Pencil-Thin Portable HDD Shipped By Seagate

Everything in IT storage keeps getting smaller, lighter and more capacious and Seagate’s latest portable drive is no exception to this trend. The company has started shipping its GoFlex Slim portable hard drive, a 2.5-inch HDD in a casing which measures a mere 9mm (0.35 inches) thick and 83mm (3.25 inches) by 127mm (5 inches).

The 320GB version retails for £79.99 and the drives are so thin that two or three of these could easily slip into a front pocket. The thin profile makes the USB 3.0 connector look positively oversized.

Windows And Mac Compatible

The thickness of the GoFlex Slim, originally announced at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics show in January, is roughly the width of a pencil. It features a 7200RPM drive and a USB 3.0 interface that can accelerate transfer speeds up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0. While the faster drive speed takes full advantage of the plug-and-play USB 3.0 interface, it maintains compatibility with older USB port.

The GoFlex Slim portable drive also features interchangeable use between Windows and MacOS computers without formatting or performance loss, Seagate said. The drive comes equipped with backup software for automatic and continuous backups. It can also encrypt files and folders.

Seagate said it will make a version of the GoFlex Slim specifically for use with Mac OS X devices available in May 2011. The GoFlex Slim for Mac will be HFS+ formatted to make it compatible with Apple Time Machine backup software. It will maintain the ability to work across both  Windows and Mac OS X computers, Seagate said.