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Portable hard disks are almost always pocket-sized, but few are quite as diminutive as Seagate’s latest; the GoFlex Slim is a pencil-thin 9mm thick, almost half the height of many other 2½in external hard drives. It weighs a barely noticeable 160g and easily slips into a pocket, which makes it ideal for taking your data on the move.
It’s common for small external hard disks to sacrifice performance in order to shrink in size, but that isn’t the case here. Because it combines a high-speed 7,200RPM spindle with USB3 connectivity, we were expecting good results from our file transfer tests. Thankfully we weren’t disappointed; large files written at 92.5MB/s and read at 139MB/s. Small files read speeds were an equally impressive 58.1MB/s but the disk could only manage a disappointing 13.3MB/s when writing them.
Like all GoFlex products, the interface connector can be removed and replaced with an alternative. There currently aren’t any connectors specifically designed for the Slim, but we tried connectors designed for larger disks and they all worked fine.
The GoFlex Slim looks fantastic thanks to an anodised aluminium finish. Its tiny dimensions have more in common with a USB memory stick than an external hard disk; it’s just as easy to carry around but offers a significantly greater capacity. Performance was also impressive. The only problem is the price. Despite having only 320GB of storage space, the Slim costs more than most 500GB disks. Unless you must have the slimmest disk around, there are better choice around.
