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Must-have Mac accessories

We've covered a few useful Mac accessories lately, so we thought we'd wrap them up in one easy-to-find place. Click here for the full side-by-side run-down. You can also check out the accompanying slide show, if you're into that sort of thing.

Click-through and you'll find our reviews of Mac video adapters from Griffin and Kanex, the latter featuring HDMI input to the 27-inch iMac. We also have write-ups of Seagate's new FreeAgent GoFlex OS-agnotic external hard drive, and an impressive little BassJump from Twelve South, which gives your MacBook and MacBook Pro a bit … Read more

Seagate hybrid hard drive raises perfomance bar

You've probably heard of solid-state drives, such as the Intel X25, but haven't yet purchased one because you can't afford it. Or maybe you're turned off by the limited amount of storage these drives offer.

There's now an alternative that allows you to have high performance and more storage space, without leaving a hole in your wallet. It is the all new hybrid Momentus XT hard drive that Seagate unveiled Monday.

The Momentus XT combines the traditional platter-based storage with solid-state memory, incorporating 4GB of high-speed single-level-cell flash memory and a built-in algorithm, called Active … Read more

Seagate confirms 3TB hard disk on the horizon

You might be impressed with your new 1-terabyte hard drive, but sources at Seagate have confirmed plans to announce a new drive later this year with 3 terabytes of storage space.

According to Thinq.co.uk, Seagate senior product manager Barbara Craig reports that many of today's PCs literally weren't made to handle hard-drive capacities above 2.1TB, a cap set in place by the original DOS standard back in 1980.

Thirty years later, many desktop systems already include hard drives reaching 1TB capacities, leading vendors like Seagate to revisit range limiting, but modern system issues reach deeper … Read more

Seagate GoFlex: Portable storage goes superflexible

For a while, it has seemed impossible to design anything new or innovative when it comes to portable hard drives other than to increase their storage space or add minor features, like an e-label, in the case of the WD My Passport Studio. As it turns out, however, Seagate has been working on another major evolution.

The company announced Tuesday an entirely new line of storage solutions called FreeAgent GoFlex that emphasizes flexibility. The new storage family includes both portable and desktop external drives. Each comes with an array of cable adapters that allow it to quickly switch to difference interfaces. With this new family, the concept of an external hard drive has changed significantly.

Traditionally, an external hard drive has circuit boards with selective built-in ports for different interfaces. These interfaces includes USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA. Low-end or ultraportable drives generally support USB 2.0 only, whereas higher-end and desktop drives tend to support more interfaces. However, all of them share one common shortcoming: they are stuck with whatever ports they come with.

With Seagate's new FreeAgent GoFlex design, an external hard drive is now divided into two parts, the storage and the cable adapter. The storage part is just the hard drive itself with no circuit board. Essentially, it's like any internal SATA hard drive with a protective case. The second part is a small adapter that can be snapped-in tight on the first part to make it a complete external storage solution. The two connect via the standard SATA interface.

An adapter contains the circuit board that determines the functionality of the drive and can be designed to support different interfaces and features. Each FreeAgent GoFlex drive will come with a USB 2.0 adapter of its own and have the capability of working with any other adapters. This way, your new external hard drive can be quickly changed to support any interface or have any added features that Seagate offers.

The best thing about the new snap-in adapter design is that the adapters also work with any internal hard drives.… Read more

Seagate's FreeAgent Theater+ HD adds Netflix streaming

When we reviewed Seagate's FreeAgent Theater+ USB media player last year, we gave it good marks but lamented the fact that it didn't offer the Netflix streaming capabilities of the Roku HD Player. Well, now Seagate's added Netflix streaming via a firmware upgrade, so we'll have to update our review and eliminate that critical sentence.

If you're new to the whole USB media player category, it goes something like this: storage brands like Western Digital, Seagate, and Iomega are looking for ways to tap into the growing number of consumers who have multimedia files stored … Read more

Seagate ships portable drive with movies

Seagate, maker of the FreeAgent Go portable hard drive and the FreeAgent Theater+ player, announced Monday its agreement with Paramount Pictures to preload some of its 500GB FreeAgent Go Portable drives with a library of 21 feature films. This appears to be the first time a storage company has teamed up with a studio to distribute movies in a digital format this way.

The movies include "Star Trek," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "G.I. Joe," "Shooter," "The Hunt for Red October," "Nacho Libre," and "Jimmy … Read more