Computerworld - Seagate today announced a battery-powered wireless external drive for mobile devices, including those powered by Apple's iOS, such as the iPad.
Seagate's GoFlex Satellite mobile wireless storage, offers up to 500GB of additional storage wirelessly for any mobile device with Wi-Fi access over 802.11 b/g/n.
The GoFlex Satellite drive has a rechargeable lithium polymer battery; mobile devices are connected directly to the drive by use of the free GoFlex Media app -- available now on iTunes and the Apple App Store -- or a Web browser.
The drive's battery has a standby life of up to 25 hours, or in continuous operation -- such as with streaming video -- it has up to five hours of power.
The drive is initially only available for Apple iOS devices, such as: iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. An Android app is expected to be available by this summer, Seagate said.
Seagate's Media Sync software is included with the drive and allows users to download files from a Windows PC or Mac OS X computer, such as music, videos, photos and documents. Media Sync can be configured to only place files on the drive that are compatible with an iOS device.
The drive comes with a USB 3.0 cable, which allows faster downloads of files from a computer. The USB 3.0 cable is also backward compatible with USB 2.0 ports. In addition to the USB 3.0 cable, the GoFlex Satellite drive comes complete with a car charger and a compact wall charger.
GoFlex Satellite is available immediately for preorder from Seagate.com, Amazon and BestBuy.com for a suggested retail price of $199.99. It is scheduled to arrive in Best Buy stores in July 2011.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at 
@lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed 
. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.
Read more about Data Storage in Computerworld's Data Storage Topic Center.
Free Insider Guide
If somebody asked you to do the exact same work over and over again, would you think that was a smart thing to do? Of course not. But that¿s exactly what many of us are doing in our backup environments. more
Copyright © 1994 - 2013 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Computerworld Inc. is prohibited. Computerworld and Computerworld.com and the respective logos are trademarks of International Data Group Inc.
