Data Backup Digest

Three months ago, Seagate and drone company DJI announced a partnership to develop storage solutions for images and videos recorded on a drone. Now their first product is hitting the market at some point this summer: The Fly Drive.

DJI are one of the leading companies in the drone market, with their products receiving praise for the ability to capture great video, strong battery life and being light to carry. Seagate is an American storage company that has been around in some form since 1979.

The Fly Drive has a 2TB capacity, which is enough for over 60 hours of 4K video at 30fps. While you might be imagining a drive that attaches to the back of the drone, despite its name the Fly Drive doesn’t do any flying. Instead, the drone feeds the footage back to the drive and can go for an average of 250 flights without needing wiping.

This is a drive that has been designed to go on the road. While an SSD would have been the best solution, since it doesn’t contain any moving parts, selling a 2TB SSD drive is cost prohibitive. Instead, Seagate have used a durable outer shell to stop the drive getting damaged out and about, and to provide shock resistance.

Inside the casing is a 2.5-inch BarraCuda drive, with integrated microSD card slot in the drone. The drive then has a USB 3.1 Type C interface to hook up to your computer to transfer the data.

The Fly Drive comes with two months’ free access to Adobe Premiere Pro CC video editing software, because what’s the point of recording all that drone footage if you aren’t going to edit it into a sweet montage? Of course, you’ll need to pay for the software once that trial expires, so be sure to cancel it if you don’t want to shell out.

In the US, the Fly Drive will cost $119.99 for the 2TB model. Pricing in other markets has yet to be announced.

While the Fly Drive has come about through DJI and Seagate’s partnership, it could be used as a solution to backup any data from a microSD card. For example, you could use it for your camera, smartphone or a drone made by a different manufacturer.

This technology isn’t exactly new. Photographers have had similar products targeted at them for a long time, which explains why Seagate could produce this so quickly after their partnership was announced.

Whether it’ll be beneficial to the market remains to seen. It’ll certainly be good for those people who are travelling and away from their computers for a long time, allowing them to capture large amounts of data without needing to clear out the drive, but for everyone else it may be an unnecessary addition.

It’ll be interesting to see what other products the partnership between Seagate and DJI brings. While it’s likely we’ll see solutions like this in varying capacities, it’d be good to see their two teams work together to bring about some innovation in the drone storage market.