The Thunderbolt revolution is finally starting to arrive. Seagate have released their Thunderbolt GoFlex external hard drive docking bay which uses a 10Gb/s interface to connect hard drives. Given the fact the fastest hard drives can use up to 6Gb/s on SATA III and there is 10Gb/s available, all bottlenecks have been eliminated that were previously found with USB 3.0. The docking bay will allow you to use any 2.5″ or 3.5″ hard drive as storage over the Thunderbolt interface. It works by simply sliding and locking in a hard drive device device to the industry-standard SATA power+data interface combo and then plugging in the adapter to the host using a Thunderbolt cable. The Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter is going to retail at $99.99 and since shipping has already started expect to see it in shops within a week.

Source: TPU

Seagate purchased the company Evault Inc back in 2006 for a sizeable $185 million. They kept the company as it was until about 2008 when they decided they would rename it from EVault to i365 to reflect the fact it is available 365 days of the year and the obligatory i to show some sort of technical nature to the brand. However, Seagate has now decided that i365 has no brand recognition whatsoever, in fact more people remember the old EVault branding and consequently Seagate is restoring the name back to that.

Certainly not the smartest move Seagate have ever made, but in the end this decision is probably best for the company.

Source: The Register

Western Digital last week announced plans to slash warranties across the board and offer customers the chance to buy these back. It was a below-the-belt cost cutting method that could even turn around to make them a profit. Seagate has reportedly been up to the exact same thing. An extract from Seagate to its partners states that:

“Effective December 31, 2011, Seagate will be changing its warranty policy from a 5 year to a 3 year warranty period for Nearline drives, 5 years to 1 year for certain Desktop and Notebook Bare Drives, 5 years to 3 years on Barracuda XT and Momentus XT, and from as much as 5 years to 2 years on Consumer Electronics.”

The hard drives which get massacred the most are the Barracuda Green drives which decline from a 5 year warranty to just a 1 year warranty. The 2.5″ Momentus drives also suffer the same fate. The full list of warranty alterations is as follows ( remember they all previously had 5 year warranties):

• Constellation 2 and ES.2 drives: 3 years
• Barracuda and Barracuda Green 3.5-inch drives: 1 year
• Barracuda XT: 3 years
• Momentus 2.5-inch (5400 and 7200rpm): 1 year
• Momentus XT: 3 years
• SV35 Series – Video Surveillance: 2 years
• Pipeline HD Mini, Pipeline HD: 2 years

Back in 2008 Seagate lowered its hard drive warranties from 5 years to 3 years in a move that angered the consumer market and the trend quickly spread with 3 years being the new standard for warranty. Now it seems Western Digital is taking it one step further, lowering their warranty again from 3 years to 2 years on selected models. The lines that are to be affected by the cut in warranty are Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue hard drives while the Caviar Black, Scorpio Black, A/V drives and external drives all retain the 3 year warranty. The transition takes place over the next few months and customers can check if their drive has a 2 or 3 year warranty by checking its serial number on the Western Digital website. The new changes come into affect on January 2012…Western Digital’s way of saying Happy New Year to its customers. Western Digital is considering a measure to allow users to essentially buy back the extra 1 year of the warranty and get an extended warranty by paying a bit more, seems like a below-the-belt money grabbing measure to us.

“This new warranty policy will be effective for drives shipped from January 2nd, 2012. It is important that you take a moment to update your website(s) and collateral to reflect this change for effected drives shipped after January 1st, 2012.

All drives shipped to distributors prior to Jan. 2nd 2012 will retain the current warranty terms. Because of existing inventory in the distribution channel there will be a short period of time when some drives with a 3-year warranty will be sold at the same time as drives with a 2-year warranty.

If you have any doubt about the warranty of a drive you purchased, you can go to support.wdc.com, select Warranty and RMA Services and proceed to the Warranty Check page.”

Source: The Register

Seagate Technology plc., updated its financial outlook for the December 2011 and March 2012 quarters. The company continues to believe that, due to the industry impacts caused by the extensive flooding in Thailand, hard disk drive supply will be significantly constrained for several quarters. For the December 2011 quarter, the company believes the industry will ship between 110-120 million units.

