB is “back ordered” yet, even at Seagate.