Friday 1 April 2016

Seagate's huge capacity external hard disk throws away the power cable

Seagate has revealed the Innov8, a new external hard drive with a whopping capacity 3.5-inch disk inside the enclosure – and it's a drive which doesn't need to be plugged into a power socket.

As the name suggests, the Innov8 offers 8TB of storage, and uses an innovative system called Ignition Boost. Essentially, this means that there's an internal battery present which boosts power during the drive's spin-up, allowing the drive to simply run off the power drawn from the USB 3.1 cable it's hooked up to the computer with.

In other words, USB power might not be enough to get the drive going, but it's plenty enough to keep it running once it warms up, and to keep that internal battery charged.

Phil Yin, principal hardware technologist at Seagate, notes: "Once the drive has warmed up, its power requirement is reduced and the host system is able to recharge the battery."

Aluminium enclosure

So, with the Innov8 you need one less cable, and the enclosure itself looks pretty neat and tidy too – it's fashioned from aluminium, and thus nicely durable as well.

As Seagate notes, with 8TB of space it's possible to fit around 800 HD movies on this drive, 4 million photos or 2 million songs. As a bonus, buyers get 200GB of storage on Microsoft's OneDrive cloud locker.

The Seagate Dashboard software also allows for one-click or scheduled backups.

So how much will this rather nifty external drive set you back? When the Innov8 comes out a little later this month, it will retail at $349 (around £240, AU$455).