To meet the growing demand for higher-capacity, more efficient enterprise storage systems, Seagate today introduced the Savvio 10K.3 hard drive - the world's highest-capacity, small form factor 2.5-inch enterprise hard drive built for the demands of enterprise servers and storage arrays. This latest generation of 2.5-inch drive offers 70% lower power and greater than 60% performance density over traditional 3.5-inch drives.

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins, outlined yesterday that his company won't release any solid state drives until next year. "SSDs are not price-competitive yet," Watkins said. First Seagate SSDs will start to appear as late as next year, and target only enterprise market. Seagate has no plans to release SSD drives for consumers because of the high prices and other problems that still part solid state drives from conventional hard disks. "If the cost per gigabyte comes down to 10 cents, maybe," Seagate will focus on SSD storage for consumers, Watkins said. But "It will take three to four years for SSDs to come to parity with hard drives," he thinks. In related news, Bill Watkins also announced plans to introduce 2TB conventional hard drive next year. The exact release date and price information for the 2TB hard drive is still distant though.

At NCTA's Cable Show, Seagate Technology announced it will introduce its Seagate Showcase storage solution, a new series of products that extends the storage capacity of your Digital Video Recorder (DVR), so you never have to say goodbye to your favorite movies and television shows. Seagate also announced that the Showcase family of products will be designed to be compatible with Motorola's market leading e-SATA capable high-definition (HD) digital video recorder (DVR) set-top portfolio.

Seagate Technology today announced that its Momentus 7200.3 hard drive, the industry's first 2.5-inch 7200-rpm, 320GB HDD, now powers Dell XPS laptop PCs and will be available soon in select Alienware laptops - making the leading computer manufacturers first to market with systems featuring high-performance 320GB hard drives. Perfect for performance laptops, workstations and small form factor desktop PCs, the Momentus 7200.3 Serial ATA 3.0 HDD features doubled 16MB cache and a free-fall sensor technology, to help prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped. The hard drive is also lean on power consumption, allowing notebook users to work longer between battery charges, and are virtually inaudible thanks to Seagate's innovative SoftSonic fluid-dynamic bearing motors and QuietStep ramp load technology. Both Dell and Alienware will update their websites soon to include the new storage option on selected XPS and Alienware notebooks.

Seagate Technology announced today that it is the first hard drive manufacturer worldwide to have shipped 1 billion hard drives - a number not only staggering in size but also emblematic of the massive amount of digital content being created in the home, hand, office, car and dozens of other markets. Consider this: the 1 billion hard drives Seagate has delivered equates to approximately 79 million terabytes, able to store 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of your favorite music - and Seagate hard drives and storage solutions enable people to create, share, enjoy and protect more digital content every day.

STEC, a designer, manufacturer and marketer of high performance solid state drives (SSDs), announced today that it has received notice of a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Seagate Technology LLC, Seagate Technology International, Seagate Singapore International Headquarters Pte. Ltd. and Maxtor Corporation in United States District Court, Northern District of California, alleging infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,404,647 (issued in 2002), 6,849,480 (issued in 2005), 6,336,174 (issued in 2002) and 7,042,664 (issued in 2006).

HDD maker Seagate Technology LLC has filed a patent-infringement suit against STEC Inc., a global engineering and manufacturing company for OEM memories and SSD solutions, accusing it of infringing four patents held by Seagate and its Maxtor subsidiary. These patents include solid-state memory storage, memory-backup systems and device self-testing systems. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco and Seagate seeks STEC to stop further infringement of its patents, and asks for damages and royalties to be awarded for violating the Seagate patents. Seagate didn't disclose any specific financial damages it is seeking from STEC.

This is not about stifling innovation or threats to our business. ... We have an obligation to our company and our shareholders to protect what belongs to them.

, said Seagate Chief Executive Bill Watkins in s statement.

Seagate Technology today also introduced a new breed of hard drive, the Cheetah 15K.6 FDE (Full Disk Encryption) disc drive family, the world's first self-encrypting hard drives for mission-critical servers and storage arrays. As part of the award-winning Cheetah family, the industry-standard in performance and reliability in data centers, the new Cheetah 15K.6 FDE hard drive now also encrypts data as well. And that encryption goes anywhere the hard drive goes - whether it is moved, stored, or retired.

