Thin is in, and Seagate has answered that call by launching the thinnest external hard drive on the market. Dubbed the GoFlex Slim, the drive has 320GB of storage and retails for $99.99. The drive measures in at about 9mm, which is about the average overall height of the MacBook Air.

If your computer supports USB 3.0, you’ll be able to take advantage of the faster transfer speeds with the GoFlex Slim. It is also compatible with both the Mac and PC, and includes backup software with the device. For you Apple purists, there is a Mac-only version available, making it an appealing companion for Time Machine.

From where Seagate is going with this drive, its market is pretty obvious: netbooks and ultraportable notebooks. If you’re going with something that small, you’re not going to want a bulky external drive with it — so Seagate sees a natural market for a drive that puts the emphasis on thinness, even though it’s possible to buy a chunkier drive with higher capacity for the same price.

Today’s the last chance to get a shot at one of the five Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Pro hard drives we’re giving away. Here’s how to enter.

Our Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Pro giveway continues–go here to enter.

On Tuesday evening in San Francisco, we threw a party we called SpringThing at a cool art gallery called 12 Gallagher Lane. Our cohost/sponsor was Seagate, which gave demos of its just-announced line of FreeAgent GoFlex external hard drives. The folks in the photo above (by Ken Yeung) all look so attentive because they’re watching the giveaway drawing we did for five GoFlex drives. We can’t recreate the whole nifty SpringThing experience online, but here’s the next best thing: we’re replicate the giveaway drawing.

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(Full disclosure: As I blogged last week, Technologizer is throwing a party called SpringThing tonight in San Francisco. Our sponsor is Seagate, who will be demoing the products I discuss here.)

External hard disks are one of the most universally useful gadgets known to techkind. And they’re all pretty similar: For the most part, differences involve the quantity of gigabytes you get for your money, the industrial design of the case, and maybe the software the manufacturer bundles.  But Seagate has come up with an interesting twist for FreeAgent GoFlex, a new update to all the products in its FreeAgent Go line of portable external drives–it’s making the interface part of the cable, rather than part of the drive.

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A few months ago I reviewed Pogoplug, a gizmo that lets you connect USB drives directly to the Internet for access from anywhere. I said the best thing about it was the slick, simple service that let you get to your files from any browser. Seagate seems to like the Pogoplug service, too: It’s announced DockStar, a dock for its FreeAgent Go portable hard drives that you connect to your router via a Gigabit Ethernet port. Presto–your FreeAgent is on the Internet, along with up to three other drives via the DockStar’s USB ports. It uses PogoPlug’s service, letting you share folders or entire drives full of photos, videos, and other items across the Net–either to the world at large or to specific friends who you grant access.

Here’s what Pogoplug’s service looks like in your browser (this image is a rerun from my earlier review):

The DockStar looks sleeker than PogoPlug’s own bulky wallwart hardware and costs the same–$100. If you’ve got a FreeAgent Go and are intrigued by Pogoplug’s capabilities, this is the one to get.

In separate Pogoplug-related news, the company has announced a new social networking feature that lets you publish photos and videos to Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. The content stays on your hard drive so there are no limits to capacity, resolution, or length, and you can use Pogoplug’s authorization features to turn access to your stuff on and off at any time.

Quick reminder: We’re still collecting your reflections on gadget you used (or use) for schoolwork, and the ones you wish you had (or have).  Share your thoughts by 5pm PT tomorrow and you might win a nifty 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go portable hard drive.

Read what folks have said so far and enter here.

[UPDATE: The contest is over--thanks to everyone who entered. We'll announce a winner shortly; if you have a comment here, you're in the drawing.]

Hey, it’s back-to-school time! I’m just glad I’m not going back to school myself, and I’m kind of amazed that it’s here already–back in the day, I don’t remember school starting until September. But we’re going to celebrate by giving away a snazzy 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go Special Edition portable USB hard drive to a lucky member of the Technologizer community. (No, you don’t need to be a student at the moment to win it.)

The drive is a $169.99 value, has a red aluminum case (as shown at left), and comes with a docking station, and is provided courtesy of Seagate. I certainly would have found it useful in college, when I stored my data on 72KB floppy disks, although I seem to remember cranking out most of my papers on an electric typewriter–at least it had a built-in correction feature.

To enter, respond to this message in the comments and tell us about the gadgets you found (or find) most essential for high school or college–and/or the ones you wish you had but didn’t (or don’t). Please fill out the e-mail address field so we can contact you if you win the FreeAgent–it won’t be displayed publicly, and we won’t use it for anything other than conveying the happy news to you. (If you’re logged in as a WordPress.com user, you won’t have to enter your e-mail address–just make sure that the address associated with your WordPress account is current.)

We’ll close this contest at 5pm PT this Friday, August 21st 2009, choose a winner at random, and notify that person by the following Monday, August 24th. If you’re shy, you can also enter by dropping us a line with your e-mail address using this form.

Your favorite gadget for classwork could be something like one of these…

Or this…

Or this…

Or even this…

Or maybe it’s something weird and unexpected.

Good luck and have fun!

Just in from Seagate: “Seagate has isolated a potential firmware issue in limited number of Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives and related SATA drives based on this product platform, manufactured through December 2008 … Seagate is offering a free firmware upgrade to proactively address those with potentially affected products.  This new firmware upgrade corrects compatibility issues that occurred with the firmware download provided on our support website on Jan. 16.” Customers affected are being urged to check this support page.

The hard drive company, which has seen its share of troubles due to the weakening economy, has another issue to worry about: failing hard drives. Users of its Barracuda 7200.11 desktop hard drive, as well as several other models including the DiamondMax 22 and other drives in the Barracuda line have been experiencing issues.

A bug in the firmware of these drives is causing them to either fail or lock-up. While data is not getting erased, it is rendered inaccessible to the user in some cases. Estimates of a rate of failure have approached 30%, although Seagate argues that it is not anywhere near that.

Seagate will offer free data recovery services to affected users through its i365 subsidiary. It also said it should have a firmware upgrade soon for those drives affected, although it looks like it will not bring back any data lost due to the fault.

More information on the exact cause of the issues may be released later today by the company, some news sources are reporting.

If you are one of the unlucky users having problems, either contact the company through the support website, or call 1-800-SEAGATE.

Hard-drive kingpin Seagate announced a refreshed lineup of FreeAgent external hard drives yesterday. The new models offer all the stuff you’d probably guess they would: more capacity at lower prices with a redone industrial design. The company also introduced what is, as far as I know, the first USB dock ever offered for hard drives–an optional holder for the FreeAgent Go portable drive line that sits on your desk and lets you plug in the drive without futzing with the cable. (It’s $29 and comes with a case for the drive.)

One of the most intriguing things about Seagate’s announcement is this: It’s expanded its FreeAgent offerings with drives designed specifically for Mac users. Smaller companies such as LaCie have catered to Macheads for years, but this is the first time that Seagate has done so. And the fact that a manufacturer as large as Seagate sees a business opportunity in the Mac market is yet another sign of the Mac’s resurgent good health. (It wasn’t all that long ago that big companies were fleeing the Mac, not catering to it.)

Of course, all of Seagate’s drives are Mac-compatible; I’ve used ‘em with both PCs and Macs for years. So how did it make Mac-specific models?

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