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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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.
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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. → Read More
As a fan of hard drives, I’m quite enthused by this bit of news. The Seagate GoFlex Home was one of the first easy-to-use cloud storage systems and for about a year access was limited to desktops and laptops. Now, however, you can access your files directly using a free iOS app for iPads, iPhones, and iPods Touch.
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. → Read More
Seagate is toying with us, saying they’re going to release this month the “perfect companion” for iPads and other tablets. Being that they’re a storage company and tablets lack serious storage space, I’m guessing it’s a tablet-oriented storage and backup solution, perhaps focusing on mobility and anywhere-accessibility. Perhaps via a browser client? Nobody knows, though Reg Hardware is making a few guesses. We’ll keep our eyes open. → Read More
Seagate’s latest hard drive breakthrough features an industry first of 1TB of data per platter. The Barracuda XT 3TB happens to be the first drive on the market with this high density platter and it’s ready to serve up your media and spreadsheets through the company’s GoFlex Desk product line. The 3.5-inch external drive comes NTFS formated and should hit the consumer distributional channel later this year for an unannounced price. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
You can’t really tell how slim the Seagate GoFlex Slim drive really is until you see it next to a standard external hard drive. This wee drive is .354 inches thick and about four inches long – about the size of a larger cellphone – and it includes a removable port adapter for USB 2.0/3.0 compatibility and an internal 320GB hard drive running at 7200RPM. → Read More
Seagate’s external hard drives were clearly put on some sort of diet because they’re shrinking away to nothing. The firm’s GoFlex Slim is a 2.5-inch 7200RPM hard drive that measure’s in at just 9mm thick. That’s thinner than an iPhone 4 or even a #2 pencil. Best of all, the drive sports USB 3.0 technology for faster transfers to-and-fro a ‘puter. The slender size comes at a price, though. The 320GB drive carries a $99 MSRP, which makes it on the high end of the price to gigabyte scale. But it’s so thin….shipping now. → Read More
Seagate’s got a fancy new SATA6 3TB enterprise hard drive. The 3.5-inch, 7200RPM Barracuda XT ships with a 64MB cache and Seagate DiscWizard software that allows older computers to create a 3TB partition. You see, 3TB hard drives have been around on the retail market for a while, but thanks to a 2.1TB roadblock established back in the ’80s when the LBA standard was developed, many computers with legacy BIOS systems could not see the full drive in a single partition. Seagate’s solution is an elegant and simple user solution. The ST33000651AS just started shipping at an $279 MSRP. → Read More
Say you’re buying a TV – any TV, really – and you’re not quite sure what you’re doing. Say you’re in a store and the sales guy says “Well, you want this to be a Smart TV, right?” and you, not knowing any better, agree. Then he upsells this dumb LG box that simply adds LG’s Smart TV offerings including LG’s apps and some DLNA support. And you go home and realize that it’s just a dumbed-down Roku, Western Digital, or Seagate box. Heck, it’s even worse than Apple TV and the new one, barring the obvious hacked value, is pretty boring and is still better than this. You’ve been played. → Read More
Low-power consuming hard drives are popular these days for the latest crop of servers and NAS units. And why not, right? These drives like don’t need to spin at breakneck speeds for storage, which means they don’t suck down as much power as other hard drives. Seagate’s latest, the Barracuda Green, brings 4K sector performance to the line through the SmartAlign technology while featuring class-leading 5900 RPM speeds. 1.5TB and 1TB drives complete the line with all three drives available in SATA 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s flavors. Amazon currently has both the SATA 6Gb/s 2TB and 1.5TB drives available for $127 and $99 respectively. → Read More
The kids at Western Digital officially called “First!” way back in the balmy summer of 2009 on a 1TB 2.5-inch spinning disk hard drive, but this Seagate model is a bit different and the first of its kind. The Constellation.2 drive is designed for the enterprise market, for servers and data storage needs, not your next laptop. → Read More
Western Digital outed a 3TB external hard drive under the My Book line just a few weeks ago, but now, the same 5400 RPM hard drive along with a slightly smaller 2.5TB version are available sans the enclosure. Both drives ship with an PCI-E Advanced Host Controller Interface Host Bus Adapter that will add operating system support for the large drives. Even with this card, the drive will not talk with Windows XP either as a boot or secondary drive and won’t boot the 32-bit versions of Windows Vista or 7.
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. → Read More
Do you need a lot of storage? I mean, an amount that can be officially described as a shit-ton? But the only requirement you have is that the device has to be the size of a toaster. Well, buddy, do I have good news for you. Let me introduce you to the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440. → Read More
Need 1.5 terabytes at USB 3.0 speeds? Need to stick it all into your pocket? Seagate, Ponch to your John, has your back. The 1.5 TB GoFlex Drive is the biggest monster in all of monsterland and features Seagate’s unique GoFlex technology that allows you to swap out the chips and the rear port to add new capabilities.
The 1.5 TB model costs $249 and is available right about now. → Read More
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.) → Read More
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. → Read More
