You better overnight Santa an addendum to your Christmas list. You’re going to want to acquire as many hard drives as possible before 2012 rolls around. Both Seagate and Western Digital are slashing hard drive warrants for hard drives shipped next year. Tell Santa, tell your mother-in-law, tell you boss. All you want for Christmas this year are hard drives.

Currently the Seagate Barracuda XT, Constellation 2, ES.2 and Momentus XT hard drives ship with a stellar 5 year warranty. However, come 2012, the warranty drops to just three years. Seagate’s other lines are also seeing warranty cuts. The SV35 Series and Pipeline HD drives will soon have a two-year promise while the Barracuda, barracuda Green and 2.5-inch Momentus will ship with only 12 months of coverage.

Western Digital is also cutting hard drive warranties. The Scorpio Blue, Caviar Blue and Green will soon only have a two year warranty rather than the current three-year note. However, the company is letting buyers extend the warranties if they don’t mind coughing up a bit more cake.

These changes come after a period of amazing hard drive deals abruptly interrupted by mother nature. Widespread flooding in Thailand forced many consumer electronic companies to close factories, which in turn, caused prices to spike. Once upon a time 2TB hard drives could be had for less than $70. Now, as 2011 is coming to a close, 2TB drives are priced around $100 and steadily increasing. Hard drive manufacturers are no doubt looking at ways to keep prices competitive. Slashes warrants no doubt helps with short-term loses by increasing the profit margin. As always, back up your data. Hard drives do not last forever.

Just a couple months after selling its 1 millionth hybrid hard drive, Seagate has some fresh news to announce, including the death of its Barracuda green drive and the announcement of its new enhanced Seagate desktop drives. The Barracuda, Seagate’s flagship, has been revamped to offer performance of 7200 RPM for every capacity — from 250GB up to 3TB.

Using 40mm fabrication technology, the dual-core Seagate Barracuda drive is now 45 percent faster. Thanks to AccuTrack technology, the drive boosts capacity, speed and performance by offering track density of 340,000 TPI.

Meanwhile, the Barracuda XT hard drive will be migrating over to solid state hybrid technology, which basically offers the best of both worlds. You can enjoy hard drive capacity points at solid state speeds, all at a less expensive cost per GB. The Barracuda and Barracuda XT will now round out Seagate’s hard drive offerings, in an attempt to make the buying process that much easier for customers.

According to the company, the electricity savings from reduced RPM in Barracuda Green were totaling around 20 cents per year. When measured against productivity during the extra hours a faster and more efficient hard drive yields, it seemed like an easy decision. However, Seagate maintains that it’s still environmentally friendly as far as manufacturing goes.

The Barracuda drives will be available by the middle of November, with MSRPs starting at $71.99 for 1TB.

Seagate has just announced that they’ve sold their 1 millionth Momentus XT hybrid solid-state/mechanical hard drive, an interesting development for the hard drive manufacturer especially considering the rise of expensive SSD drives. These hybrid drives run at 7,200 RPM, nearly twice as fast as standard mechanical drives. The drives contain some solid-state memory as well as a full mechanical drive and offer speed improvements at a very low initial cost.

The Hybrid drive is an interesting technological advancement. It’s cheaper than a full SSD drive but thanks to a 4GB cache you can read and write to the drive – at least in theory – nearly as fast as you can with a SSD drive.

To be clear, this isn’t a full SD drive. The speed savings are eventually reduced by the dependence on mechanical parts, but the price – about $99 for a 500GB model – is pretty good for a 7,200rpm drive.

I’m trying to put this thing into a position where I can really test it out but basically it’s a wireless hard drive. It’s called the Seagate GoFlex Satellite and it contains a small battery, a 802.11g/n radio, and a 500GB hard drive. To use it, you connect it to a data source – your computer, NAS, etc. – and drag over files you might want to use or share with others. Then, while you’re on the road (in a plane or car or office) and you can’t connect via USB (or don’t want to) you turn on the device, connect to it via the built-in WiFi hotspot, and browse the files using a web or iOS app interface. You can also download files from the drive and then turn it off, thereby saving the battery.

The drive uses Seagate’s GoFlex cable interface which means it runs at USB 3.0 and can be up or downgraded to various standards using add-on cables (sold separately). A small cover protects the back port when you don’t need a cable.

