Performance
When connecting the drive to the computer, it shows up as a regular external hard drive. Simply run the setup program and it will register the drive and you are on your way.
As you can expect, due to the USB 3.0 nature of this drive, transferring data to the drive is much, much faster than the USB 2.0 Wi-Drive. It is not as big of a deal on the Wi-Drive because you are dealing with, at most, 32GB of data. On the Seagate drive, you can hold as much as 500GB, meaning you can take your entire music or video library with you. That does hold some value, especially on longer airplane flights or just longer trips in general. Tablets and smartphones do not have this much storage capacity, so this is clearly an excellent companion for that.
Connecting to the hard drive is as simple as telling your device to connect to the Seagate wireless acess point.
When referring to space I hear you asking, "What about Micro-SD cards?" Well, you can shuffle around many of these cards in your bag, and it even might be a little cheaper to purchase 500GB worth of those to bring with you, but with the GoFlex Satellite all you have to worry about is managing one device. Plus, there are other benefits to the drive as well.
Just like the Wi-Drive, you can have up to three devices connected to it for streaming media. Family road trip? Everyone in the car can conceivably watch their own media while cruising down the interstate. From a technological standpoint, I am sure the Wi-Drive performs this task better, due to the solid state nature of its storage, but in real-world practical testing, I did not notice any lag or issues. Native apps on all the major platforms make compatibility a breeze. As long as your device can support the media type, the drive will be able to support the media type.
There are times where I could see the Micro-SD card argument winning out. If you were on an airplane and it was a long flight and the GoFlex's battery died, you might have an issue, but I would humbly submit for most people being able to share the media with more than one device would be ideal.
Along with viewing by media type, you can also use a traditional folder viewer, and by looking at the next picture, you can see there is an internal document viewer built in to the app.
