If you’ve recently purchased an Apple iMac, you should keep your eyes peeled for an email from Apple. The company on Friday announced it would be replacing potentially faulty Seagate 1TB hard drives that were shipped in iMacs for fear they could ‘fail under certain conditions.’

Free programme

The iMac 1TB Seagate Hard Drive Replacement Program is being carried out for free, with Apple saying that it affects a ‘very small number’ of the 1TB drives being used in 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs that were sold from May 2011 through to July 2011. Apple said it would directly contact iMac owners who had provided the company with a valid email address when they registered their new iMacs.

If, however, you did not provide Apple with your email address, yet fear you may have purchased an iMac with the faulty Seagate drive, you can enter your Mac’s serial number on Apple’s replacement programme page to see if you are eligible for the Hard Drive Replacement Program.

A blunder in a sea of victory

Apple, which has had to recall a small number of iPads, too, recently, often escapes unscathed when it blunders. The same cannot be said for its competitors, like RIM whose BlackBerry Playbook recall got plenty of negative press coverage.

Much of this is obviously attributable to their relative prospects – Apple is scoring colossal victory after colossal victory with iPhone and iPad sales through the roof, so a recall can go ignored.

RIM, in the interest of keeping with our example above, are struggling with sales of the company’s devices plummeting dramatically. This means that any blemish, including a product recall, is met with jeers and negative sentiment. Irrespective of whether this is fair or not, it is how it currently is.

Get to it

Anyhow, Apple has said that the replacement programme for the faulty Seagate drive extends to 23 July 2012, but the company says this did not extend the standard warranty coverage period for your iMac. Also, make sure to back up your drive before sending it off, since this is not a service the Cupertino folks provide.

One of the biggest limitations of tablet PCs in their current incarnation is storage space. Seagate is attempting to rectify this problem with its GoFlex Satellite, an external hard drive that is battery-powered and connect wirelessly to any device that has wi-fi.

Sleek solution

Effectively, the Seagate GoFlex Satellite hard drive allows you to add up to 500GB of extra storage for your mobile devices, from your iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, to Android devices, and most any other device that requires storage and has built-in wi-fi.

A Mi-fi like solution for storage

Seagate touts one of the big advantages of this device as allowing tablet PC buyers to opt for a device with less storage, effectively saving money, safe in the knowledge that they can store media content externally. And, with it being battery-powered and portable, you can still carry the content around with you.

Very happy, as expected

As is to be expected, the team behind the Seagate GoFlex Satellite external hard drives is gushing about the range. Vice president and general manager of Seagate’s retail group, Patrick Connolly, says: ‘With the GoFlex Satellite mobile wireless storage, we wished to create an elegant solution that provides real value to the multitude of iPad users out there by delivering a seamless connection to local storage.’

He continues: ‘With GoFlex Satellite, people will be able to carry their entire media library with them without the need for wires or the web at a fraction of the cost of adding 3G or purchasing or a higher capacity tablet.’

Pricing and availability

With the Seagate GoFlex Satellite costing $200 (around £125) for 500GB of external storage, you might be better of just buying a tablet PC with the maximum storage available to you. Given that it’s priced much higher than other external hard drives with the same capacity, we advise you weigh the pros and cons carefully before jumping in.

Samsung, who was reportedly seeking a buyer for its ailing hard drive business, has found one in Samsung. The storage giant will reportedly buy the ops for Samsung hard drive business operations for $1.375 billion (£934m).

The deal will see a Seagate Samsung hook up that involves the storage giant paying for half of Sammy in cash and paying the balance in shares. Speaking on the matter, CEO and president of Seagate, Steve Luczo, said: ‘consolidation is really reflective of the needs of the industry to make new investments in capital and technology to continue to provide these devices that are in such huge demand.’

Quality and design is what we bought

He described Samsung’s business as having fantastic design and manufacturing capabilities, but was too capital intensive and lacked scale. Seagate Technology hopes to change this. He explained that: ‘By aligning in this way, we expect to achieve greater sales and deliver a broader range of innovative storage products and solutions to our customers, while facilitating our long-term relationship with Samsung.’

With respect to design capabilities, Luczo says: ‘I think it’s important for everyone to realize though that Samsung is a very capable designer and producer of hard disk drives and there’s a lot of technology ownership that Samsung has both on the design side and on the production side.’

Seagate and Samsung, sitting in a desktop?

What comes of the Seagate Samsung hard drive relationship will be interesting. This acquisiton does not change the fact that solid state drives are threatening the livelihood of moving parts drives, which is exactly what Seagate has just bought into.

Hopefully the Seagate Samsung hard disk venture will see the resultant entity produce top quality hard drives at more economical prices. What it will mean from a business stand point is far more interesting.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

]]> http://www.mobile-computing-news.co.uk/mobile-computer-news/835/hard-drives-for-netbooks-getting-cheaper-pushing-overall-prices-down.html/feed 0 http://www.mobile-computing-news.co.uk/mobile-computing-accessory-news/686/momentus-fdenew-self-encrypting-notebook-hdd-by-seagate.html http://www.mobile-computing-news.co.uk/mobile-computing-accessory-news/686/momentus-fdenew-self-encrypting-notebook-hdd-by-seagate.html#comments Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:56:46 +0000 Alexis http://www.mobile-computing-news.co.uk/?p=686 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.