It costs $200 and will be available in July.

The question, then, is “Why?” While I don’t like cluttering up my iPad any more than the next guy, I wonder if I really need up to 300 movies with me on the go. However, as a hyperlocal sharing system – up to five people can connect at a time – it may be useful in that it allows you and your closest friends to stream different files from the same drive at once. Think of it as an odd, virtual video jukebox for five people.

Again, I need to take this on a flight to see if I’m really in love with it and I’ll be on my way to Vegas and then E3 in a week or so, allowing me to test it in its native habitat. Until then, it’s a really cool idea but I’m worried about the use cases the average user will find after purchasing it.

Another interesting point – it only supports NTFS so you have to install a plug-in under OS X to run it. It runs a mini version of Linux so I won’t be surprised if folks don’t hack it in the next few months.

The GoFlex Home costs $159.99 for 1TB, $209.99 for 2TB, and $269.99 for 3TB and older models require updates to run the new software.

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Hard Drive Product Page

Nobody knows, though Reg Hardware is making a few guesses. We’ll keep our eyes open.

Seagate Breaks Areal Density Barrier: Unveils World’s First Hard Drive Featuring 1 Terabyte Per Platter

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Seagate (NASDAQ:STX), the leader in hard drives and storage solutions, today unveiled the world’s first 3.5-inch hard drive featuring 1TB of storage capacity per disk platter, breaking the 1TB areal density barrier to help meet explosive worldwide demand for digital content storage in both the home and the office.

“We remain keenly focused on delivering the storage capacity, speed and manageability our customers need to thrive in an increasingly digital world.”
Seagate’s GoFlex® Desk products are the first to feature the new hard drive, delivering storage capacities of up to 3TB and an areal density of 625 Gigabits per square inch, the industry’s highest. Seagate is on track to ship its flagship 3.5-inch Barracuda desktop hard drive with 3TBs of storage on 3 disk platters – enough capacity to store up to 120 high-definition movies, 1,500 video games, thousands of photos or virtually countless hours of digital music – to the distribution channel in mid-2011. The drive will also be available in capacities of 2TB, 1.5TB and 1TB.

“Organizations of all sizes and consumers worldwide are amassing digital content at light speed, generating immense demand for storage of digital content of every imaginable kind,” said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing. “We remain keenly focused on delivering the storage capacity, speed and manageability our customers need to thrive in an increasingly digital world.”

GoFlex Desk external drives are compatible with both the Windows® operating system and Mac® computers. Each drive includes an NTFS driver for Mac, which allows the drive to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without reformatting. The GoFlex Desk external drive’s sleek black 3.5-inch design sits either vertically or horizontally to accommodate any desktop environment.

Samsung and Seagate this morning announced a broad ‘strategic alignment’ in a move to expand their existing relationship and more effectively counter competitor Western Digital.

The most important elements of the agreement include Samsung combining its hard disk drive operations into Seagate, receiving significant equity ownership in the HDD and storage solutions provider and enhancing the current patent cross-license agreement between the two companies.

The combined value of these transactions and agreements is approximately $1.375 billion USD, which will be paid by Seagate to Samsung in the form of 50% stock and 50% cash.

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Samsung and Seagate this morning announced a broad ‘strategic alignment’ in a move to expand their existing relationship and more effectively counter competitor Western Digital.

The most important elements of the agreement include Samsung combining its hard disk drive operations into Seagate, receiving significant equity ownership in the HDD and storage solutions provider and enhancing the current patent cross-license agreement between the two companies.

In addition, Samsung and Seagate inked a NAND flash memory supply agreement under which Samsung will provide Seagate with its semiconductor products for use in Seagate’s enterprise solid state drives and other products, as well as a disk drive supply agreement under which Seagate will supply drives to Samsung for PCs, notebooks and other consumer electronics.

The combined value of these transactions and agreements is approximately $1.375 billion USD, which will be paid by Seagate to Samsung in the form of 50% stock and 50% cash.

Upon closing, Samsung will receive Seagate shares 45.2 million shares with a total value of $687.5 million, representing approximately 9.6% ownership of Seagate, plus $687.5 million in cash.

The agreement has no financing contingencies, and is subject to customary closing conditions, including review by U.S. and international regulators. The transactions are expected to close by the end of calendar year 2011.

