Seagate today unveiled what it calls the world's first 2.5-in, 1.5TB portable hard disk drive.

The new Seagate 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drive is now shipping in the U.S.

The GoFlex drive comes with a Superspeed USB 3.0 interface cable, which offers data transfer speeds 10x that of USB 2.0 when connected to a USB 3.0 port. For example, a drive using a USB 3.0 connection can transfer a 25GB file in under five minutes versus the 14 minutes it would take using a traditional USB 2.0 drive.

The drive also comes with a bonus movie already on it, Seagate said.

"Today's announcement is a 'triple-crown' of consumer technology," said Darcy Clarkson, vice president of Global Retail Sales and Marketing for Seagate. Darcy was referring to Seagates recent release of a 3TB GoFlex desktop drive and the Momentus XT solid state hybrid drive.

The GoFlex ultra-portable drives are compatible with both the Windows and Mac OS X systems and the drives includes an NTFS driver for Mac, which allows the hard drive to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without reformatting. The NTFS driver must be installed once on the Mac OS X computer, allowing it to read and write files on a Windows formatted drive.

The GoFlex ultra-portable 2.5-in drive is available in capacities of 320GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB.

The 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drive with USB 3.0 adapter can be purchased on Seagate.com and through select retailers for $249.99.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.