• Seagate GoFlex Upgrade Cables

    Seagate GoFlex Upgrade Cables

    Jayesh Limaye, Jul 21, 2010 1700 hrs IST

    Instantly upgrade the interface of your portable drive

    Flexibility to choose interface, easy to install, works with any laptop hard drive, good performance

    Expensive, eSATA cable works only with powered eSATA ports

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Portable hard drives are used everywhere today and they come with so many different interfaces - USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire and eSATA. Many a times you happen to have a computer system that has an interface incompatible with the one on the portable hard drive. And if you happen to have a compatible interface such as USB 2.0, which is universal, you also happen to have a faster interface and wished your portable drive would have had that interface to make things happen faster.

Seagate seems to have taken note of this thinking and brought out a truly innovative product, which allows you to simply change the interface of your portable drive to the one which suits you the best. This product series is the GoFlex Upgrade Cable that comes in different flavors - USB 2.0, USB 3.0, eSATA, FireWire 800 and even something called a Backup cable. These cables let you instantly upgrade the interface of the same drive to better suit your computer. We have with us the USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and eSATA Upgrade Cables, which we will be testing today.

Features

The GoFlex Upgrade Cables are supposed to be able to work with the Freeagent GoFlex and GoFlex Pro ultra-portable drives from Seagate. Here are some of the pictures of how the cables actually look.



USB 2.0 Upgrade cable



USB 3.0 Upgrade cable

Notice the blue plastic in the USB port that distinguishes this cable from the USB 2.0 cable, which has white plastic.



eSATA Upgrade cable


The eSATA Upgrade cable does not have any provision for a separate power supply to drive the drive. This means it draws power from the eSATA port and will therefore require a powered eSATA port such as those available on most laptops, but almost rare in desktops.

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Tag keywords
Seagate GoFlex Upgrade Cables USB 2.0 USB 3.0 FireWire eSATA portable hard drive



Discussion Board
(2) Comments
apoorv
,bangalore, on Dec 29, 2010 02:38 PM
I dont understand when usb 3.0 is backward comparable with usb 2.0 why give usb 2.0 adapter as default when 3.0 can work for both 3.0 and 2.0
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Kapil
,Gwalior, on Jun 12, 2011 11:38 PM
you're absolutely right mate. There's no sense in it. Why pay 1500 for usb 2.0 cable when eventually u'll be buying usb 3.0 or eSata cable. There should be an option to choose the default cable that we get, albeit with a price difference, when we're buying the drive.
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