The company believes the industry’s ability to manufacture and ship hard disks drives will gradually improve throughout calendar 2012. While this may alleviate some of the unit demand shortfall, it is expected that some companies will optimize unit shipments by manufacturing lower component count/lower capacity hard disk drives; thereby, only modestly offsetting the growing petabyte shortage. Because demand is estimated to significantly exceed supply during this time, pricing is expected to remain stable.

Financial Outlook
The company’s component and disk drive factories in Thailand have not been directly affected by the flood; however, the company’s ability to manufacture hard disk drives has been impacted due to external component supply constraints as first disclosed on October 12, 2011.

For the December 2011 quarter, the company now expects unit shipments of approximately 43 million units and revenue of approximately $2.8 billion. Gross margin as a percent of revenue is expected to be 150-300 basis points above the high-end of the company’s long-term, targeted gross margin range of 22-26%. Operating expenses (R&D and SG&A) are expected to be approximately $400 million. Expenses related to the acquisition of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd’s (“Samsung”) hard disk drive business and any revenue or operating expenses of the acquired business following the closing date cannot be estimated at this time and are therefore excluded from this outlook. The company continues to expect to close the acquisition of Samsung’s hard disk drive business by the end of December 2011.

The company’s outlook for the March 2012 quarter assumes requisite regulatory approvals are received and the Samsung acquisition closes in December of 2011. The company also continues to work with its external suppliers to restore the component supply chain, and now expects that in the March quarter it will be capable of shipping a mix of products in terms of capacity per drive and expected market similar to pre-flood levels.

Currently, for the March 2012 quarter, the company expects unit shipments to increase sequentially. Revenue is expected to be at least $3.75 billion and gross margin as a percent of revenue is expected to be at least 300 basis points above the aforementioned targeted range of 22-26%. The outlook for the March 2012 quarter excludes certain costs related to the integration of the acquired Samsung hard disk drive operations which cannot be estimated at this time.

The financial outlook provided today does not include the arbitration award previously disclosed on November 21, 2011.

Source: Press Release

Seagate is now shipping the second generation of Momentus XT, its groundbreaking solid state hybrid drive for consumer and commercial laptops and the company’s fastest drive ever for personal computers. With a simple drive upgrade, users can boost boot-up speed and overall performance to turbo-charge their laptop PC. Seven original equipment manufacturers are gearing up to ship laptops powered by the Momentus XT drive. The drive is now available at online retailers Amazon, Canada Computers, CDW, Memory Express, NCIX, Newegg, and TigerDirect.

Powering the Momentus XT drive are Seagate’s Adaptive Memory and FAST Factor technologies. Adaptive Memory technology works by identifying data usage patterns, and then moving the most frequently retrieved information to solid state memory for faster access. Adaptive Memory effectively tailors hard drive performance to each user and the applications they use. FAST Factor technology blends the strengths of SSDs and hard disk drives for faster access to applications, quicker bootup and higher overall system speed.

“Laptop users want faster access to all of their content, from gaming, music and video to spreadsheets and documents, creating strong demand for the highest performance,” said Scott Horn, vice president of Worldwide Marketing at Seagate. “Seagate is excited to answer this need with a second-generation Momentus XT drive that delivers solid state drive (SSD) speed, greater storage capacity and easy installation at an affordable price.”

“High-speed storage devices make a difference when it comes to improving overall PC performance,” said John Rydning, research vice president at IDC. “Seagate’s newest Momentus XT drive gives notebook PC users an economical option for boosting PC performance while at the same time providing spacious storage capacity all in one device.”

Momentus XT – Meeting the need for speed
The Momentus XT drive is nearly 70 percent faster than the prior Momentus drive version and up to three times faster than a traditional hard disk drive while providing 750GB of storage capacity. The Momentus XT hard drive’s Serial ATA 6Gb/second interface and 8 gigabytes of Single Level Cell NAND flash double the interface and NAND read-write speed of the previous generation. The all-in-one design of Momentus XT drive makes installation and upgrading simple and easy for any laptop or desktop computer and with any operating system.

