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Seagate GoFlex Slim Portable Drive Review

Reviewed by: Anthony Garland
Reviewed on: April 6th, 2011 Not all that long ago, Seagate released the GoFlex brand, which instantly revolutionized the portable storage niche with its ability to change the interface with almost no effort. Then it pushed the limits of 2.5" capacity with their release of 1.5TB mammoth and the competition trembled. Well, the company is back again and this time, they have their sights firmly placed on changing our expectations of how small a portable drive can be with their all new Seagate GoFlex Slim. Today, I'm going to see exactly what makes this portable drive special and whether or not it is worth your hard earned dollars!

Design - Thin is In
As soon as I took the GoFlex Slim out of its packaging, I knew that Seagate had truly made something unique as this is one amazingly thin drive! In fact, it is not thicker than a Super Talent 32GB Express Duo, yet packs in 10 times the amount of space. Even the adapter has gone on a diet and is down right svelte. With that being said, it may have gotten smaller, but the magic of the GoFlex system is still in full effect as standard cables will work on it and vice versa... though doing so would look odd!

While the thickness of the GoFlex Slim has been slimmed down to an amazing 9mm, the width and depth have not changed. This is for the simple reason that while there was some room to manoeuvre on the thickness of the GoFlex devices, there is only so small you can make a 2.5" hard drive based device! To be blunt, this 9mm thickness is quite an accomplishment as the Slim's case really isn't that much bigger than a bare 2.5" hard drive! In fact, it is 0.5mm thinner than most 2.5" form factor internal hard drives which are 9.5mm thick. To put this further in perspective, the GoFlex Slim is thinner than most pens and is even thinner than my "Every Day Carry" Gerber skeletonised folding knife! Now that is thin!

How Seagate was able to do this was by making a custom 2.5" hard drive which is only a single platter high. To be precise, the GoFlex Slim uses the 7mm thick Momentus Thin, model number ST320LT007-9ZV142. By trimming the casing of the hard drive housed within it down to the absolute minimum, Seagate was in turn able to make the Slim's all black external case that much thinner as well. Compared to the 1TB or 1.5TB FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-portable, the Slim model really is thin. Of course, the downside to making things as small as possible is the fact that the storage capacity does suffer. In this instance, it is "only" 320GB of space. This should be enough for most consumers needs, but it does make the capacity seem as puny as the dimensions when compared against external devices which are over four and a half times large in capacity!

From top to bottom: 320GB Slim, 500GB Goflex & 1.5TB GoFlex Portable.

As with all things in life, the trade-off for making such a thin drive means less capacity for your hundred dollars. However, helping to offset this lack of cavernous capacity is the fact that the GoFlex Slim is a 7200-rpm device! This means that while it may not have the same capacity as the bigger siblings we have looked at, it should be much more peppier as those devices are all 5400rpm drives! This difference in speed should really make as noticeable impact on small file transfer speeds as it does in ease of transportation. Heck, this device really is going to be the road warrior's best friend as it will easily slip into your jacket pocket or anywhere else you would usually grab a flash drive.

From left to right: 1.5TB GoFlex, 500GB GoFlex Portable, Slim 320GB.

Backup Software
On the software side of things, the Slim drive has also gotten an upgrade. While the Seagate Dashboard is basically the same as previous GoFlex models, the software is not. To be precise, previous versions came pre-loaded with Memeo Backup Basic which while a decent software solution was a tad on... well, the basic end of the spectrum. Compare and contrast this with the Thin's premium version and you instantly can see the difference.

To be blunt, the Memeo Backup Premium software solution is pretty much near everything you could ask for in a backup and restore solution. You can not only backup to different devices (and encrypt the data), but you can also setup complex backup schedules that are completely hands off and automated. Want Memeo to backup all your documents and pictures every night? It's as easy as doing a custom job and telling it to do so!

Not only is this program powerful, it is also user-friendly. If you want to do basic things, it will have you equally covered and do so in a very intuitive and easy to learn manner. To be honest, the only feature missing from Memeo is the ability to make bootable media for disaster recovery. If it had this, I may have just been tempted to use it instead of Acronis for my disaster aversion & recovery "go to" program. The fact that Memeo comes free of charge with the Seagate GoFlex Slim is simply astounding as this really is almost too good of a program to include for "free". Color me impressed.

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