Whether the world’s slimmest or simply Seagate’s trimmest, the GoFlex Slim packs an awful lot into a pencil-thin package.
Take 9 millimeters of black anodized metal casing, drop in a 320GB Momentus notebook/netbook hard drive, crank the rotations-per-minute up to 7,200 (conventional desktop speeds), and you get less than six ounces of totable storage–enough to hold most users’ entire MP3 music or home photo collections.
Seagate says its newest GoFlex drive is 38 percent thinner than prior ultraportables and measures about 5-inches (long) by 3 inches (wide) by less than half-an-inch deep. It supports ultra-high-speed transfers with USB 3.0 (connected to a like-wired USB 3.0 device), powers off an included detachable USB cable, ships pre-formatted with either NTFS (Windows) or HFS+ (Mac) file systems, includes Seagate’s MEMEO backup and synchronization software, and works on either a Mac or Windows PC (if you want immediate cross-compatibility, you’ll want to reformat to Microsoft’s broadly compatible FAT32 file system).
And costs? $100. That’s not awful, but it won’t compete with Seagate’s own GoFlex Pro 500GB, which costs anywhere from “about the same” to $10 more.
So yes, as with so much “style-first” technology these days, you’ll pay a little extra coin for bragging rights.