Digital Trends
Hard drive failure is inevitable, and if you’re not backing up your PC on a regular basis, you’re running the risk of losing all the music, digital photos, documents, and everything else that’s stored on it. It’s a fact. It’s also a fact that most of us don’t back up our hard drives because it’s a royal pain. Who has the time? Besides, when was the last time your hard drive actually failed?
When Western Digital introduced its smart WD TV HD Media Player earlier this year, which is designed to mate portable hard drives with big-screen TVs, we knew it was only a matter of time before rival disk manufacturer Seagate would come up with something similar. Second-to-market products are often better than the ones that create a new niche, so expectations were suitably high around the office. In a strange twist though, Seagate’s FreeAgent Theater unexpectedly takes several steps in the wrong direction, much to our dismay and disappointment.
It’s a digital world, Seagate
Storage maker Seagate is looking to win over the hearts (and wallets) of eco-concious desktop computer users with its new Barracuda LP line of 3.5-inch desktop hard drives. Available in 1, 1.5, and 2 TB capacities, the drives spin at 5,900 rpm and the company claims they can consume as little as half the electricity of a typical desktop hard drive—although, over the entire life of the drive, Seagate is only claiming up to a 44 percent reduction in energy consumption. What’s more, up to 70 percent of the materials used in the drive can be recycled.
Though few hard drives on the market can even come close to the current 3 Gb/s speed limit on the Serial ATA (SATA) standard, Seagate and AMD are marching forward with a new standard that’s purportedly twice as fast. Both companies demonstrated drives that used the new 6 GB/s standard at a conference on Monday in New Orleans.
Normally, drive hardware acts as the biggest limitation on speed, with the SATA standard acting only a theoretical limit on peak transfer rates. But according to Seagate, the new standard comes just as some manufacturers have managed to begin bumping against the speed limit on the old 3 Gb/s standard, especially ultra-fast SSDs.
In April of last year, hard drive maker Seagate filed a patent infringement lawsuit against solid-state drive (SSD) developer STEC, alleging the company was violating four Seagate patents in its SSD products. STEC is a relatively small SSD developer, and Seagate implied that the lawsuit was a test case to induce other storage developers into patent licensing partnerships—Seagate claimed it had invested over $7 billion developing key storage technologies and other storage vendors needed to respect Seagate’s intellectual property.
Storage developer Seagate Technologies has unexpectedly announced the immediate departures of both its chief executive officer William Watkins and Dave Wickersham, president and chief operating officer, effective immediately. The company also announced it plans to cut about 10 percent of its U.S. workforce, which would amount to about 800 positions. Worldwide, the company employes about 53,000 people.
Company chairman Stephen J. Luczo will take over Seagate’s CEO position; Luczo is a familiar face to Seagate investors, since he previously served as Seagate’s CEO from 1998 until 2004, during which time he guided the company through a difficult restructuring. Seagate says Watkins and Luzco will work together to ensure a smooth transition, and that the two will talk about what role, if any, Watkins will have with the company going forward.
Storage manufacturer Seagate is getting into the holiday spirit by introducing new colors for its FreeAgent Go line of external hard drives. Initially available in royal blue, red, black, and silver, new drives’ new color options include pink, orange, spring green, forest green, sky blue, and gold. And, Seagate is throwing in some extras: through January 31, 2009, folks who register a new FreeAgent Go drive will receive a multimedia package, including 50 free songs from eMusic annd half-off a one-year subscription to SmugMug.
Storage vendor Seagate has announced a new lineup of FreeAgent external hard drives for Macs and Windows PCs, including the new FreeAgent Go, which the company claims is the slimmest external hard drive on the market today at just 12.5mm thick. The FreeAgent Go also offers capacities up to 500 GB and a docking option so users don’t have to deal with cables.
“The first FreeAgent storage solution offering introduced in 2007 unquestionably made a mark for Seagate in the consumer space, demonstrating that hard drives can be designed to provide a stylish complement to a computing environment,” said Seagate senior VP for consumer solutions Pat King, in a statement. “This second-generation of FreeAgent storage solutions takes the extra step of providing easy-to-use technology in a consumer-friendly package.”
The world today runs on information. Every time you access the Internet, hit "send", trade a stock online, use an ATM or even watch a Hollywood blockbuster movie with computer-generated special effects, you create, access and share tremendous amounts of digital information. Seagate is committed to developing the technology and manufacturing the products that help make it all happen.
PRODUCT FEATURES:
Best-in-class environmental specification and reliability features;
New perpendicular recording technology enables higher areal density, fewer moving parts and increased dependability;
Adaptive Fly Height offers consistent read/write performance from the beginning to the end of your computing workload;
Storage manufacturer Seagate has just announced its new Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive, boasting a whopping 1.5 terabytes of storage capacity. Seagate’s previous drives topped out at 1 TB; according to the company, the 1.5 TB unit marks the single largest jump in capacity in the more than half a century that hard drives have been around, thanks to perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.
“Organizations and consumers of all kinds worldwide continue to create, share, and consume digital content at levels never before seen, giving rise to new markets, new applications, and demand for desktop and notebook computers with unprecedented storage capacity, performance, and reliability,” said Seagate executive VP Michael Wingert, in a statement. “Seagate is committed to powering the next generation of computing today with the planet’s fastest, highest-capacity, and most reliable storage solutions.”
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