Seagate is taking portable data storage to new heights. The company has unveiled the Backup Plus Fast portable drive, the world's first portable 4TB storage device that has twice the capacity and speed of existing external portable drives, as well as the second generation of the Backup Plus Slim, which is hailed as the world's thinnest 2TB external hard drive.

The Seagate Backup Plus Fast drive can transfer data up to 220Mb/s and can store up to 68,000 hours of music, 1.24 million digital photos, or nearly 1,600 hours of DVD quality movies.

"With Backup Plus FAST, Seagate has taken a very mature product category and has delivered innovative enhancements to address the real world challenges of our customers," said Scott Horn, vice president of global marketing for Seagate. "The performance and capacity of this new portable drive is beyond that of any other external offering to date.  We believe that the Backup Plus FAST drive will be widely adopted by creative professionals as the go-to back up device for the field."

"This is all about the mobile markets and getting in front of the consumer," said Rocky Pimentel, the president of consumers and marketing at Seagate. "We are at a crossroads in our role in storage. We are much more directly involved with consumers, and we have some consumers that can't get enough storage."

The 4TB hard drive is aimed at people who need to back up a lot of files such as field photographers and mobile filmmakers. According to Jim Sugar, veteran National Geographic photographer, having a high-capacity, fast and reliable storage can spell the difference between the success and failure of a project. "Ingesting, editing, managing, and backing up these files, which are often gigabytes in size, represent the crucial steps that make up my digital workflow," he said.

The hard drive is easy to carry along as well. It does not need an external power supply and it can easily fit in a camera bag or backpack with its size of 4.6 inches by 3.2 inches by 0.88 inches.

The Seagate Backup Plus Slim, on the other hand, measures only 12.1 millimeters thick but has the superspeed USB 3.0 interface for fast backup.

Both portable hard drives include the Seagate Dashboard, which now has a mobile backup application that can be used to back up pictures and videos from an iOS or Android mobile device to a drive or a cloud service.

The 4TB Backup Plus Fast sells at $269.99 while the 2TB Backup Plus Slim is available for $149.99.