Seagate today announced it has begun worldwide shipment of its 1 terabyte (TB) enterprise-class Barracuda ES.2 hard drives with a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. Applications addressing rich media content and collaborative applications like email can benefit from the average 135% performance boost over SATA-interface drives along with robust enterprise features and native compatibility.

Hard drive manufacturer Seagate has quietly updated its Barracuda 7200.11 series of hard drives to now include a 320GB single-platter HDD. Previously starting at 500GB, the 7200.11 family now includes a 3.5-inch 320GB drive with only one platter (model number: ST3320613AS), which features SATA 3.0 Gbps interface, 16MB of cache (no 32MB version available like the other models) and MTBF (mean time before failure) of 750,000 hours. The drive is said to have a slightly lower noise output and power consumption as well as improved read/write characteristics.

Seagate Technology announced it will begin shipping its new Cheetah 15K.6 hard drive this month. Designed for the world's most demanding enterprise storage environments, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive is Seagate's highest-performance hard drive ever in a 3.5-inch form factor, with a 28% increase in sustained data transfer rates compared to previous generations. With this new performance on tap, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive remarkably consumes significantly less power, using up to 61% less energy in both idle and operational modes.

Strengthening its position in the growing notebook hard drive market, Seagate has announced it is currently shipping a 250GB Momentus 5400.4 notebook drive that delivers a compelling combination of capacity, performance and durability for mobile computing.

Today, Seagate Technology announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire MetaLINCS, a technology leader in the fast-growing E-Discovery market. MetaLINCS's innovative, patent-pending software helps companies respond to litigation and regulatory issues that require them to search large volumes of electronic data for relevant information. MetaLINCS will become part of the Seagate Services Group and support its mission to help business customers protect and manage valuable company information. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Seagate is advising those who have purchased a Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 hard drive since August 2007 to check them, if they haven't already, for viruses. Some 3200 drives may have came preloaded with a Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah virus right out of the box. The malicious code is searching for passwords to online games (World of Warcraft included) and sends them back to a server located in China. It can also disable virus detection software. In order to determine whether your drive is preloaded with this virus, feel free to phone Seagate with the serial number in hand, or update your anti-virus software with the latest definitions.

Seagate Technology, the world's largest maker of hard drives, said Monday it is shuttering one of two manufacturing facilities in Northern Ireland, resulting in a cut of 780 employees, about 1.5 percent of the company's global work force. The company is closing a 10-year-old plant in Limavady in County Derry that manufactures substrate materials used in disks for hard drives, Seagate spokesman Woody Monroy said. Monroy did not know how much money the company would save from the move but said it is part of Seagate's ongoing effort to streamline operations. "It's no longer competitive from a business standpoint" to keep the Limavady plant open, Monroy said.

Following false advertising by Seagate with regards to hard drive capacities, overstating capacities by 7% due to the differences between a gigabyte and a giga binary byte (both of which are commonly abbreviated to 'GB'), the company is now required to reimburse customers with either a 5% cash benefit for drives purchased between 22nd March 2001 and 1st January 2006 or a software benefit in the form of a free copy of Seagate Software Suite for drives purchased between 22nd March 2001 and 26th September 2007. To get the cash benefit customers must visit the settlement website and fill out the mail-in form, and to receive the software benefit customers must fill in an online form. This offer is only applicable to hard drives purchased as a discrete unit and not hard drives in pre-built computers.

Seagate has finally started shipping its Momentus 5400 PSD 2.5-inch hybrid hard drive to OEMs. The drive will be available in 80, 120, and 160GB capacities with a SATA 1.5 interface, 8MB of cache, and 256MB of flash memory to buffer cached write requests to disk. Seagate's HHDs are said to reduce boot time from 40 to 32 seconds while cutting average power consumption from 0.78 to 0.45 watts. However, Melissa Johnson, a Seagate product manager, says the sub-par performance for all HHDs stems from first generation issues with both the BIOS and Vista device drivers because they do not know how to properly utilize the flash memory.

Seagate today also launched several other storage devices; the 250GB Momentus 5400.4 2.5-inch notebook hard drive, and the first encrypting 1TB desktop PC drive. Momentus 5400.4 is designed for a wide range of systems including mainstream notebook PCs, workstations, external storage enclosures and small form factor desktop PCs. This 2.5-inch SATAII, 5400-rpm drive delivers up to 250GB of capacity on just two platters using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. Next in the list is the Barracuda FDE (full disc encryption) 1TB hard drive, the world's first 3.5-inch desktop PC drive with native encryption to prevent unauthorized access to data on lost or stolen hard drives or systems. Seagate also unveiled new Maxtor OneTouch products. The new Maxtor OneTouch 4 family includes: Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus, OneTouch 4 Mini, and OneTouch 4. Momentus 5400.4 is expected to ship in the fourth quarter of calendar 2007, while the Barracuda FDE is on track to ship in 2008. The Maxtor OneTouch 4 family is available now - with the exception of the 1TB OneTouch 4 Plus, which is scheduled to ship in late October. Please visit Seagate.com for more information.

