Seagate in partnership with Amazon presented a portable hard drive Seagate Duet. The drive is now available for pre-order in the US. However, it is expected to reach the UK market soon as well.
The new device has a black plastic body and equipped with USB 3.0 interface. USB 3.0 provides sufficient power to the device, so Seagate Duet does not require an additional power adaptor. The capacity of the drive is 1TB. Inside, however, is a standard 2.5-inch hard drive. So the speed of data transfer is probably not that great.
What special about this device is that it has additional functionality. It is synchronisation with Amazon Drive, online cloud storage service. In this way, user created two copies of the file simultaneously, one on the drive and another on Amazon’s servers. That way you can be always sure that you not going to lose the data whatever happens. Moreover, storing the data in the cloud allows one to access it from anywhere in the world providing one has access to the Internet. A dedicated app, Amazon Drive Mobile App, allows one to access the data from a mobile device.
This is close to ideal data storage solution for an average user. As we indefatigably warn people who visit our London computer repair service, always backup your data. And ideally, it should be done on two different media.