Seagate Duet portable hard drive syncs with Amazon Drive

Seagate has introduced a new portable hard drive called Duet, one that features Amazon branding on the case and supports syncing with Amazon Drive, the company's cloud storage service. The drive itself has a 1TB capacity, and it backs up whatever data you put on it to Amazon Drive, which can then be accessed using its related mobile app. Not an Amazon customer? You'll get free cloud storage to get you started.

The idea here is that a physical hard drive is a great way to store content, giving you immediate offline access and making it easier to control who has access to the data itself. However, accessing that data when you're not physically home — or if you're on something like a tablet — is tricky. That's where the cloud storage comes in.

Seagate Duet gives buyers a free year of Amazon Drive Unlimited Storage for backing up their data to the cloud. If you already have an Amazon account, you'll log in with your Amazon credentials and then drag and drop files onto the Duet hard drive. From there, the content will be synced to the cloud

Files located on a smartphone or tablet, meanwhile, can be backed up using the Amazon Drive mobile app, which can also be used to access those files later on. According to Seagate, the mobile app will provide access to videos and photos that have been saved to the Duet drive.

You can pre-order the Seagate Duet hard drive starting today from Amazon for $99.99 USD. As mentioned, the drive includes a year's access to unlimited Amazon Drive storage (if you're new to Amazon Drive, that is), which itself would ordinarily cost $59.99 USD.