Seagate busts out 3TB external hard drive for $250
By Vlad Savov 
posted June 29th 2010 8:18AM
posted June 29th 2010 8:18AM
Seagate Breaks Capacity Ceiling With World's First 3 Terabyte External Desktop Drive
New FreeAgent® GoFlex™ Desk External Drive Packs Unprecedented Amount of Storage for both Mac and PC
SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Putting more terabytes in the hands of consumers worldwide, Seagate (NASDAQ:STX), the leader in hard drives and storage solutions, today announced the world's first 3 Terabyte (TB) external desktop drive. Available immediately, the 3TB FreeAgent® GoFlex™ Desk external hard drive helps to meet the explosive worldwide demand for digital content storage in both the home and the office. With 3TB of capacity people can store up to 120 HD movies, 1,500 video games, thousands of photos or countless hours of digital music.
"Consumer capacity demands are quickly out-pacing the needs of business as people continue to collect high-definition videos, photos and music"
A key addition to the company's recently introduced GoFlex™ family of hard drives, the 3TB GoFlex Desk external drive couples immense capacity with the flexibility to adapt the drive's USB 2.0 interface to a USB 3.0 or FireWire® 800 connection to meet varying performance and transfer speed needs. Consumers can easily create, store and access content from either a Windows® or Mac OS X computer on the GoFlex Desk external drive, thanks to an included NTFS driver for Mac.
"Consumer capacity demands are quickly out-pacing the needs of business as people continue to collect high-definition videos, photos and music," said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of Sales, Marketing and Product Line Management. "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."
A recent report by Parks Associates indicates the average consumer household will see its digital media storage needs grow to nearly 900GB by year-end 2014, driven in large part by video downloads, managed copies of Blu-ray Disc, and increasing use of DVR recording capabilities1. The GoFlex Desk external drive delivers unconstrained2, high-capacity storage and automatic, continuous backup with software file encryption to help keep all data safe and secure3. The standard USB 2.0 interface can be upgraded to USB 3.0 or FireWire® 800 by coupling the drive with the appropriate GoFlex™ desktop adapter to increase file transfer performance by up to 10x for easier copying or sharing of files4.
"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. "Consumers who are active in digital media creation and consumption will witness their digital media storage needs grow nine-fold by 2014, driving the demand for higher capacity, easy-to-use storage solutions."
The GoFlex Desk external drive is compatible with both the Windows® operating system and Mac® computers. Each drive includes an NTFS driver for Mac, which allows the drive to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without reformatting. The NTFS driver is simply installed once on a Mac computer, allowing it to read and write files on a Windows formatted5 drive. Its sleek black, 3.5-inch design sits either vertically or horizontally to accommodate any desktop environment.
The 3TB GoFlex Desk external drive with USB 2.0 adapter can be purchased on Seagate.com and through select retailers for $249.99.
About Seagate
Seagate is the worldwide leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions. Learn more at http://www.seagate.com.
© 2010 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved. Seagate, Seagate Technology, the Wave logo, FreeAgent, and GoFlex are trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. When referring to drive capacity, one gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one thousand billion bytes. Your computer's operating system may use a different standard of measurement and report a lower capacity. In addition, some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions and will not be available for data storage. Quantitative usage examples for various applications are for illustrative purposes. Actual quantities will vary based on various factors, including file size, file format, features, and application software. Actual data rates may vary depending on operating environment and other factors. The export or re-export of hardware or software containing encryption may be regulated by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security (for more information, visit www.bis.doc.gov). Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings or specifications.
1 "Consumer Storage Opportunities," by Kurt Scherf and Pietro Macchiarella, Parks Associates, March 2010.
2 The GoFlex™ Desk external drive has been specially engineered to overcome the Windows HDD limitation of 2.1TB.
3 Included backup software delivered by Memeo and Memeo Premium backup software for Mac.
4 View how the GoFlex family of hard drives works at http://bit.ly/cMVxOP.
5 Reformatting to HFS+ required to use backup software for Mac or Time Machine® software.
@nsfw what all you guys that are replying need to realize, is that hes probably talking about a raid backup solution i.e. two HDDs hooked up xternally?
No eSATA?
@TP for my Bunghole
Oh my god, then don't comment!
Reliability is a big issue - if that goes south your looking at a huge PITA.
This is great, but can we please have it with usb 3.0 connection?
@supamario2008
oh sorry, you can buy with usb 3.0 for additional cost..
Any idea if this thing requires a power supply or is powered by the two USB method?
@MrHashbrown,
Power supply.
@macslut
i figured. i'm avoiding HDDs with power supplies because I know in two years everyone will make fun of me for having 3TB plugged into a wall while they carry around 10TB on their earrings.
@MrHashbrown
+1
@MrHashbrown Are your friends all rich as fuck? earring sized 10TB flash drives will probably not be THAT cheap in 2 yrs
@TP for my Bunghole why are we all saying oh my god!?
trifecta? please, engadget, get a dictionary and/or stop trying to be clever.
Send a link to this article to the geeks in your IT department at work and ask them why your email has a 200MB limit on it. Tell them you will personally pay them $250 to never EVER again get the annoying message that you have to take action to reduce your mailbox size.
(I know there is a lot more involved than just the spindles; I used to design storage subsystems for enterprise-scale systems. That is why I think it is just stupid that disk in that environment costs so frickin' much, especially since these are so cheap.)
@MilesBFree
huh? i like cookies :)
Wow, gonna get that for some external storage goodness!
I just filled my 1TB external, time for a new one and this may be it!
These individual terabytes drives really scare me. I wouldn't mind having this for storage + redundancy (eg. in a Home Server), but using this as a standalone drive? Imagine the grieve if it hard crashed.
SEAGATE RULES! I know this isn't a very articulate way of stating that I like Seagate products, but I really like Seagate products. Maybe HDD isn't a technology of the future, but a Seagate HDD is a product that is likely to be around and fully functional in the future. I've had too many HDD fail on me from the most prominent makers. I've yet to have any Seagate drive fail ever. I've still got some old Seagate drives that refuse to die and a box full of the competition that died long ago. I'm onboard for this one!
In six months or less it'll be less than half that price.
RAID 1 or GTFO. If I'm storing that much data at this point I want redundancy. Which is why I'm going with a RAID 5 SAN this fall. Yes its more. But its also more reliable. I just wish I could find a manufacturer that would store the RAID configuration on the drives so if the controller went poof you could just replace the system and be up and running.
@TP for my Bunghole
OH. EM. GEE.
Anyone know when this will be available?