Photo: Seagate

True to their word that they would keep investing heavily and rapidly in ever-expanding drive capacity, Seagate this week unveiled the world’s first ever external 3TB external drive.

GoFlex that capacity muscle

Called the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk, this world’s first external 3TB external drive is priced at an extremely cheap $250.

Seagate believes increasing demand for HD film downloads will make the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk an interesting proposition for potential customers. At this capacity, Seagate is claiming it can store 120 HD Movies, using 25GB per film as its reference file size.

Why you may not want this

All is not well, though. From an engineering perspective, having not had hands-on time with the 3TB FreeAgent GoFlex Desk, we cannot rule in favour of or against the Seagate drive. The one very serious problem, however, comes in if you, as a potential buyer, consider this as a replacement for all your storage problems, by storing all your data in one place. Not only is there a serious security risk of having that much data in one place, but if your drive goes belly-up, that’s a lot of data to lose. And, even if you can recover that data, you will likely burn a hole in your pocket to do so. Be weary.

It’s good for consumer storage, in general

The big payoff, however, is for storage in general, with this increased capacity likely to depress the price of external storage solutions in general. External hard drive prices are likely to fall across the board. Good on you Seagate, and here’s to hoping the pricing disruption takes place soon.

If a 3TB external drive is too much storage for you, there are a host of 1TB external storage solutions and 2TB external storage solutions available on the market, too.

Seagate, a world leader in the manufacturing of high performance hard disk drives, in association with Western Digital has recently unleashed a new sophisticated hard drive named the Barracuda 7200.12 HDD. It’s a 3.5 inch hard drive running at speed of 7200-RPM. It has got an aerial density of 329 Gigabits per square inch and hence the performance it gives is outstanding. The Barracuda has got only two platters and offers 1TB of storage space.

This hard drive is developed to bolster the most demanding PC applications. It has got a 3Gb/sec Serial ATA interface, that’s the industry’s leading standard offering incredible data read/write rates. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 3.5 inch hard drive will also be released in 750GB and 500GB storage capacities with a built in high speed cache memory of 32MB and 16MB respectively.

The company also announced its Constellation hard drives. The Constellation series has got two speedy and reliable hard drives. One measures 2.5 inches and the other measures 3.5 inches. Both the drives are optimised for enterprise level deployment and feature Seagate’s PowerChoice technology that reduces the power consumption by up to 54 percent. The Constellation 2.5-inch hard drive is available in 160GB and 500GB storage capacities and the 3.5 inch Constellation HDD comes in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. Both versions of the Constellation series are available with SATA as well as SAS interface.

A few years ago International Business Machines, popularly known as IBM was unable to develop fault free Deskstar 75GXP hard disk drives. The company formed a negative image in the market and users were used to calling the Deskstar drives Deathstars. History has now repeated itself. The only difference is this time the Seagate is on the target.

Recently, the company’s firmware patch malfunctioned badly for the users of barracuda 7200.11 hard disk drives with DiamondMax22 and Barracuda ES.2 models, such as the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 250 GB, for example. The firmware bug caused sudden crash of 500GB and 1TB Barracuda hard drives. The company has withdrawn the firmware update for further development, fixing and extensive lab testing. As of now the users are advised to roll back to the previous firmware as Seagate moves in to fix the problem. The company however claims that the firmware malfunction do not results in data loss. All the stored stuff still resides on the drive.

According to Seagate,” There is no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive. But if you are unable to access your data due to this issue, Seagate will provide free data recovery services. Seagate will work with you to expedite a remedy to minimize any disruption to you or your business.”

Seagate, the world’s top notch maker of high performance hard disk drives has recently expanded its Cheetah hard drives line up by introducing two new Cheetah models named the Cheetah 15K.7 and Cheetah NS.2. Cheetah hard drives are known for their performance, speed and reliability and these two newbies are targeted at enhancing these three prime attributes.

