The idea behind Seagate’s GoFlex Satellite drive is awesome — take a 500gb 2.5″ hard drive in a portable enclosure, and add WiFi so the files are accessible to smart phones, tablets, and laptops.
Put kids movies on the drive, hand the brats an iPad and then start your cross country trip. Boom – peace, quite and a crapload of violations of international copyright law.
Seagate claims 5 hours for the device and its fairly reasonable at $200 or so. The only problem is so far the Satellite hasn’t exactly wow-ed customers. Amazon reviewers complain about the awful UI for the iPad app, issues with the WiFi capabilities and configuration, and the device’s speed (users complain that the device stutters with just a single video stream).
This is such an awesome idea, I hope Seagate listens to all the criticism and goes back to the drawing board to put out an improved version of this.
completely agree with the other comments on the poorness of the product. Here is what I have found so far.
1) Does it play movies? Yes… with skipping, stuttering, and freezing from only five feet away on occassion
2) Does it create it’s own wireless network? Yes… but if you use your browser to surf the files and play your movies, when you go back to your normal network… you have a good chance of finding the homepage of your browser hijacked permanently to the goflexsatellite.com homepage. After that… Your browser will only display http 400 Bad Request for your homepage url. Whether you just opened up a new browser or typed the url in by hand. Other url’s come up fine though… very strange. So far the only way their support has gotten mine back being google.com is to reset my browser to its default settings. If you change your homepage to something beside what it was and then reconnect… you may find that both url addresses are now not working when you re-connect back to your regular wifi network. This issue affects multiple types of browsers on multiple Operating Systems and Devices… not just Internet Explorer. I have had Seagate verify this issue on my laptop by letting them remote in to it and see the issue. They could not correct it. They advised me to update my firmware. Yep… right after that my Toshiba Thrive started doing the same thing.
3) Ripping your movies to file to be able to play them? for this price they should include at least a piece of software to do this. Even a trial issue would have been nice.
4) Battery… so far I have found the drive needs to be plugged in if you plan on watching more than one movie or two really short ones.
5) Space? there is plenty of it on the 500 gig drive. that is one thing in its favor… about the only thing I can see though.
Awesome Idea but extrmeely poor implementation, support, and performance bring it down to a poor to fair rating. Hope Seagate works this and any other bugs out of the system. I have to say… I have been buying seagate products for over ten years and I have never been so dissappointed.