Unless you’ve just crawled out from under a rock, it’s hard not to notice the explosion of personal storage and sharing solutions, whether you’re looking at ultraportable hard disks or home media players that connect your content to your TV and your home network. But if you thought that innovation in this space was dying and everyone was making me-too products, think again. With their GoFlex series of products, Seagate’s put a pretty unique spin on the almost genericised portable hard drive, and it’s an idea that’s so simple, one wonders why it hasn’t been done before!

As the name suggests, there’s a strong emphasis on flexibility, and that starts with the hard drive that’s the heart of the system. It looks rather like a standard portable 1 terabyte drive. Turn it around to the business end of things, and where you’d expect to see a USB port, you see an exposed SATA port (sort of like the fast connections that internal hard drives use in some desktops these days).

In the box is an included USB 2.0 cable with an adaptor that plugs into the hard drive, giving you a standard USB drive. Not having a USB 2.0 port mated permanently to the hard disk is where the flexibility really comes from — there are cables for the much faster but less prevalent USB 3.0 and eSATA interfaces, and changing the adaptors is a simple case of pulling one out and clicking another into place.

Plug the right adaptor in, and you have the same hard drive performing at much faster rates, given that you have the right port on your desktop/laptop, that is. Keep in mind many current motherboards do not have powered eSATA or FireWire 800 ports, and since each upgrade cable is extra, do ensure that you have the right ports on your system before splurging.

Another thing I really liked (and it matters much more if you’re a Mac user) is that the drives are formatted for Windows use with the NTFS format, but Seagate’s fortunately provided a MacOS patch that you need to install on your Mac the first time you connect the drive to ensure compatibility.

Now since the connector is taken out of the equation, it was common sense to extend the storage to other uses, so there are a slew of docks that do just that. There’s the GoFlex Desk Desktop adaptor, which lets you mount the disk vertically on your tabletop, and gives you an at-a-glance LED capacity gauge.

Then there’s the GoFlex Net media sharing device, which transforms upto two GoFlex drives (any SATA drives for that matter) or a flash drive into an Internet-connected media sharing device. Consumers can access their content inside and outside their home using just about any device. You do have to have a fast Internet connection to truly see the benefits, and I personally would have preferred wireless capabilities instead of solely depending on a wired network. And finally, the GoFlex TV HD lets you slide the GoFlex drives into an internal bay and plays back all your media onto your TV via the HDMI, component or composite connections.

I like the flexibility that Seagate’s gunning for here — one drive to rule them all. Price and wear-and-tear issues aside, I’m concerned that consumers might get locked into a system that could potentially be discarded by the company that’s pushing it now. Give that a thought before you buy.

Rating: 8/10 Price: GoFlex range - 1TB drive: Rs 13,900, Cables (USB 3.0: Rs 3,000, FireWire800: Rs 2,700, eSATA: Rs 2,000), Desk USB 3.0 adaptor: Rs 3,500, Net: Rs 7,000, TV HD: Rs 12,000

URL: http://bit.ly/c0j20B

Game for fun

Whether the content is ready or not, pretty much every manufacturer is jumping on the 2010 entertainment buzzword — 3D. ViewSonic’s latest launches cater to the home and enterprise segments, while being 3D ready to boot. The 5352 for example can throw a 1024×768 (120Hz) image or video sized up to a 50-in picture from as little as 3ft from the wall. Keen readers will note that this is not full HD (1080p) content resolution, which probably explains the lack of an HDMI input port, so you’ll have to deal with just VGA inputs, S-Video, and composite inputs.

The 6381 marginally improves on the specs with higher brightness and contrast ratio than the 5352. Practically speaking, with both projectors lacking the HDMI port, the only real use I can foresee for this is to use it for gaming. Hook it up with a beefy PC with a recent Nvidia 3D-capable graphics card, and games like Team Fortress 2 really come alive. But please, test this out in the shop before you buy it purely for the 3D gaming novelty value. If you felt ill watching Avatar’s 3D sequences, you may feel the same with the 3D content turned on. Also remember, the graphics card along with Nvidia 3D glasses will add up to the cost of owning these uniquely positioned projectors.

Rating: 7/10

Price: PJD5352: Rs 48,000, PJD6381 Rs 66,399

URL: http://bit.ly/bBTlR6