IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 131

through the same physical connection
that are used for the data transfer. They
might also have an internal power
source, such as a battery, and use Wi-Fi
to allow a connection between the laptop
and the external storage. Let us look at
some of the devices on the market that
can provide external storage for laptops
or even tablets and phones.

EXTERNAL STORAGE FOR
MOBILE APPLICATIONS
There are several devices on the market
that provide external storage for mobile
devices. Let us look at some of them.
The thinnest high-capacity external
storage device available, the Seagate
Seven, is a 2.5-in external HDD that is
7-mm thick, 178 g, and provides storage
capacity up to 500 GB. The Seagate 7
uses the USB 3.0 interface. Although
not the cheapest storage product in
terms of US$/TB (MRSP is about
US$100), it does provide a lot of storage
capacity in a thin form factor. Seagate

(a)

(b)
FIGuRE 2. (a) The Seagate Seven Mobile
HDD. (b) The Toshiba Canvio Basic 3 TB
Mobile HDD.

also offers its Backup Plus drives, which
include 200 GB of cloud storage from
OneDrive by Microsoft in addition to up
to 4 TB of internal storage.
The Toshiba Canvio Basics and Connect 2.5-in external HDD offers a much
thicker product but with storage capacity
up to 3 TB. Figure 2 shows the Canvio
Basic 2.5-in HDD. The 5,400-RPM product has a USB 3.0 interface, with data
rates up to 5 Gb/s. The 2- and 3-TB versions are 20.5 mm thick to accommodate
the number of disks in the drive. This is
the HDD with areal densities of about
1.1 Tbpsi (until recently the highest areal
density in the world).
The Samsung portable T1 solid-state
USB drive (see Figure 3) provides a
very small and lightweight solid-state
portable storage alternative (71.0 × 9.2 ×
53.2 mm and 30 g), offering 250 GB,
500 GB, and 1 TB storage capacity. The
device uses Samsung's 32-layer, triplelevel cell (TLC) V-NAND (3-D NAND).
This allows higher storage capacity due
to the 3-D NAND structure as well as
the use of TLC cells.
Figure 4 shows the SanDisk iXpand
flash drive, designed for the iPhone and
iPad. The device was created to transfer
photos and videos from an iPhone or
iPad to a PC or Mac computer. The
available capacities are up to 128 GB,
and it includes a flexible connector that
allows for connecting directly to an
iPhone or iPad without first removing
the protective case.
USB 3.0 supports up to 5 Gb/s data
rates, but the Thunderbolt 2 interface
supports up to 10 Gb/s. Solid-state storage using flash memory has data rates
that can use this high-speed interface.
There are a few Thunderbolt mobile
external storage products. Figure 5
shows the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt
250 GB external SSD. In addition to
the Thunderbolt interface, this product
also has a USB 3.0 interface.
There are several products that
offer a mobile network attached storage device (NAS) using a Wi-Fi connection. Among these is the Canvio
Connect 2.5-inch drive with storage
capacities up to 3 TB (this is the Wi-Fi
version of the Canvio Basic 2.5-in
drive described earlier).

FIGuRE 3. The Samsung portable T1
solid-state USB drive.

FIGuRE 4. The SanDisk iXpand flash drive.

FIGuRE 5. The LaCie 250 GB Thunderbolt
mobile external SSD.

FIGuRE 6. The Seagate Wireless Plus
mobile Wi-Fi HDD.

october 2015

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IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015