External hard drives can be great for Personal computer backup and carrying your data around with you, but I can think of two non-PC uses straightaway for the pair of drives launched by Seagate on Monday.
They both reside under my TV, as do two other possible destinations for external storage that are less friendly to hard drive manufacturers.
Seagate’s FreeAgent XTreme is a fast large-capacity drive, costing $300 for a 1.5 terabyte version. I could plug that into the USB port on my satellite DVR receiver. Its internal drive fills up in no time with all the high-definition movies and Television shows I record, so the top model of the XTreme would lift my total storage capacity to 2 terabytes or 220 hours of HD recording.
The xTreme has more storage than Seagate’s Showcase external drive, brought out specifically for DVRs in 500Gb and 1Tb versions.
Then there’s the FreeAgent Go, a small sleek portable drive in 250Gb ($120), 320Gb ($150) and 500Gb ($240) sizes that looks very Apple-like in design and comes with its own dock in the Mac version. It would work very well swapped between the PC and the new Slingcatcher, now available and on my Christmas wishlist.
One useful attribute of the Slingcatcher is that it allows you to transfer photos, videos and music onto an external drive and then plug it into the Slingcatcher attached to your TV. You can then use its remote control and appealing interface to watch or listen to your media on the massive screen.
The two other devices under my TV where I would struggle to increase the storage, despite them having the same USB connections, are the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games consoles.
I can understand why Sony and Microsoft have not gone out of their way to make extra storage plug and play - it messes with their pricing strategy.
The common tactic has been to keep a console’s price constant by offering more storage for the same price. Storage prices are constantly falling away so this move appears to offer fresh value while maintaining margins.
The ability to add easily a cheap external hard drive would be disruptive for this model.
“They’ve controlled that pretty tightly because they want a portion of the opportunity,” Brian Dexheimer, president of Seagate’s Consumer Solutions Division, told me.
“Microsoft wants you to purchase their 120Gb drive accessory that attaches to the side of the Xbox.”
“I think it’s going to be very hard for them to keep those models closed because storage lifecycles move at a very different pace to device lifecycles,” he added.
He reckoned a 20Gb Xbox drive would fill up in six months with all of the HD content now available through Xbox Live, but the console would be expected to last for five to seven years.
Mr Dexheimer said that while he expected Microsoft and Sony’s attitudes to change, consumers could be turned off by too many external hard drives under their TVs linked to consoles, DVRs and other devices.
“You really want to solve that problem with the network,” he said.
“Our view is storage will move to become a seamless expandable asset that you’ll want to get access to enjoy your power supply - it’s just there when you need it and if you need more your storage bill would go up at the end of the month. But until we reach that point, people will want to solve these problems in piecemeal ways.”
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