GoFlex Satellite Lets You Access 500GB of Movies from Your iPad/iPhone

FutureStan said:

You get this 500 GB hard drive for $200.

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I just bought a 3tb drive for $149. I'd say the Seagate is slightly overpriced, wifi or not.

I like it. It would be really handy at home and the dedicated apps make it that much better. Thanks for the heads up on this.

That is pretty sweet. Hopefully, with time, they'll have cheaper models. A 100gb model would be nice.

Very nice - I like!

Not worried about the price, it's only moderately more expensive hardware-wise but it will open up some interesting uses for me.

GoFlex Satellite Lets You Access 500GB of Movies from Your iPad/iPhone







Seagate has introduced the GoFlex Satellite portable hard drive for use with iOS devices such as the iPad and iPhone. The external hard drive includes a Wi-Fi interface as well as the ability to stream photos and movies to your iOS device.

Rather than rely on a buffered stream from a distant provider, GoFlex Satellite mobile storage wirelessly serves up media content as a local attached storage for up to three devices at the same time. With a stand-by battery life of up to 25 hours, the powerful lithium polymer battery delivers up to 5 hours of continuously streaming video.

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The expected use case is for you to fill up your drive with movies and media prior to travel and to use the device as a local wireless server. Movies can be streamed over any browser, but there is also an iOS-specific app that lets you interface the media. It supports streaming to up to 3 devices at once.



It comes with 500GB of storage, offers USB connectivity to your Mac, and 25 hours of standby and 5 hours of battery life. It's presently available from Amazon and BestBuy.com for $199.


Article Link: GoFlex Satellite Lets You Access 500GB of Movies from Your iPad/iPhone

I really like it and may pick one up.

Looks like it's available for pre-order at this point (Best Buy and Seagate's site list it as pre-order, Amazon says 3-5 weeks).

Very cool, though. Might solve my issue of wanting to have all my music available in my car but not having an iPod Classic / iPad with enough storage. Be interested to see how well this works.

not seeing the point here. I don't use my iPad as a storage device. the limited space is managed by moving content in and out via iTunes.

My Mac Mini has a 320gb HD and I use a 2Tb drive for all my music, movies, etc.

Why would you need 500gb to back up a device that only can store 16gb at one time? Isn't your iTunes library on a laptop or desktop with more storage?

Can you CHOOSE to attach it to a Mac with USB if you want (to charge it, or continue watching a second movie)? I was just thinking that might make more sense, given the battery life is only 5 hours.

patp said:

not seeing the point here. I don't use my iPad as a storage device. the limited space is managed by moving content in and out via iTunes.

My Mac Mini has a 320gb HD and I use a 2Tb drive for all my music, movies, etc.

Why would you need 500gb to back up a device that only can store 16gb at one time? Isn't your iTunes library on a laptop or desktop with more storage?

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I thinks mainly for portability when you're not home. Cuz how u going to carry your Mac with u?

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8G4)

I wonder if you could setup port forwarding to access it on the go or something

Any idea of you could stream Apple DRM protected video from this onto an iPad? Probably not.

Tony

emodro said:

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8G4)

I wonder if you could setup port forwarding to access it on the go or something

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That. Would. Be. Awesome.

Tones2 said:

Any idea of you could stream Apple DRM protected video from this onto an iPad? Probably not.

Tony

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No idea but I don't necessarily see why not. Streaming content from the drive wouldn't need anything special. And if they use the MediaPlayer kit in iOS then it should work fine I'd imagine.

nwcs said:

No idea but I don't necessarily see why not. Streaming content from the drive wouldn't need anything special. And if they use the MediaPlayer kit in iOS then it should work fine I'd imagine.

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No current "air" streamer apps that run server side software from your Mac and stream on the iPhone / iPad (i.e. Air Video and the like) can stream DRM protected video. I think it can only be decoded by Apple apps (iPod / Safari). Would this be any different?

Tony

patp said:

not seeing the point here. I don't use my iPad as a storage device. the limited space is managed by moving content in and out via iTunes.

My Mac Mini has a 320gb HD and I use a 2Tb drive for all my music, movies, etc.

Why would you need 500gb to back up a device that only can store 16gb at one time? Isn't your iTunes library on a laptop or desktop with more storage?

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Maybe because as a streaming device it suddenly adds 500GB of video content to your iPad?

Is this device a wifi network, or does it connect to a wifi network. IOW, does this show up in the list of networks as something to connect to?

Because, if so, that means you have no internet access on your iPad while it's connected to this drive, because you can't be connected to 2 wifi networks at once, and also you can't use 3G and WiFi data at the same time.

aindik said:

Is this device a wifi network, or does it connect to a wifi network. IOW, does this show up in the list of networks as something to connect to?

Because, if so, that means you have no internet access on your iPad while it's connected to this drive, because you can't be connected to 2 wifi networks at once, and also you can't use 3G and WiFi data at the same time.

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If I'm sitting on a plane, I can easily change networks when I want to surf vs. watch content. Not a big deal.

I really like this product, and might just buy one. This seriously has nice implications for anywhere where you can't access cloud-based storage: think airplane trips, or car rides for those of us with iPads who don't want to spend the significant money to tether an iPhone or mobile hotspot.

In the past, I have tried to go through and select a portion of my library to sync up to my iPhone/iPad, but I've always ended up being disappointed in the end that I end up wanting something that I haven't synced (my music/video library is considerably larger than any iPad/iPhone can hold).

poloponies said:

Maybe because as a streaming device it suddenly adds 500GB of video content to your iPad?

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You can stream video from that hd to an iPad? I thought it was about storage only?

mcdj said:

I just bought a 3tb drive for $149. I'd say the Seagate is slightly overpriced, wifi or not.

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Your 3TB drive is a full size drive designed for a desktop computer. The drive in this thing is a laptop sized hard drive designed for running on battery power. Hardly a comparison there, the 3TB drive is not available in a small form factor... The largest drive right now is 750 gigs (or maybe they have hit 1tb).... But those larger drives use more power, so probably wouldn't work well with this.

Ssd

I'd like to see Seagate make an SSD version of this... It would be a LOT more expensive, maybe $500 for a 256 gig model and $350 for a 120 gig model, BUT... I bet they could get 10 hours of battery life instead of 5.

Tones2 said:

Any idea of you could stream Apple DRM protected video from this onto an iPad? Probably not.

Tony

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Actually, my educated guess is "yes". As long the computer you sync your iPad to is authorized to play the content, then it should play just fine.

I stream DRM-protected media from my iMac to my iPad via my WIFI via HTTP using a third party tool (the name escapes me right now). I started using it before iOS supported Home Sharing, and I still use it because Home Sharing on my iPad doesn't work.