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Seagate announces larger, faster AES-packing Momentus hard drives

Seagate announces larger, faster AES-packing Momentus hard drives
Today's corporate laptops tend to be bristling with security measures, able to uniquely identify your fingers and faces on top of whatever authentication measures your operating system offers. But, without some kind of encryption, the drives inside are left completely vulnerable to anyone with a screwdriver. Seagate has been combating that with its AES-packing Momentus Full Drive Encryption disks for years, finally updating the range with a suite of larger and faster models. The first is the Momentus 5400 FDE.3, a 5400RPM drive with 8MB of cache available in 160GB and 320GB sizes. There's also the Momentus 7200 FDE, coming in the same two capacities but with twice the cache and, predictably, spinning at 7200RPM. Seagate's promising 500GB flavors soon, all with onboard AES encryption that doesn't impact boot times or overall performance. Just don't forget that BIOS password, yeah?

Seagate developing mutant hybrid SSD tech to bring costs down

We'd heard that Seagate was prepping its first solid state hard drives, but there was no plan for consumer-friendly products in that vein anytime soon because solid state drives cost far more to produce than the conventional variety. Recently, CEO Bill Watkins hinted that the company intends to overcome that problem by combining relatively inexpensive (but unreliable) multi-layer cells with pricier (but dependable) single-layer cells in some kind of hybrid drive technology. It's all very pie in the sky right now, but surely it's a better hope than sticking to your old fashioned ways and seeking out opportunities to sue envelope-pushing competitors.

[Via Electronista]

Fujitsu to hand over hard drive division, self-respect to Western Digital


It's prom night, and Fujitsu wants to give it all up to Western Digital. And we're talking everything: if the sordid deal goes through, by the end of the year Fujitsu will have sold its entire hard disk division to WD, giving the maker of the exquisitely named Caviar almost thirty percent of the market, second only to Seagate's thirty-five percent. So look out, Seagate! But who will the real winners be? That's right: the consumer. Because the rampant monopolization of every aspect of the computer industry can only be a good thing. Just ask those fat cats in Washington.

Seagate's FreeAgent drives get official, Go Desk EXtreme


Seagate just officially announced what we already told you about last month: they're shedding brown with the introduction of the thoroughly redesigned FreeAgent series of external storage devices. Things break down into USB 2.0 PC and USB+Firewire Mac flavors for both the multi-colored, portable FreeAgent Go Drives ($240 for up to 500GB plus $30 for optional docking station and carrying case) and home-based FreeAgent Desk Drives ($270 for up to 1TB). A higher-performing 7,200rpm FreeAgent XTreme Drive tosses in an eSATA jack to complement the USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 ports in capacities up to 1TB ($230). Both the XTreme and Desk drives will hit 1.5TB capacities starting next month. Macheads happy with USB 2.0 and suitably skilled to reformat a hard disk will want to examine prices closely: while the Go and Desk Drives for Macs list for $10 and $40, respectively, more than their PC brethren (for the value-add of Firewire 800/400 jacks and an OS X pre-formatting), the 1.5TB FreeAgent Desk Drive for Macs is expected to list for an unexplained $70 premium over the $280 PC version when it ships in October.

Seagate dumps brown, gets Mac happy with leaked FreeAgent disks


We have it from a highly trusted source that Seagate is working on a new line of stylish hard drives. Oh hey, what do you know, there they are pictured above. You're looking at a few of the next generation FreeAgent storage devices from Seagate. While unannounced, the drive on the left is a likely FreeAgent Desktop replacement while the drive on the right looks to either augment or replace the FreeAgent Go series with its thinner profile and docking port. Instead of traditional Seagate-brown, these drives will ultimately ship in several colors (grey, black, and silver at launch time) including red, green, gold, pink, and more. Speeds will start at 5,400RPM before moving towards 7,200RPM sometime down the road with at least one drive shipping Mac-ready -- Windows, not Mac users will have the privilege of reformatting the disk for use. We expect to hear an announcement for these drives as well as a new FreeAgent XTreme disk for gamers and speed-freaks sometime in September.

Update: Regarding those "holes," they're actually glowing blue lights, illuminated only when the unit's on -- the air vents are located on the back.

Micron announces insanely quick RealSSD C200 SSDs


Intel's partner in solid state crime, Micron, just announced an update to its RealSSD lineup of SSDs. Based on the typically slower (and cheaper) MLC NAND process technology, the new 2.5-inch (up to 256GB) laptop and 1.8-inch (32GB to 128GB) ultra-portable storage slabs offer a 3Gbps SATA interface and ridiculous 250MBps read and 100MBps write speeds -- yes, that's fast, damn fast when you consider the 70MBps write and 90MBps read speeds of Samsung's latest consumer oriented SSDs. They even best the listed read speeds of Samsung's top-ender. Unfortunately, no prices were given though it's said to be "balanced price to performance." Expect 'em to hit the market in Q4 under the Lexar brand, and maybe even Crucial, Seagate, and Intel for all we know.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11: 1.5TB of love


You know, we're not actually certain we want to trust 1.5TB of our precious precious NES ROMS invaluable work data to a single drive, but that doesn't mean Seagate's latest Barracuda isn't droolworthy regardless. The jump from 1TB to 1.5TB is the "largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives," according to Seagate, and the perpendicular-recording drives should begin shipping in August. There are also a pair of Momentus 2.5-inch 500GB notebook drives coming in Q4 in 5400 and 7200RPM speeds, but like big brother, pricing is unavailable -- we've got a hunch you might want to start saving those pennies, though.

