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

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Seagate has introduced the GoFlex Satellite (http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/external-hard-drive/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.

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.

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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 (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Seagate+-+GoFlex+Satellite+500GB+External+USB+3.0/USB+2.0+Portable+Hard+Drive+-+Black/2740208.p?id=1218349814541&skuId=2740208&st=goflex%20satellite&cp=1&lp=1) for $199.



Article Link: GoFlex Satellite Lets You Access 500GB of Movies from Your iPad/iPhone (https://www.macrumors.com/2011/05/16/goflex-satellite-lets-you-access-500gb-of-movies-from-your-ipadiphone/)

I am really looking foward to this. Planning on carrying my entire 200GB itunes music collection, mounting the drive in my car and using my ipad as a front end (mounted in place of the head unit). Would be a kickass car stereo upgrade.

I only have 3 concerns. First is that this drive doesnt integrate the music library into the ipod app on the ipad(not sure if apple even allows this yet), forcing you to use the seagate app to access the drive. Second is that the seagate app doesnt support multitasking. Meaning if i exit the app, the music stops. Third, once connected to the drive via wifi, there appears no way to access the internet via 3G.

In spite of that, i still really want this drive. Been wanting to integrate the ipad into my car stereo for ages and ive finally found a way to do it

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

Tony

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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