Hands-On With The Seagate GoFlex Slim Hard Drive

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

You can’t really tell how slim the Seagate GoFlex Slim drive really is until you see it next something like a paperback book or another drive. This wee drive is .354 inches (9mm) thick and about four inches long – about the size of a larger cellphone – and it includes a removable port adapter for USB 2.0/3.0 compatibility and an internal 320GB hard drive running at 7200RPM.

Read/write times were fairly speedy on this one – 25 MB/s write and 30 MB/s read using a simple command-line test in USB 2.0 mode – and this takes into consideration that you need to use Paragon’s NTFS add-on to use the drive in Mac/PC mode (you can easily format the drive into any native format but you risk losing the included backup software (which you probably don’t want to use anyway)).

The drive costs a mere $99 and could be a handy and useful replacement for any number of thumbdrives that litter your bag or briefcase. At less than 30 cents per gigabtye – and as slim as this thing really is – it’s an excellent replacement for small albiet lower-density flash media. Check out a few more pictures below but generally it’s an interesting aesthetic and space-saving move for Seagate.

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