With its sleek design, slim profile and elegant features, perhaps it's no wonder that Seagate's FreeAgent family of external hard drives is so popular with many of the world's top fashion and commercial photographers.

Photographer Sun Hi Zo can easily transport and share her work with clients—including this image for Kia—with a FreeAgent Go portable drive.

Korea's Sun-Hi Zo, for example, is a favorite photographer among fashion editors, advertisers and celebrities alike. Her emotionally rich photos have led her to work with leading magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, as well as with high-profile corporate clients like Samsung and Nike.

Photography has come a long way since Zo began her career more than 20 years ago—everything has gone digital. She uses a digital camera, while post-production work is done on a computer and the images are saved to a hard drive. "In the past, it was difficult to keep the original film safe, and I needed to be very careful," said Zo, "but now my Seagate FreeAgent Go is all I need."

Reliability is the No. 1 reason why Zo uses Seagate FreeAgent drives. "I can't imagine losing my data during a system failure, yet it happens quite often to photographers," she said. "Losing all my work would be like losing my entire history as a photographer. So I always check the track record of the hard drive before I buy it."

Storage on the Go. Mobility is another important storage criteria for Zo, who travels frequently around the world, often to locations that aren't equipped with PCs. Her compact but roomy 640-GB FreeAgent Go stores all the applications she needs, as well as all her important images, so she can instantly replicate her system in a studio, anywhere.

"My shots demand a very high quality so each single file can be 10MB, and each day I'm taking more than 100 shots," Zo said. "It's important that I can keep all these photos handy so that I can edit or revise them freely and find the image that meets my needs."

The FreeAgent Go drive's storage capacity allows Zo to transport a huge number of photos that she can easily show to clients or to photography students at the university where she teaches on a part-time basis. "I can keep all my images without having to delete them to make space," she said. "That means I can teach my students more effectively by sharing not just my best shots, but also my worst."

Seagate's portable drive has impressed Zo with more than just its performance; the stylish design struck a chord with someone whose business is all about beauty. "The FreeAgent Go is like a fashion item—slim and elegant," she said. "As an artist, I believe design is as important as performance."

There's little doubt that for Zo, Seagate's external storage products are as essential to her work as her camera, ensuring that the gorgeous world she sees through her lens is kept safe and secure.

Hard Drives for Haute Couture. Fashion has evolved into an integral part of the modern lifestyle in India but many do not realize that behind the scene, digital technology links the glitzy "haute couture" shows to the general public. For top fashion photographer Pomy Issar, Seagate's high-performance FreeAgent XTreme external drive has made that connection a lot easier.

Pomy Issar's photo of supermodel Naomi Campbell is secure on a Seagate FreeAgent XTreme drive.

Issar has worked with practically all the top fashion designers in India, and in March, he was responsible for capturing the best of the three consecutive fashion weeks, an industry event that allows designers to showcase their latest collections in runway shows. Typically, a photographer covering a fashion week shoots nearly a terabyte of images. For Issar, whose work has appeared in publications such as Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan, the output is much higher.

Fashion weeks consist of round-the-clock events, and Issar doesn't want to miss a single show. He had to download all the pictures from his memory cards quickly so that his cameras were ready for the next show. The FreeAgent XTreme drive's blazingly fast data-transfer speeds—Issar's drive uses the FireWire 400 interface for Mac computers—allowed him to do just that.

Built-in software automatically backs up files to the FreeAgent XTreme drive—a feature that saved Issar from a potential disaster when he lost his camera's memory card during India's Lakme Fashion Week.

"Thankfully, I had backed up all the photographs," he said. "I can actually have all my event photographs on one drive, which was impossible before I got the FreeAgent XTreme. The software lets me back up any folder I want automatically, without having to do the usual copy and paste, which is a real time-saver. It's like I have a personal image studio that I can carry anywhere."

Another key feature for Issar is Seagate's rock-solid security. Powerful encryption software keeps files and folders on the FreeAgent XTreme private. "In the confusion and chaos of a fashion week, things are very easily lost. With Seagate, I have the confidence that all my work is secure—and I'm the only who has access to it."

Cataloguing the hundreds of thousands of images he's captured over his 10-year career is a crucial part of Issar's job. "I often get requests from designers to compile the work I've done for them when their clients demand quick presentations," he explained. "With Seagate, all I have to do is access the image library, and I don't have to worry about being lost in an ocean of images. Organizing my files has never been so easy."