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.
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.