Nowadays, external hard drives and flash memory sticks are the most used methods for transferring data between different computers. Even if the two are currently competing they actually are very different solutions. While hard drives use the old magnetic storage and have a cheaper price per GB, the NAND flash memories have the supremacy in power consumption and data transfer speeds. However, as the price per GB is much higher than for magnetic storage products, high capacity solutions that use flash memory are rare and extremely expensive.

On the other hand the high storage market belongs to the hard drives and Seagate has an impressive line-up in this area. Featuring a beautiful elegant casing and weighting less than a pound, Seagate’s models allow safe transportation and storage all kind of information, from music and videos to important data files. As for the storage capacity, I really believe that the available products that offer 40 to 160 GB will prove enough for (almost) anyone. It is not just capacity that impresses, but speed too, as the devices are compatible with the USB 2.0 standard and thus support speeds of up to 480 Mbps. Two other factors contribute to the speed of this device; the 5400 rpm (revolutions per minute) speeds of the disks inside the device and the 8 MB of cache memory used for rapidly accessing data.
All in all the new devices seem to be a good choice for those who need access to their data at anytime and anywhere, but if you don’t need such high storage capacities there is always the solution of using memory sticks or even CD/DVDs.

For more information visit Seagate’s webpage.

Filed under Portable Media, Storage