[Thanks, Dave]

Seagate rolls out 1TB Maxtor Central Axis NAS


There may be bigger NASs out there, but there are few more impressively named than Seagate's new Maxtor Central Axis -- a name that's all the more imposing when combined with the drive's monolithic appearance. If that's not enough to sell you on it, however, you may be slightly more impressed with its 1TB 7,200 rpm drive with 32MB of cache, or its support for DLNA and UPnP media streaming, dual USB ports, and magical auto-sorting software, not to mention all the expected security features. $330 and it's yours this July, with folks in Europe and Asia set to get theirs later this year.

Analyst sees Micron joint venture, SanDisk as possible targets for Seagate

Seagate has already made its intentions about jumping into the SSD game pretty clear, and one analyst now says he sees two clear options at the company's disposal if it wants to seriously make a go of it, each of which involve Seagate shelling out a good chunk of cash. According to Lazard's Daniel Amir, one option would be to buy out Intel's 49% stake in the IM Flash Technologies joint venture it has with Micron, which would reportedly cost anywhere from $1 to $2 billion (not to mention put Seagate on the outs with Intel). More likely than that, Amir says, would be an acquisition of or partnership with SanDisk, which he says would be an ideal fit given Seagate's expertise on the enterprise side and SanDisk's retail knowhow. Amir doesn't put a price tag on that option though, but you can be sure it wouldn't be cheap.

Seagate to jump into the SSD game, 2TB spinners planned for next year

SSDs are the new heat, and while all sorts of upstarts have been cranking them out old-school drive manufacturer Seagate has mostly sat it out and made a lot of noise about patent lawsuits. The lawsuits aren't going away (obviously), but CEO Bill Watkins told PC World yesterday that the company is finally getting ready to release its first SSD sometime next year, as well as launch a line of 2TB traditional hard drives. Watkins said that SSDs weren't yet price-competitive for consumers (uh, yeah), and that Seagate won't focus on consumer SSDs until the price falls to the 10-cents-per-GB level. Until then, the target market is data centers looking to process data quickly or save on energy consumption costs -- the rest of us will just have to save our pennies, apparently.

Seagate reveals Showcase external HDD: for media centers and DVRs

Great, just great. Soon after Western Digital made a fool of itself by introducing an external hard drive "certified" for use with DISH Network HD DVRs, along comes Seagate to further fuel the hype machine. Announced at this year's Cable Show (after being mentioned at CES), the Showcase storage solution is "designed" to extend storage capacity of DVRs and media centers. In a similar vein, the outfit's newest drives are "compatible with Motorola's s-SATA-capable HD DVRs," and they also come with USB 2.0 ports and up to 1TB of space. No word on a price or any of that jazz, but those who can't figure out that an external hard drive is an external hard drive can look for 'em to land in Q3.

Hard drive recovered from shuttle Columbia used to complete experiment


Although it's been several years since the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, it looks like some of the data gathered during the orbiter's final mission will be put to good use. A hard drive salvaged from the wreckage contains the results of an experiment to study the way xenon gas flows in microgravity, and the results were published in the April edition of a journal called Physical Review E. The 400MB Seagate drive was originally thought to be destroyed, but workers and engineers reconstructing the orbiter from the remaining debris found it during the process and sent it off for recovery, where 99 percent of the data was extracted. It then took several years for lead researcher Robert Berg and his team to analyze the findings, but they're happy with the results -- we only wish they hadn't come at so dear a price.

[Thanks, Laura]

Seagate: 1 billion drives served


Seagate claims it's the first company to hit the magical "one billion drives shipped" mark, and doesn't plan on slowing down any time soon. The company was founded in 1979, with its first drive offering up 5MB of storage for a whopping $1,500. We've certainly come a long way in 29 years, and Seagate expects to ship its next billion drives in less than five years. Of course, with all this "cloud computing" talk we'd think drive sales have to slow down at some point, but there's certainly no sign of our GB appetites abating just yet. Now if you'll excuse us, we need to download this 7GB MMO demo to a secondary hard drive.

Seagate sues SSD maker STEC

Seagate was talking a big game last month about how SSD makers like Samsung and Intel were infringing its patents, and the company wasn't joking around, following up all that tough talk with... what appears to be a test case against relatively minor vendor STEC. Seagate says STEC's drives violate four patents it holds on SSD interfaces and that while "it's not a big financial issue yet," the company wants "to set things straight." As you'd expect, STEC doesn't feel quite as casual about the situation, saying that it's been making SSDs since 1994, before any of Seagate's patents were filed, and that it's going to aggressively defend Seagate's "desperate" claims and seek to invalidate its patents. many of which it believes aren't even relevant to SSD technology. That sounds like a fight to us -- get ready for some nonstop paperwork legal thrills, people.

Read - NYT article about the suit
Read - Official STEC response

Seagate warns it might sue SSD makers for patent infringement

It may already be dipping its own toes into the wild new world of solid state hard drives, but Seagate apparently isn't so keen on others ditching traditional hard drives, and it's now indicating that it might even sue 'em if SSD really starts to catch on. That word comes from none other than Seagate CEO Bill Watkins, who told Fortune recently that he's "convinced" that SSD makers like Samsung and Intel are violating some of Seagate's patents (as well as Western Digital's) that deal with the way a "storage device communicates with a computer." Somewhat curiously though, especially given Seagate's own plans, Watkins doesn't see SSD catching on in a big way anytime soon, saying that, "realistically, I just don't see the flash notebook sell." As Fortune points out, however, if prices keep dropping at the rate they have been, that "sell" could soon be a whole lot easier to make, which would also make that lawsuit quite a bit more likely.

[Via Slashdot]



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