I find a very unusual yet amusing similarity between my wallet and the hard disk of my laptop! Both run out of space very fast. My wallet tends to get fat, not because of the currency notes I carry in it, but due to the accumulation of pieces of paper I scribbled small notes on or jotted down the name and cell number of the cab driver I hired to go to the airport to receive an ageing aunt, visiting cards of the people I meet during the course of my professional duties, some bank slips and list of grocery I was to pickup from the DDA market. And, of course, not to mention essentials like plastic money, identification and other ?must carry? cards.

Though the hard disk of my laptop doesn?t get fat in the physical sense, it nevertheless runs out of space, rendering the machine to crawl at the snail?s pace. The race between gigabytes of the hard disk and the gigahertz of the processor soars up to a new dimension and no amount of deleting and cleaning helps. The only solution that comes to mind in both the cases is to shift the ?stuff? to some other location.

The stuff from the wallet could be quickly discarded or stored in a drawer for later reference, but the digital contents of the hard disk are precious and have to be transferred to an external hard disk for safe keeping and easy retrieval.

And, as the personal collection of digital contents (videos, photographs, movies, music and other multimedia HD contents) is growing at an explosive rate, the need for not only high capacity, but also high performance storage and back-up devices is becoming a priority.

To meet the challenge, the world leader in hard drives and storage solutions, Seagate, has recently introduced their already popular ?FreeAgent? external hard drive in a new avatar called ?GoFlex? storage solution. These new external drives and accessories introduces a new level of flexibility to traditional USB 2.0 storage. The FreeAgent GoFlex storage includes easy to use, plug-and-play portable and desktop drives, with an array of interchangeable cables and desktop adapters that allow each drive to adapt to the interface of the computer its being used on and also provide interoperability between operating systems like ?Windows? and ?Mac OS-X?.?

The portable variant of this GoFlex drive, that I got for evaluation, is a sleek 1 TB (Tera bytes) capacity device measuring 120mm x 89mmxX 22mm and weighing mere 0.28 kg. The drive appears to be ruggedly built in a hard glossy piano black plastic casing with an exposed SATA port and a power connector, and comes with an interchangeable USB2 cable adapter.

Though I also got two upgrade ?FireWire 800 and eSATA? cables, they are sold separately for Rs 2,700 and Rs 2,000, respectively. There also available is an upgrade ?USB3? cable kit with ?Express card? adopter (to upgrade your laptop or PC) and a transfer rate of 10 times faster than the USB2 for Rs 6,000.

Changing the adapter cable is as simple as pulling one out and plugging another in to the slot.

By simply switching the upgrade cable, enables the USB 2.0 drives to be upgraded to USB 3.0, eSATA or FireWire 800 connections and the ?Auto Back-up? feature transforms the drive into a continuous full-system backup, while leaving the remaining capacity for basic drag-and-drop file transfer. It also enables the external drive to be hooked to a range of media players and docks.

?GoFlex? interface cables are about providing the speed, performance and connectivity needed to support interaction with the digital content. With USB2 cable, the GoFlex performed like any other branded portable hard disk, but with ?FireWire800? cable, the transfer rate jumped to twice as fast.

Though I could not try the ?eSATA? cable for lack of connectivity option, Seagate claims it to perform six times faster than the USB2.

For an MRP of Rs 13,900 (plus the cost of the adopter cable of choice) you can store all your precious digital contents and the system back-up, securely in a portable device and cary it along in your hip pocket if you so desire.