Thanks to the flexible design, the Seagate&39's GoFlex portable drive can be easily turned into a storage module to be used in a more standard, slot-based application.

LAS VEGAS--You might not remember it, but the Zip drive was arguably the most popular external storage solution during the second half of the 90s. With the initial storage capacity of 100MB (which later increased to up to 750MB) it was a perfect replacement for the floppy drive.

The Zip drive is similar to a floppy drive, with the slot just slightly larger to accommodate the thicker Zip disks.

With the rapid increase of internal hard drives' capacity, though, the Zip drive couldn't keep up, and its popularity started to wane at the turn of the century. By 2005 it was obsolete. It was the time that the portable storage market fell into the hands of external portable drives that came in many different physical shapes, sizes, and types of connectivity, including USB, Firewire, and eSATA.

While external portable drives offer basically the same amount of storage that internal hard drives do, they are a little inconvenient to use, as oftentimes users need to fumble to find the cable or the port on the computer. Also, the external drives require a computer to support its type of connectivity to work. For example a Firewire external hard drive is useless with computer that only has USB ports.

For this reason, Seagate, the maker of hard drives and many portable storage solutions, including the superflexible GoFlex family wants to revive the concept of the Zip drive with its GoFlex storage system.The company announced today its new program to allow third-party companies to incorporate slots on their products to support removable GoFlex external hard drives.