Seagate has announced a series of Backup Plus drives aimed at online storage and social networking. The hard drives sync and share files to Facebook and Flickr, with more services covering both areas coming soon. 

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Along with the drives being able to get files from social networks, with the drives logging into Facebook and Flickr, there are more services to come (Dropbox's omission seems like something that should arrive). The software will automatically grab photos from the social networks and support sharing files over the Internet.

The Verge got a hands-on with the drives, and was impressed "with how simple and functional the service is." Users can set up folders to sync and backup automatically, whether choosing a select few or the whole drive of computer when the device is plugged into the computer.

Sharing and saving Facebook photos "was simple and fast, though Facebook's convoluted naming scheme made it a little hard to save photos. Though it's hard to make an external hard drive that qualified as "exciting," the Backup Plus products are certainly solid" according to The Verge.

Seagate previously claimed it offered the record storage in one terabit per square inch, using heat-assisted magnetic recording technology (HAMR). The company uses a laser to heat a portion of the disc so more data can be written than when at the regular temperature, which Seagate also claimed could result in 6TB 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch 2TB drives. There could even be drives, theoretically at least, reaching the size of 60TB (at 10 terabyte per square inch).

Researchers at the university of Singapore produced a density of 3.3 terabytes per inch, though the researchers didn't say the drives were even near final. In terms of when people can expect Seagate's high-capacity drives, it said "later this decade" with the 60TB capacity spanning over the following 10 years. So stay tuned.

The 2.5-inch drives are available now, starting at $119.99 for 500GB of storage and rise to 4TB of storage. There's also Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 support.

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