Seagate Launches Drone-Friendly DJI Fly Drive

Earlier this year, at CES, Seagate and the drone manufacturer DJI (official name: Dà-Ji?ng Innovations Science and Technology Co., Ltd), announced they would collaborate on an upcoming product launch that would make copying data from drone flights simpler and more efficient. Now we know what that collaboration looks like — it’s a 2TB external hard drive with an external bumper and a built-in SD card slot.

Despite its name, the Fly Drive doesn’t actually fly. Instead, it’s meant to offer an immediate means of copying data directly from the SD card on the drone itself to the 2TB storage device. The hard drive is also USB-C compatible (the cord apparently fits into the shock-absorbing bumper, which is a nifty touch). The Fly Drive is compatible with both Thunderbolt and USB 3.1 (no word on whether the interface is Gen 1 or Gen 2) and the integrated microSD hub supports UHS-II transfer speeds. That’s as fast as microSD transfer speeds get for now, though a newer version of the standard, UHS-III, did launch in February of this year.

The integrated microSD card slot could make the Fly Drive popular with more than just drone enthusiasts. The laptop industry tends to follow where Apple leads, and Cupertino made rather a big deal of junking everything but USB-C ports late last year. If you’re not interested in carrying around a bunch of dongles, a new Fly Drive with an integrated port is a useful alternative.

Seagate plans to ship the Fly Drive sometime this summer; it will cost $119.95. You’re definitely paying a premium for the hardware. A conventional portable external 2TB HDD is $70 at Newegg, and the USB-C port isn’t worth an additional $50 on its own. For that amount of money, it’s too bad Seagate didn’t push the envelope a little further. Given that the company is already targeting drone enthusiasts, specifically, we would’ve liked to see something a bit more out-of-the-box, like a portable HDD with a small integrated Li-ion battery and automatic backup function that would copy the contents of an SD card to the hard drive when in the field without any need for a laptop at all.

As an added bonus, the Seagate DJI Fly Drive will also come with a two-month subscription to Adobe Premiere Pro CC. While software subscription services tend to be poor deals if you normally use previous software versions for any length of time rather than upgrading every single year, a two-month trial subscription could be a useful way to take Premiere Pro for a test-drive and see if it’s the kind of application you might want to use.

Now read: Best drone picks for every budget