The Momentus XT drive is now shipping in volume worldwide. Manufacturer’s Suggesting Retail Pricing (MSRP) for Momentus XT 750GB is $245.

Join a Seagate webinar for a chance to win a laptop powered by Momentus XT
Learn more about solid state hybrid drive technology and Seagate’s new Momentus XT drive by joining a live webcast on Tuesday, December 6, at 11 a.m. PST. Sign up for a chance to win a high-performance laptop powered by Momentus XT here.

Tuning Momentus XT for Optimal Performance
The hard drive industry is transitioning from the current 512-byte sector standard to a newer Advanced Format 4K (4096-byte) sector size that helps maintain data integrity at higher storage densities and capacities. Momentus XT takes advantage of this newer Advanced Format 4K standard and is already tuned for optimal performance on the latest PC operating systems.

Momentus XT customers can easily optimize Momentus XT to work with Windows XP and older versions of Microsoft Windows with a few simple steps. Please visit this page on the Seagate web site to determine if Momentus XT is already tuned for your operating system version and how to do so if needed.

Source: Press Release

Seagate is streamlining its flagship family of desktop drives under a single product that hones in on performance and big capacities to help satisfy the explosive growth in content creation and consumption by businesses and consumers worldwide. The new Barracuda family makes it easier for consumers to find the product they need and reduces costs for Seagate’s original equipment manufacturer and distribution channel customers by reducing the number of product qualifications and amount of inventory they need to manage.

“A simpler desktop drive product family is exactly what Seagate customers are asking for,” said Scott Horn, vice president of Marketing at Seagate. “The new Barracuda family reflects the reality that end-users want a full range of hard drive capacities and as much performance as we can give them to help manage and store massive amounts of digital content. In addition, our OEM and channel customers want to reduce overhead costs by having fewer product lines to qualify and manage in their inventory.”

Desktop PC performance is growing in importance as computer users consume and otherwise use more and more multimedia – a blend of text, audio, images, animation and video – and other rich-content files in areas as diverse as business, advertising, art, education, entertainment, engineering, medicine, mathematics and science. Higher hard drive performance often means a faster computer and quicker access to this content.

The new Barracuda hard drive – to be available first at online retailers Amazon, CDW, Newegg and TigerDirect – is designed for desktop, tower or all-in-one personal computers; workstations, home and small business servers; network-attached storage devices; direct-attached storage expansion; and home and small-business RAID solutions. Capacities of the family range from 250GB to a massive 3TB.

The simplification of the Barracuda family comes as Seagate begins volume shipments of its 1TB-per-disk Barracuda hard drive. Seagate plans to end production of its Barracuda® Green drive in February 2012. Seagate analysis shows that its new Barracuda drives have a nearly identical power-consumption profile as energy-efficient desktop drives but deliver much higher performance. Barracuda XT, Seagate’s fastest desktop hard drive, will be folded into the new Barracuda family and re-emerge, in name, as the company’s desktop solid state hybrid drive.

Technical Specifications
The new Barracuda hard drive features a SATA 6 Gb/s interface, 7200 RPM spin speed and up to 64 MB cache to deliver high performance across all capacities. Seagate’s SmartAlign technology, a feature of Seagate’s Barracuda Green drives, will continue to ship with the flagship Barracuda drives to help the hard drive industry segue from the current 512-byte sector standard for hard drives to the new 4096-byte sector size. The new 4K standard enables the use of stronger error correction algorithms to maintain data integrity at higher storage densities and capacities.

Environmental Commitment
Seagate is committed to building hard drives to the highest quality and environmental standards. More than 70 percent of materials used in its storage products are recyclable, and all of its products are halogen-free and comply with the rigorous REACH standard. These and other initiatives at Seagate are what truly make a difference to the environment.

Source: Press Release

Seagate

Seagate Technology plc today reported financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2011. The company shipped 51 million disk drives and reported revenue of $2.8 billion, gross margin of 19.5%, net income of $140 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.32. On a non-GAAP basis, which excludes the net impact of certain items, Seagate reported net income of $146 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.34 for the quarter ended September 30, 2011. For a detailed reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP results, see accompanying financial tables.

