back to article Seagate launches non-flying disk drive for drones

Fly Drive is not about car rental any more, not in our version of disk world at any rate. It's a Seagate disk drive for DJI drones and comes just three months after Seagate and drone-maker DJI announced a partnership to develop storage for drone-recorded images and videos. Back then we thought it blindingly obvious it was …

  1. Peter Galbavy

    No mention of battery life, unless it's not battery powered in which case it's a non starter. I have both a WD Passport Wireless (slow SD) and a Pro (much faster SD reader) and I'm happy with both for this job. And the Pro also runs Plex natively without any hackery required.

    1. mateifb

      Not self powered

      Unfortunately it is not self powered. It is similar to any other portable hard drives. The only difference is the integrated micro SD reader. At least this review http://www.firstquadcopter.com/reviews/seagate-dji-fly-drive-review/ says that is pretty fast. It features about 130MB/s read/write speed.

  2. Lee D Silver badge

    Would be much easier to just slap in a wireless chip into the drone so you can just clone it to your laptop or even phone, and then you can just carry a wireless-connected drive of your choice rather than partner up with a terrible drive manufacturer.

    As it says, 250 flights of an hour each. You aren't going to do all that without being near a computer at some point.

    Years ago I bought a Wifi SD card, which has 32Gb of storage and also shares it over a Wifi network of your choice when it's full (e.g. to a phone or to a real network). Amazing technology for something that just works like an SD card to the recording device. I bought it for astrophotography, so I didn't have to touch the camera mounted to the telescope in order to access the images, but I'm sure they could come up with something sensible, much cheaper than a £200 drive, that basically only does what an £80 drive and a USB adaptor does.

    And I can get a Samsung 256 GB EVO Plus MicroSDXC for £133. You're not telling me I'd need more than that. That's "only" 50 flights of 4K video by their same estimations.

    1. TRT Silver badge

      I bought it for astrophotography, so I didn't have to touch the camera...

      Exactly this.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The wireless chip in the drone wouldn't be able to stream ~500MB/s data though. The real-time feed that drones send to the controllers is nowhere near as high quality as that captured to the on-board storage, predominantly for bandwidth reasons - it's why they have onboard storage. Plus the occasional dropped frame is fine from a controller perspective, not from a recorded footage perspective.

      Although I'm not sure how this product is specialised to drones - there have been similar devices to this targeted at photographers for years.

      1. AndyS

        > Although I'm not sure how this product is specialised to drones - there have been similar devices to this targeted at photographers for years

        Look at the picture - it's branded dji. That alone is probably the whole point, as it allows dji to sell them along side their drones.

    3. druck Silver badge

      As it says, 250 flights of an hour each. You aren't going to do all that without being near a computer at some point.

      Or as it actually says; 250 flights of less than 15 minutes, equating to 60 hours.

  3. Sureo

    " two months of complimentary access to Adobe Premiere Pro CC "

    Then it's $20 or $50 per month after (depending on what you subscribe to). No thanks.

  4. Brian Miller
    Joke

    Where's my flying NAS?

    Hey, Seagate, where's my flying NAS? If the Navy can launch the USS Akron (ZRS-4), then we can have real storage in the clouds! So where is it? A disk on the ground is exactly that, and we need fully cloudy storage.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Battery life killer for drone.

    Unless this is an SSD, a spinning drive would consume WAY too much juice to be useful for flying. Battery life is only about 15-20 minutes already with a drone, adding weight and features shortens it even more. High end drones like the Inspire 2, technically already have drives like this, but at least are NVMe already and designed for hot swap and plug directly into an adapter for the PC.

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