GoFlex Satellite Drive Firmware Update Arriving March 19th

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Posted By: Dan Cohen

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At CES this past January, Judie and I had a chance to meet with Seagate and see their new and updated offerings. We saw, and later reviewed, their GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter. It is now a key part of my iMac setup. We also learned about a coming update to the GoFlex Satellite drive we had reviewed previously. As we wrote at the time,

We were glad to see that an update is on the way, and that it will bring some needed improvements. Among them …

– The update will double the battery life. That is a big deal since this is a mobile device.

– It will allow you to have up to eight people connected at a time instead of three. Of course the more people connected to it the slower the performance may be but the point remains that up to eight people can now connect.

– In addition, the update solves the WiFi connection issue by alloying the device to connect to the internet and you to connect other devices to the network THROUGH the Satellite. This also means that, theoretically, if you were paying for a connection you could pay once for the Satellite to connect and then the others could connect through it and by-pass the need for additional charges.

The best news of all? ALL devices will get the update. Original devices will get a firmware update in early March and all new products will ship with the updated firmware. We really love it when companies don’t leave first generation hardware behind!

Well good news just came to our inboxes.

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Seagate has released the firmware upgrade for the GoFlex Satellite and it will, as promised, improve battery life, lift the restriction on the number of devices that can connect to the drive at one time, and most importantly, provide a pass through for Internet access when connected to the drive.

To my mind the most important thing here is the increased battery life which, with one connected device, goes from 5 to 7 hours.

The upgrade is a free download available for GoFlex Satellites drives in the field and will be widely available to the public on March 19th.

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About the Author

Dan Cohen
Having a father who was heavily involved in early laser and fiber-optical research, Dan grew up surrounded by technology and gadgets. Dan’s father brought home one of the very first video games when he was young and Dan remembers seeing a “pre-release” touchtone phone. (When he asked his father what the “#” and “*” buttons were his dad said, “Some day, far in the future, we’ll have some use for them.”) Technology seemed to be in Dan’s blood but at some point he took a different path and ended up in the clergy. His passion for technology and gadgets never left him. Dan is married to Raina Goldberg who is also an avid user of Apple products. They live in New Jersey with their golden doodle Nava.

1 Comment on "GoFlex Satellite Drive Firmware Update Arriving March 19th"

  1. Andrew Whittall | March 18, 2012 at 5:09 am |

    Seagate missed the mark with the WiFi. A better implementation would be to let the device JOIN an existing network, rather than act as a repeater. The Elgato Tivizen works this way and can remember several networks. This way your iOS device always connects to the same network, instead of sometimes the Satellite, sometimes not. Is there a way to prioritise wifi networks on iOS?

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