MY PETITION FOR MORE SPACE

It seemed such a simple desire; I wanted to be able to listen to any of my music collection I wished while wandering far from my home base. For several years, I've been using three of these Archos 500 gb devices, which among them manage to hold every piece of music I've collected since age 12, now in MP3 format, with some room for continued growth. But eventually, as with any rechargeable device with a non-replaceable battery, these beloved devices will die, and Archos doesn't make them any more. Nobody else makes palm-of-the-hand media devices with this much storage capacity.  It appears the consumer electronics market is not worried about people like me with large music collections.  The market is driven by young people who can be content with 64 gb, or collectors who don't mind constantly rearranging the stuff on their ipods and other devices.  I do not want to pay a monthly fee for the constantly growing space I would need for cloud storage.  Why, I wondered, couldn't somebody market a tiny MP3 player that would work off of a portable hard drive.  Maybe somebody has made such a thing, but I have not been able to find it.

But now, to the rescue, comes Seagate, with a different approach to my problem.  I now have a 1 tb Seagate Wireless Plus. This device pairs with your ipad/ipod/android, pretty much any device with wireless.  I imagine many will use these to carry their collections of movies, but it's just what I needed for my music. I was able to get everything on it with a small amount of remaining space, and I'm going to assume that by the time I need more there will be a larger capacity version of this.  I already have a 2 tb drive I carry in my briefcase for data backup, and that is no larger than the wireless plus, so I m confident that I won't have to buy two of these, the way I've had to buy three of the (expensive) Archos players. So now I can rest assured that when I am again stranded overnight at an airport, my entire music collection will be in my briefcase as it is now, and I can simply select what I want and play it via my phone.