These drives are ideal for use in corporate IT environments based on a standard 3.5-inch enterprise infrastructure. They are optimised for low power consumption and offer the advantage of low drive replacement costs and low storage cost per gigabyte. As of now, the new Cheetah hard drives are the largest capacity mission critical drives and come in 600GB storage capacity, which is larger than the 400GB provided by the older Seagate Cheetah NS hard drive. Seagate build them exclusively for 3.5-inch Tier 1 storage applications. Both the drives are powered via 2nd-generation PowerTrim technology that enables dynamic power consumption management. It actually makes the drives smart enough to adjust the power consumption according to the level of activities.

John Rydning, IDC’s research director for hard disk drives said, “External storage system OEMs continue to consume the majority of 3.5-inch performance-optimized HDDs shipped each quarter, whereas server manufacturers consumed nearly all of the 2.5-inch SFF performance-optimized HDDs that shipped in 2008. Seagate’s new 3.5-inch Cheetah disk drives with up to 600GBs of capacity will fill a critical need for both its customers and end users looking to extend the life of existing external storage system platforms.”

The world’s leading manufacturer of hard disk drives (HDDs), Seagate, has recently decided to reduce the warranty period of all the products it sells to distributors and computer makers from 5 to 3 years. The Seagate desktop, notebook and consumer electronics drives sold to customers, such as the Seagate Barracuda, will only feature a 3-year warranty. However, certain Seagate products for retail and enterprise consumers will continue to offer a full five year warranty. Previously, all the Seagate products were offering a five year warranty but now only the Seagate enterprise drives and certain Seagate and Maxtor branded retail products will feature a five year warranty.

According to Seagate, “Based on our data, we know that 95% of all returns take place during the first three years, so by offering a 3-year warranty, we can make other aspects of our customer support and warranty programs more attractive with negligible impact to customer product return needs. The 3-year limited warranty on laptop, desktop and consumer electronics bare drives offers new advantages and enhancements to the business proposition for our channel customers while improving cost efficiencies for Seagate We expect little, if any change for consumers – since hard drives used in computer systems other devices are covered by the individual manufacturer’s warranty.”

Netbooks have surged in popularity since their inception only a little over a year ago. These devices offer the functionality of a laptop, but with a much smaller size and compact form and price. As a result they are preferred over any other mobile computing device currently available on the market.

To drive the already very low netbook prices down even further, three major hard disk drive manufacturers, i.e. Seagate, Western Digital and Hitachi, are now working on a new 2.5 inch low cost HDD which to be installed in netbooks. According to these companies, the new netbook HDDs will be 40 to 50 percent cheaper than the current ones and will play an important part in increasing the demand of netbooks next year. However, making quality products with a compact form factor and low price is a big challenge for the companies but it is still a realistic target.

The hard drive manufacturers will cut production costs by minimising the cost of integrated circuits, platters and heads. The first low cost HDD will offer a storage space of 80GB and use a single platter. Afterwards, the 120GB version will hit the market. Once the new low cost netbook HDDs will get launched in the market it will definitely discourage the users to go for SSDs, like the OCZ SATA II 2.5 SSD, which are very expensive.

Tags for this article: mobile, netbook, netbooks

Seagate has launched its new range of hard disks that are intended to provide high-level data security. Designed for executive notebooks the new Momentus FDE (full-disk encryption) hard drives are backed by McAfee’s software for the enterprise-wide management of notebooks.

These hard drives provide full data protection in the event of lost or stolen notebook. It has got the powerful government-grade encryption that is the best for securing sensitive information such as customer database, official documents or any other private data. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator management system and endpoint encryption client are the applications that are used with the Seagate Momentus FDE hard drives while implementing embedded hardware encryption. These hard drives offer complete security under heterogeneous environments. They are available in 5400 and 7200rpm models. Presently the maximum storage capacity offered by these drives is 320 GB but the hardware market will welcome the 500 GB (half a terabyte) disks soon.

These secure hard drives from Seagate are simple to use and install. The end user need not interact with the complex security policies. Instead, he has to authenticate himself by simply entering a BIOS password and that’s all. The drive automatically secures the data transparently without affecting the system’s performance.