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.

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.

Courtesy of Seagate, we have five 500GB FreeAgent GoFlex Pro drives up for grabs. They’re compatible with both Windows PCs and Macs, and we’ll give them away in a random drawing.

There are three ways to enter:

1. Add a comment to this post talking about the most important data you’ve got–whether it’s essential documents, beloved photos, your music library, or something else. Please use a real e-mail address so we can notify you if you win. (It won’t be displayed, and we won’t use it for any other purpose.)
2. Go to Twitter and tweet your thoughts about your most important data. Use the hashtag #goflex so we can find your entry, and follow me (@harrymccracken) so we can direct message you if you win.
3. Go to the Technologizer page on Facebook and add your important-data thoughts as a comment on this post.

We’ll accept entries until 5pm PT on Wednesday, May 12th, and will conduct a random drawing and notify winners by Friday, May 14th. Please enter only once. Good luck, and have fun. Oh, and there are more SpringThing photos here and 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.

With standard external drives, the interface–be it USB, FireWire, or something else–is built into the drive. With FreeAgent Go, it’s in a lump connected to the drive end of the cable. Connect the cable and lump to the drive, and the whole thing looks like a standard external drive with a cable attached.

What’s the benefit? Because GoFlex drives have no built-in interface, they’re not USB 2.0 drives or USB 3.0 drives or FireWire drives or eSATA drives–they’re just drives. And by swapping the cable, you can give one drive different interfaces as needed. For instance, you can use a GoFlex with a USB 2.0 cable now, then upgrade to a much USB 3.0 one when you get a PC with 3.0 ports. Ot if you’ve got a Windows PC and a Mac, you can use a GoFlex as a USB 2.0 drive with the Windows system, then switch to the faster FireWire 800 for the Mac.

(With the GoFlex line’s introduction, Seagate is giving up on its separate line of Mac drives. Instead, it’s shipping drives formatted in Windows’ NTFS format, with a driver that lets Macs read from and write to them. The approach should work well if you want to connect one drive to both Windows PCs and Macs, but for use with Apple’s Time Machine backup system you’ll need to reformat the drive as HFS+, a file system which Windows doesn’t support.)

If you pop the cable and connector off a GoFlex drive, the drive looks kind of  like a hard-disk cartridge with the hard disk’s standard edge connector exposed–such as the cartridges that HP and other companies have sold for many years. Seagate has visions of everything from PCs to DVRs sporting slots that you can pop GoFlex drives into. For now, the company is leveraging the concept in the GoFlex TV HD,  a $129.99 networked media player that connects to HDTVs (similar to the existing FreeAgent Theater HD) and the $99.99 GoFlex Net, which lets you access stuff stored on it from any Internet-connected PC (similar to the existing DockStar).

With the FreeAgent launch, Seagate is updating all the drives and all the accessories it sells. FreeAgent GoFlex 5400rpm drives come with a USB 2.0 cable and are available in 320GB (list $99.99), 500GB ($139.99), 750GB ($179.99), and 1TB ($229) versions. GoFlex Pro drives run at 7200rpm (a speed increase that actually means something with USB 3.0) and come with encryption and “premium” backup software but no interface cable; they’re available in 500GB ($159.99) and 750GB ($199.99) versions. Seagate’s interface cables are available in USB 2.0 ($19.99), USB 3.0 ($29.99), eSata ($19.99), and FireWire 800 ($39.99) versions; there’s also an AutoBackup cable (offering functionality similar to Seagate’s existing Replica drive) for $29.99 and a dock with a capacity gauge (also $29.99).

On a cost-per-gigabyte basis, these list prices are high compared to street prices for both other manufacturers’ drives and Seagate’s existing FreeAgent drives–for instance, you can get Western Digital’s My Passport SE drive in a 750GB version for around $120. But Seagate says that retailers will likely offer discounted pricing. And with the USB 3.0 cable option and the Pro drives’ 7200rpm speed, the new GoFlexes have the potential to feel fast and up-to-date a few years from now, after today’s typical USB 2.0 drives are products of the past.

Oh, and there are also GoFlex Desk desktop drives (larger ,larger-capacity cheaper models that need to be plugged into AC): 1TB for $139.99 and 2TB for $229.99.

Assuming that these GoFlex products never wind up as the cheapest disks on the store shelf, I’ll be intrigued to see how well they do–I guess we’ll know based on whether Seagate sticks with the idea from now on–and how frequently folks end up swapping interfaces. It’s the future-proofing aspect that appeals most to me…

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.

Read what folks have said so far and enter here.

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!

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.