Additionally, Seagate returned $75 million to shareholders in the form of a dividend and repurchased $128 million of ordinary shares during the first fiscal quarter.

Acquisition of Samsung’s Hard Disk Drive Assets

The European Commission announced on October 19, 2011 that they have approved under the EU Merger Regulation, Seagate’s proposed acquisition of Samsung’s hard disk drive assets. The company will continue to work with other regulatory bodies to secure additional approvals in the coming weeks. Seagate believes the transaction will close by the end of calendar year 2011.

Western Digital

Western Digital Corp, today reported revenue of $2.7 billion, hard-drive unit shipments of 58 million and net income of $239 million, or $1.01 per share, for its first fiscal quarter ended Sept. 30, 2011. The company’s results include expenses of $21 million associated with the planned acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) announced Mar. 7, 2011 and unrelated litigation accruals. Excluding these expenses, non-GAAP net income was $260 million or $1.10 per share.

In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $2.4 billion, net income of $197 million, or $0.84 per share, and shipped 51 million hard drives. The company generated $352 million in cash from operations during the September quarter, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $3.7 billion. For more information, refer to First Quarter Fiscal 2012 Investor Information Summary.

Comparison

Source: Press Releases

An employee at Seagate has stated that now Seagate has 1TB a disk technology and has the ability to combine 5 disks into each 3.5″ drive, they will soon be able to produce a 5TB drive. He specified a time period of 3 months and stated that Seagate has been working hard to ensure it is the first in the market to bring out a 5TB drive as it was the market first with 500GB and 1TB disk platters.

Seagate plans to introduce its five platter based 4TB drive in November based off five 800GB platters and then a couple of months after that it will introduce the 5TB drive based off five of the 1TB platters. Both of these drives will come in the GoFlex disk line first as 7200RPM external drives. We are not sure how much either of these will retail for but on launch they certainly will not be cheap. You can see the whole interview with the Seagate Employee here, 6 minutes onwards is the point of interest to hear him discuss the upcoming 5TB drives.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Source

Yet another industry first for Seagate, we have reached a new high-capacity in the 3.5-inch hard drive form factor. At Seagate, we are committed to pushing the limits for our customers and will continue to adapt and innovate our products based on customer needs,” said Patrick Connolly, vice president and general manager of Retail products for Seagate. “This latest GoFlex® Desk drive offering, with its new industry-leading capacity point, is a statement of our continued commitment to meet consumer needs.

The drive has USB 2.0 and 3.0 connectivity but also includes the GoFlex Desk desktop adapter that lets you upgrade to a faster interface to increase your transfer speeds, the included pre-loaded software ensures automatic continuous backup and protects your privacy with powerful encryption software, and features an illuminated capacity gauge, the drive can also be used as network storage when combined with the GoFlex Home adapter.

The device is both Windows and Mac OSX compatible, the GoFlex Desk 4TB drive has the space to contain over 2000 HD movies so will easily meet the storage needs of most users.

The Momentus XT solid state hybrid drive, which is based around a 7200 RPM hard drive in capacities up to 500GB as well as a small 4GB of onbaord solid state memory. Seagate’s Adaptive Memory technology cleverly pieces these together to give up to 50% improvement on the more traditional laptop hard drives. The Adaptive Memory Technology optimises the performance of the drive as it moves frequently used files/data into the solid state memory, giving faster bootup and application access.

“Seagate’s shipment of its one millionth Momentus XT drive is just the beginning of a bright future for solid state hybrid drives,” said John Rydning, research director at IDC. “Fast, capacious, and economical hybrid HDD and NAND flash storage solutions like the Momentus XT drive will be found in roughly 25 percent of all new PCs shipped in 2015.”

“With Momentus XT hybrid drives, laptop users don’t have to make trade-offs when buying a system based on speed, cost or capacity,” said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate executive vice president, chief sales and marketing officer. “We’re delighted that the Momentus XT drive has been enthusiastically received in the marketplace and look forward to introducing the next generation of the product, which will give consumers an even better, faster computing experience, before the year is out.”