Samsung and Seagate will also collaborate to develop new enterprise storage solutions, and a Samsung exec will be nominated to join Seagate’s board of directors in the near future.

Something like this was bound to happen after rival Western Digital recently announced that it would buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for $4.3 billion in a deal that will expand the company’s reach in data storage.

At the end of last year, Seagate reportedly turned down an acquisition offer from Western Digital after being actively courted by private equity firm TPG Capital, which reportedly offered more than $7.5 billion for the company.

Yesterday, reports claimed that Samsung was indeed considering selling its money-losing HDD business for $1 billion to 1.5 billion to raise cash to invest in new growth areas, with Seagate being named as a potential buyer.

Samsung has about 18% of the HDD market, according to iSuppli.

The drive costs a mere $99 and could be a handy and useful replacement for any number of thumbdrives that litter your bag or briefcase. At less than 30 cents per gigabtye – and as slim as this thing really is – it’s an excellent replacement for small albiet lower-density flash media. Check out a few more pictures below but generally it’s an interesting aesthetic and space-saving move for Seagate.

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Seagate Ships Industry’s Easiest to Deploy 3TB Desktop Drive to Overcome 2TB Capacity Barrier

Barracuda® XT Combines Highest Desktop Storage Capacity Ever Available with High-End Performance

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) today began shipments of the industry’s most elegant, easy-to-install 3TB desktop drive – the Barracuda® XT hard drive – a product that eliminates the need to purchase extra hardware or software to overcome the 2TB barrier. The Barracuda XT hard drive delivers the highest available capacity for home servers and workstations, high-definition video editing and production systems, high-performance PC gaming systems and desktop PCs.

“Seagate is squarely focused on delivering the storage performance, capacity and innovation to ensure that technology transitions remain seamless for our customers”
Legacy PC BIOS designs and device drivers and older operating systems such as Windows XP are incapable of using hard drive capacities beyond 2.1TB. The upshot is that existing desktop drives with more than 2.1TB of storage capacity must be deployed with additional software or hardware and may also require extra device drivers to overcome this limitation.

The Barracuda XT hard drive with free Seagate DiscWizard™ software is a complete, easy-to-deploy solution. DiscWizard software makes it simple to configure the computer operating system and device drivers to access the full 3TB of capacity on legacy systems using Windows XP and PC BIOS and on personal computers equipped with newer versions of Windows or the new UEFI BIOS. The new DiscWizard software is available for free download at www.seagate.com/beyond-2TB.com.

“Seagate is squarely focused on delivering the storage performance, capacity and innovation to ensure that technology transitions remain seamless for our customers,” said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of sales, marketing and customer service. “The Barracuda® XT hard drive epitomizes our commitment to providing end-user customers and PC manufacturers with the world’s most advanced storage solutions.”

The Barracuda XT hard drive combines a 64MB cache that optimizes burst performance in cache-intensive applications such as PC gaming and nonlinear video editing with Serial ATA 6Gb/s – an interface that delivers the highest system throughput – to enable the highest performance available in a desktop hard drive. The 3.5-inch, 7200RPM drive’s 3TB of storage capacity gives desktop PC users the most space ever available for videos, games, photos and files.

The Barracuda XT 3TB hard drive launch comes only months after Seagate introduced the Barracuda® Green hard drive, another Seagate desktop drive that streamlines technology transitions to simplify drive installations for PC makers and consumers. The eco-friendly Barracuda Green hard drive features Seagate’s SmartAlign™ technology to enable all the benefits of the new 4K sector standard while simplifying drive installation. SmartAlign technology works by eliminating the need for utilities often required to ensure optimum drive performance.

You’ve been played.

The device will be revealed next week at CES but it’s most definitely a me-too product by a company that is oblivious to the market. Anyway, don’t be fooled. There are plenty of better devices coming out in 2011 and this ain’t a winner.

Seagate Ships Industry’s Highest Performance “Green” Desktop Hard Drive
Barracuda Green features Seagate SmartAlign technology for seamless transition to 4K sector desktop hard drives

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. – December 14, 2010 – Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) today announced the availability of the Barracuda® Green hard drive, the industry’s highest performance eco-friendly 3.5-inch desktop drive for low-power personal computers, multi-drive home networking systems and external PC storage.

Seagate Barracuda Green, the world’s highest performance eco-friendly desktop hard drive.

