I’ve written before about the absolute criticality of backing up your files on a regular basis, both locally and remote. Simply put, photos are irreplaceable whether their your own or a client’s: hard drives, be they in Macs or Windows, eventually fail; bad guys steal stuff; fires, flooding, spilled coffee, drops onto concrete floors, lost luggage, accidental folder deletion, improper formatting, puking babies, power surges, vengeful exes, stray bullets (yes this is real, when I worked at Dell a laptop came back in for repair with a bullet embedded in the screen)…

All these things happen, and if you don’t have your photos backed up onto a separate hard drive, and preferable also to a second physical location or in the cloud, you are at risk of losing images that you cannot replace.

Backing up got a little bit faster though – USB 3.0 was announced at CES in January, and Seagate is now shipping one of the first USB 3.0 portable external hard drives. It even comes with an add-in PC card for today’s laptops that don’t yet have USB 3.0 built in. The drive inside is a 7,200 rpm drive (like most desktop drives) as opposed to the 5,400 rpm drives in most portable external storage, and throughput is fast – up to 5 Gbps. What does that mean in real-world terms? According to cnet, about twice as fast as the fastest current-generation external drives.

Image via CNET reviews

Side note for Mac users, the drive comes formatted for Windows and the the included backup software and drivers for the add-in card, for now, are Windows only. Price is listed at $179.

Read the full review here.