Seagate has as we mentioned before launched a whole bunch of new drives. Altogether 10 new drives and among them a new flagship for its Barracuda series, Barracuda 7800.9 with a capacity of 500GB. A quite expected move considering both Hitachi and Maxtor already announced 500GB models. Barracuda 7200.9 uses the SATA-300 interface, 16MB cache and supports NCQ. The 500GB model has also found its way into the external series with support for Firewire 800 (IEEE 1394b) .
Seagate has been going out strong with its CE-series (Consumer Electronics) and launched 5 new models. We can look forward to a special model for car installations and a model for game consoles (Xbox 360?) with low power consumption and low level of noise.
The entire list of new drives can be found below.
New Consumer Electronics Drives
Seagate’s innovations for CE include new offerings designed to enable applications for the emerging “terabyte life,” where digital storage is creating exciting new products and even new lifestyles. From automobiles and entertainment, to home theater, handheld audio, video, communications and computing, Seagate’s new consumer electronics offerings include:
- The EE25 Series — a breakthrough hard drive designed specifically for use in cars, the world’s first hard drive with extreme environmental resistance that can operate in temperatures from -30 to 85 degrees C and in high-humidity and high-altitude environments. With the industry’s most stringent design for ruggedness, durability and protection from hostile environments, the drive will be an ideal choice to deliver the massive capacity needed for auto makers, system manufacturers and aftermarket companies to create DVD-free navigation systems and high-quality car entertainment services.
- The ST1 Series — the first 8GB 1-inch hard drive designed for use in handheld and CompactFlash applications. It will let users store the industry’s largest libraries of music (200 hours – or 4,000 songs), video and digital photos for this class of product. Seagate’s unique RunOn Technology improves performance while in a high-vibration environment, such as jogging. The ST1 Series supports low-power modes, and the drive’s time-to-ready is a mere 1.2 seconds.
- The LD25 Series — the first 2.5-inch hard drive designed for the latest game consoles, and smaller, cooler-running and more cost-effective small footprint PCs and home entertainment devices. Today’s home technology must come packaged in system designs that fit style criteria as much as they support technology requirements. Increasingly, this means smaller, thinner, lighter systems that require smaller form factor hard drives. The drive’s power consumption specs are ideal for low-power systems and add-on storage device requirements, and its whisper-quiet operation will deliver pure enjoyment of digital media.
- The DB35 Series — with a new 500GB capacity – the industry’s highest – for DVR and home entertainment systems. It will provide up to 85 hours of High-Definition TV recording, 500 hours of standard TV recording, and up to 10 simultaneous TV streams. DynaPlay Technology fine-tunes the drive’s operating parameters for entertainment applications, including performance for uninterrupted digital media, security to enhance fair use of digital programming, and power to give manufacturers more leeway in selecting cost-efficient power supplies and keep internal temperatures under control.
- The 8GBCompactFlash Photo Hard Drive — with a new, unmatched 8,000 MB capacity in a tiny 1-inch size for digital cameras. Capable of storing 2,400 high-resolution (6 megapixel) and 6,400 standard-resolution (3 megapixel) digital photos. It will be sold through select retail outlets.
Mobile/Notebook Drives
More users are replacing aging desktop PCs with fast, high-capacity notebook computers. Higher capacity, performance and stronger data security are key drivers of this trend. Seagate’s new products in this space will deliver new capabilities in all three areas, including:
- Momentus 5400.3 — the first 2.5-inch notebook drive utilizing perpendicular recording. Seagate’s new 160GB disc drive will combine higher 5,400-rpm performance with 25 percent more capacity than the largest notebook drive currently available. The entire disc drive industry will eventually need to transition to the new perpendicular recording technology, and with this announcement, Seagate has now stated its claim to be there first.
- Momentus FDE — Seagate will offer hardware-based full disc encryption technology on its new Momentus FDE family of hard drives, providing the industry’s strongest protection against unauthorized access to data on stolen or retired notebook PCs. FDE technology requires only a user key to encrypt all data, not just selected files or partitions, on the drive.
Desktop PC Drives
- The New Barracuda 7200.9 — combining 3GB/s SATA-interface throughput – double that of first-generation SATA – with 500GB of capacity, 16 Mbytes of cache and Native Command Queuing (NCQ). The new flagship drive in the Barracuda family, the most popular PC disc drives in the world, will provide higher performance, capacity and the quietest operation in a desktop PC hard drive.
External Drives
Today’s expansion of Seagate’s family of external hard drives focuses on new interfaces and capacities, including:
- The new Seagate External Hard Drive — the first external drive with 500GB of capacity from a major hard drive maker. Seagate will also introduce the new FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b) interface for the external hard drive, the fastest FireWire ever, capable of supporting data rates up to 800Mbps.
- The new Seagate Portable External Hard Drive — with an enormous 120GB capacity – the most in its class. In addition, for the first time the Seagate Portable Drive will offer a fast FireWire (IEEE 1394a) option, for robust, on-the-go storage.
Source: Seagate