The Barracuda Green hard drive, formerly Barracuda® LP, combines the industry’s highest spin speed (5900 RPM) with Seagate’s SmartAlign™ technology to deliver best-in-class performance. SmartAlign technology enables all the benefits of the new 4K sector standard while simplifying drive installation by eliminating the need for utilities often required to ensure optimum drive performance. The cool-running, lower-power Barracuda Green hard drive delivers whisper-quiet acoustics and helps reduce system costs associated with the fans and power supply devices often required for power-hungry systems.

Barracuda Green hard drives also support Seagate Think Green™ programs for a greener more sustainable world:

70 percent or more of the materials used to build the drive can be recycled.
All Barracuda Green drives use low halogen components to reduce the negative environmental impacts related to these substances.
Barracuda Green is designed and built to the highest environmental standards.
“Not only do Barracuda® Green drives offer environmental improvements in power consumption and material usage, but these drives are also among the first hard drives from Seagate to offer SmartAlign™ technology,” said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of Sales, Marketing and Product Line Management. “This is important because the industry is transitioning to 4K sector formatting called Advanced Format to improve capacities and maintain strong error correction. However, the transition to Advanced Format without SmartAlign™ technology can be complex and require additional integration steps and software utilities to avoid performance degradation. SmartAlign technology removes these concerns and makes this transition virtually invisible for our customers.”

The Barracuda Green hard drive, offered in capacities of 2TB, 1.5TB and 1TB, is now shipping to the worldwide distribution channel.

The drive features 5Gb/s performance and best-in-class low power consumption. 1TB is just an option. It’s also available in 250GB and 500GB flavors with  each model using the T10 Protection Information standard and a Self Encrypting Drive option that covers data security throughout the life of the drive. This is a serious drive for serious people and not clowns like you or I.

Dell will be the first vender to ship units with the Contellation.2 drive. These PowerVault storage enclosures and PowerEdge servers are expected to go out sometime later this month.

This goes back to the days of DOS when the LBA (logcial block addressing) standard was developed and is the main reason why Seagate, despite releasing its 3TB external drive way back in June, hasn’t released the hard drive itself on the market just yet. It’s a fustercluck of compatibility, but apparently Western Digital feels the world is ready for these drives. Fine with us. We can read a compatibility chart.

These drives aren’t all that expensive with the 3TB shipping for $239 and $189 for the 2.5TB version. Although unless you’re low on hard drive trays and must have the absolute most storage possible, 2TB hard drives are still a little better deal right now with a few options available around $100.

This small business NAS can now be configured with four 3TB hard drives, making a 12TB storage device. If that’s too much storage, or you’re business credit card can’t handle the $1,899 price tag, the 440 also comes in 8TB and 4TB flavors for $1,499 and $849, respectively. All the drives are hot-swappable and available in a RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 or JBOD configurations. The 440 also supports remote access, system backups, and USB printer sharing. But 12TB, damn that’s a lot in a NAS.

The 1.5 TB model costs $249 and is available right about now.

Seagate has a laptop hard drive, yeah? It’s called the Momentus, yeah? It has self-encryption, yeah? It just secured the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s FIPS 140-2 certification, yeah? (Yeah.)

That’s the news. The hard drive, which comes with optional self-encryption software (so BAD GUY~! don’t get into your data), has now been given the official NIST seal of approval. Does that mean anything to you? (For Seagate it means that various federal agencies can now start buying the hard drive.) Maybe, maybe not, but at least now you know the encryption is good.

And you will never see me say a bad thing about data encryption, particularly when you’re dealing with laptop hard drives. (It uses AES, for the record.)

Pretty much it.

In a recent interview, a representative from Seagate stated that the future of hard drive technology lies in the so-called “hybrid” technology. In this case, “hybrid” refers to the concept of using a flash memory buffer to increase the read/write speed, without increasing the RPM.

Seagate actually has developed one of these new hybrid drives, the 2.5-inch Momentus, and the rep from Seagate said that they are already experiencing high demand for the new technology. Seagate acknowledges that SSD drives still have some benefits over the hybrid technology, but the cost per gigabyte could help the new technology take over 80% of the market by 2015. Of course, in 5 years, there will probably be some other storage technology we’ll all be talking about.

[via XbitLabs]