This superb slideshow at Tom’s Hardware shows the facilities and processes by which the hard drives we so often take for granted are created with unbelievable precision. The Springtown facility in Ireland is one of their primary sites. The yellow light is, I’m guessing, a wavelength that doesn’t affect the raw wafers’ surface. The processes are explained in some detail although some technical knowledge is necessary to get the full effect. Still, how about this for breaking it down: If the read/write head were a Boeing 747, and the hard-disk platter were the surface of the Earth: The head would fly at Mach 800 At less than one centimeter from the ground And count every blade of grass Making fewer than 10 unrecoverable counting errors in an area equivalent to all of Ireland. The whole tour is very interesting, and the photos by Matthieu Lamelot are excellent. → Read More
“According to the United States FBI, a notebook computer is stolen every 53 seconds.” Also, twenty million kids are eaten by bats every second. That’s not according to the FBI, but it’s still relevant. Moving on, it appears that as the notebooks (of all sizes and persuasions) begin piling up in our society, there are predictably more and more lost. In an effort to predict at least the data on them, Dell and Seagate have both started making secure hard drives widely available. The drives have onboard hardware encryption, and at least on the Seagates, the drive pairs with a McAfee encryption/decryption client that’s, I assume, always running. With luck it’ll be unobtrusive and there won’t be too much of a performance hit. The hard drives are available in 160GB, 320GB, and soon a 500GB version as well. What can I say, it all sounds pretty good to me! → Read More
Seagate are the hard drive guys. They make some of the best HDDs out there but they’ve never gotten into the SSD game. Why is that? Everybody’s doing it, right? Yes, says CEO Bill Watkins, but nobody’s making any money and nobody’s making anything that different from one another. Why get into a business where there’s no money or reputation to be made? He said the same thing eight months ago, and although there are many solid-state notebooks around, they’re still a micro-minority, so I’d say he was more or less in the right. They are planning, they say, on having a limited entry into the SSD market in mid-2009, but they’re banking on other technologies as well, which may end up taking a bite out of solid-state’s market share over the next couple years. Not this stuff though, probably. → Read More
What can you get for $145? Well, you can buy Lehman Brother’s European assets 73 times, or you can get this 1TB eternal hard drive. At this rate, I’d say the hard drive is the better deal. It’s the Seagate FreeAgent Desktop, and while I’ve never used this particular model, Seagate makes a mean hard drive most of the time. If that’s not a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is. → Read More
Read on for the rest. → Read More
The world of 2.5-inch HDDs is generally that of notebook computers, but sometimes they make sense in high-end servers. Sadly, that’s the case for Seagate’s latest 2.5-inch drives, which boast 320GB storage as well as a 10k RPM speed, meaning they are bloody fast. It’s called the Savvio, and is made for enterprise servers and storage devices. It’s not going into any laptops soon, and that’s too bad. We’d love to upgrade to this thing, but it uses SAS instead of ATA or IDE, as laptops do. Still, the fact that they can get the speed and capacity into this small of a form factor means that such drives for laptops might not be far off. → Read More
Solid state drives have always excelled in power economy and heat levels, but have faltered in the price-to-performance ratio, and even lagged behind in sheer performance by some measures. That last complaint is valid no longer. Memoright’s high-speed drives operate at far higher speeds than other SSDs on the market, and show nearly double the performance of the closest competitors in the spinning disk category where it counts — or more. → Read More
Seagate holds a patent for some aspects of drive/PC communication and may just start enforcing those selfsame patents if this whole SSD craze takes off. But the key thing, Watkins argues, is that SSDs are just too expensive, and will be for a long time. Just look at the MacBook Air. There are two versions of the Apple laptop, one with an 80 GB hard drive for $1,800, and one with a 64 GB SSD for $3,100. Why pay so much more for less storage? It’s not a difficult choice. “Realistically, I just don’t see the flash notebook sell,” Watkins says. “We just don’t see the proposition.” But in case flash prices continue to plummet and the flash drives really do catch on, Watkins has something else up his sleeve. He’s convinced, he confides, that SSD makers like Samsung and Intel (INTC) are violating Seagate’s patents. (An Intel spokeswoman says the company doesn’t comment on speculation.) Seagate and Western Digital (WDC), two of the major hard drive makers, have patents that deal with many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer, Watkins says. It stands to reason that sooner or later, Seagate will sue – particularly if it looks like SSDs could become a real threat. Flash vs. hard drive battle heats up [Fortune] → Read More
[photopress:blackarmor_lr.jpg,full,center] Product Name: Seagate BlackArmor encrypted++ portable hard drives Description: A 160GB portable hdd with government-level encryption. That’s only good if you put faith in our government to be competent. Price: $150 In-store date: Q1 2008 Site: Seagate Why it’s cool: Because people are paranoid about their data being compromised while on-the-go. $150 for 160GB rides the high-end of the price curve, it should be noted, so you’ll really need to place a premium on data security to fully appreciate the drive. It’s pretty shiny, though. Still, shiny = cool, right? → Read More
[photopress:pipelinehd_lr_.jpg,full,center] Product Name: Seagate PipelineHD Series Hard Disc Drives Description: A hard drive that’s specifically built for high def DVRs with (initially) up to 1TB in storage space Price: TBA In-store date: First-half of 2008 Site: Seagate Why it’s cool: Because storing high def, DVR’d content takes up an obscene amount of space. PipelineHD is not only large enough for 200 hours, or 8.3 days, of high-def content, but it uses propreitary technology to be as quiet as possible—nothing kills the charm of movies like “Once” like the ear-piercing sound of HDD access. → Read More
It’s bad enough that my MacBook is running hotter than Hades since I upgraded to Leopard, but the last thing I need is for my HDD to crap out. Luckily my MB does not have a 2.5-inch drive from Seagate. Retrodata, a data recovery outfit in the UK, noticed something was amiss with the Seagate drive equipped MBs as they’ve seen 50 or so since last summer. Upon further inspection, Retrodata pinpointed the cause to be: → Read More
We don’t normally discuss class action lawsuits here on the Gear, mostly because we’re not fond of fostering the idea that lawyers can do good. In this case, however, you’re very possibly due for a bate for 5% from Seagate, if you’ve purchased one of its harddrives in the last six years. That’s enough money to get you most of the way to the Transformers DVD. → Read More
Photo via Jason Dunn Seagate, the company that I think I bought my first hard drive from, will stop selling IDE drives by year’s end, focusing exclusively on SATA. SATA currently is currently found in more than half of total desktops sold this year and 44 percent of laptops sold. Don’t expect IDE to go the way of the Dodo, however. Like all good standards (when’s the last time you used your serial port?), it will remain on motherboards for years to come some some sort of desiccated internal organ. Mmmm… desiccated organs. Report: Seagate plans to stop manufacturing IDE drives by year end [Ars] → Read More
http://www.podtech.net/player/podtech-player.swf?bc=bb0eb150dad14f4c9aeb9810cb8d1999 Seagate announced a 1TB hard drive today, albeit late, but as they say, “better late than never.” The Barracuda 7200.11 and ES.2 revv up to 7,200rpm, cache up to 32MB with an average data rate of 8.5ms. The ES.2 is leading the pack offering consumers a SAS interface along with SATA and is aimed for archive and secondary drive usage. The 7200.11 is as quiet as a mouse with only 2.7 Bels. Both drives will ship Q3 and the 7200.11 will retail for $399.99, while the ES.2 is still without a price tag. Now watch Marc Jourlait, Seagate VP of Global Marketing, give his spiel. Press Release → Read More
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