USB 3.1 gives Seagate world's biggest, uber-portable external HDD

Need some external storage for your laptop or tablet and find pen drives don’t offer enough space? Seagate has you covered and you don’t even need to worry about a power socket. The company’s new Innov8, 8TB external hard drive is powered entirely by USB, meaning you can bring a monstrous amount of content or storage space with you, wherever you go.

While there are lots of NAS drives, external hard drives, and large scale storage solutions outside of your main system, most of them require a hard-wire connection to a power socket. Those that don’t are more often than not restricted in size to help retain battery power.

Innov8 takes advantage of the USB 3.1 standard, which offers up to 100w of power to connected devices, to power itself entirely from a single USB port — which also handles all the data transfer requirements.

That not only keeps things to just the one cable, but means that the device can offer a huge storage capacity too. 8TB offers enough space for even the biggest media collections and would be great for a photographer or videographer requiring space for backups as well.

Power and cabling aside, the Innov8 drive comes in an aluminum enclosure, with options for horizontal or vertical mounting, depending on the preference of the user. Built in partnership with consumer electronics maker Huge Design, the enclosure is designed to reflect a bold image, whilst providing the full functionality of a large storage device.

Included with the drive is a suite of Seagate software, including its Dashboard system for one-click, on-demand, and scheduled backups, letting users automatically save copies of their most important files and folders to the external drive to better protect their nearest and dearest digital creations.

The Seagate Innov8 drive will go on sale at the beginning of April priced at $350.