Seagate has seen a lot of success with this drive, especially since Alienware, ASUS, Dell Sony and Toshiba (to name a few) now offer their laptops with the option of the Seagate Momentus Hybrid drive as an alternative to both conventional hard drives and smaller capacity Solid Sate Drives.

Hopefully we will be able to get our hands on one of these for review very soon.

There are lots of advantages to external hard-drives, but not quite as many as a purely portable drive. First and foremost it allows you to safeguard your data, those precious documents, or that music library that has taken you years to collect. Secondly it allows you to access data where ever you are, whether it is at home, school, university, sat on a train or whatever else takes your fancy that particular day. While USB memory sticks offer the perfectly compact solution for moving around data, they are rather expensive for the capacities available, especially when compared to a standard mechanical hard drive.

The reason memory sticks are so expensive is they use flash memory, similar to the likes of SSD’s, whereas portable drives are nearly exclusively made up of a mechanical hard drive. While flash memory of course has more positives than negatives over mechanical disk drives, for instance, much quicker performance, they will always fall down at the price point.

Seagate have tried to combine the best of both worlds into one drive, aiming to give you improved performance through the USB 3.0 interface while giving you the larger capacities of the mechanical hard disk drives. While the brand FreeAgent GoFlex features various different interfaces, the latest and hopefully the best is the USB 3.0, as such these Portable drives can be purchased with the USB 3.0 interface or can be upgraded at a later date, they are for want of another phrase, flexible.

]]> http://www.eteknix.com/reviews/storage/seagate-freeagent-goflex-pro-ultra-portable-drive-usb-3-0-review/feed/ 0 http://www.eteknix.com/news/disk-manufacturer-seagate-releases-battery-powered-wi-fi-external-hard-drive/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=disk-manufacturer-seagate-releases-battery-powered-wi-fi-external-hard-drive http://www.eteknix.com/news/disk-manufacturer-seagate-releases-battery-powered-wi-fi-external-hard-drive/#comments Tue, 17 May 2011 16:27:00 +0000 Ryan Martin http://127.0.0.1/order45/?p=910

Seagate has released a new hard drive that works in a unique way. Designed for mobile computing the disk drive supports 802.11 b/g/n wi-fi to allow you to connect it to your laptop or other device. The hard drive also features a rechargeable battery so that it doesn’t need to draw on the power of your device and reduce the battery life of that. Seagate has branded it the “GoFlex Satellite Mobile Wireless Storage” and they plan to introduce it at a retail price of $200 from July onwards.

The reported battery life of the disk drive is expected to be 5 hours under full load or 25 hours on standby. An “iOS” app has been made to increase the compatiblity of this drive with mobile devices especially since Seagate claims that this disk drive is primarily for the users of tablets and ipads that want mobile functionality and increased storage for their media files.

This is what Seagate had to say about their new product:

Seagate has released a new hard drive that works in a unique way. Designed for mobile computing the disk drive supports 802.11 b/g/n wi-fi to allow you to connect it to your laptop or other device. The hard drive also features a rechargeable battery so that it doesn’t need to draw on the power of your device and reduce the battery life of that. Seagate has branded it the “GoFlex Satellite Mobile Wireless Storage” and they plan to introduce it at a retail price of $200 from July onwards.

The reported battery life of the disk drive is expected to be 5 hours under full load or 25 hours on standby. An “iOS” app has been made to increase the compatiblity of this drive with mobile devices especially since Seagate claims that this disk drive is primarily for the users of tablets and ipads that want mobile functionality and increased storage for their media files.

This is what Seagate had to say about their new product:

“With the growth of the tablet and iPad markets and the larger volumes of high-quality media now being consumed, there is a clear need for access to content that is not plagued with the challenges of streamed video over the Internet, he unfortunate fact is that these popular new mobile devices are hampered by their limited storage capacity while one of their primary functions is that of media consumption.”

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Check out http://www.eteknix.com shortly for the full review on this product.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This particlar drive comes with a 5 year warranty, is quiet and uses the USB 2.0 interface.

Its perfect for storing photos, music and videos.

Click here to view the embedded video.