Seagate Technology today announced its Cheetah 15K.6 hard drive, the newest generation of Seagate's award-winning enterprise Cheetah family. Built for the most demanding transaction-intensive enterprise servers and storage systems, the Cheetah 15K.6 is the highest-performance hard drive ever in a 3.5-inch form factor, with a 28% increase in sustained data transfer rates compared to its previous generation drives.

SSD (Solid State Disk) technology is one of the most powerful advances in storage technology in some time. Unfortunately, at this point, it's hideously expensive, and only available to the major OEM companies. Fortunately, Seagate aims to change all that. Starting next year, Seagate will be releasing cost-effective desktop and laptop SSDs. By 2010, Seagate aims to eliminate current problems with SSD technology, such as high cost, low storage yields, and low availability.

Seagate today announced the 1 terabyte (TB) Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 hard drives for consumer and enterprise markets. As the industry's only second-generation desktop and enterprise perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) hard drives, the Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 deliver 1TB of capacity, 7,200-rpm spin speeds, average seek times of 8.5ms, caches up to 32MB and Seagate's industry-leading five-year limited warranty. Seagate's newest hard drives pack 1TB of data on just four discs to provide cool operating temperatures and low power consumption, which help extend drive life. The Barracuda ES.2 and 7200.11 will begin shipping in volume during the third quarter. The 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 will be offered at an MSRP of $399.99.

Metro.CL, the man behind ChileHardware, says that Seagate has a 10 000 RPM drive in the works. The HDD will compete with WD's Raptor drive, that has reigned as the highest performance SATA hard drive for enthusiasts for quite some time now.

Seagate will bring healthy competition to the market, which will hopefully result in price drops of 10 000 RPM hard drives.

There is no estimated time frame in which the HDD should debut.

Samsung has become the third major hard drive manufacturer to hit the 1TB barrier with a 3.5" hard drive, following in the footsteps of Hitachi and Seagate - although it manages to achieve a greater density than either of those two. The 1TB F1 series drive, as it will be called, spins at 7,200 rpm using three platters of 334GB, giving it a density of 241 Gb/square inch. Seagate's equivilent has four 250GB platters giving it a density of 205 Gb/square inch, whilst Hitachi has the lowest density on its 1TB drive, using five platters of 200GB giving a density of 144 Gb/square inch. Samsung's recommended price for the 1TB F1 drive is $400, with the drive presumably going on sale almost immediately.

Seagate, today announced that it has begun worldwide volume shipments of the industry's first 250GB-per-disc, 3.5-inch disc drive on the strength of second-generation perpendicular magnetic recording technology. Packing an industry-leading data density of 180 Gbits per square inch, the one-disc Barracuda hard drive sets new benchmarks for power consumption, acoustics and performance for Seagate desktop PC hard drives - all critical factors in providing the massive amounts of storage required for the world's exploding volume of digital content at home and in the office. Low power consumption reduces operating temperatures, crucial in ensuring high reliability and a long drive life.

Seagate held a special meeting yesterday where they presented at least two different soon to be introduced products. First there was a notebook hybrid hard drive that employs a 256MB flash memory buffer to cache data during normal use. The data come from a conventional 160GB 2.5 inch platter setup spinning at 5400rpm. Seagate officials said it won't digg into SSD (Solid State Disk) technology because the drives would be too expensive compared to present technology. When the buffer stored all the data the whole system needs in order to run the platters will come to rest and will spin up only when additional data is needed. The use of hybrid drives obviously offers great benefits, among them low access times, decreased power consumption and improved reliability.
The chaps from Chilehardware who attended the show also got more information regarding Seagate's 1TB (1 terabyte equals 1000GB) hard disk solution. By the end of April the 7200.11 Series will be in stores. All models out of this series feature a speed of 7200rpm, SATA II with NCQ (Native Command Qeueing) and 16MB cache. Thanks to the use of Seagate's advanced perpendicular recording efforts the aforementioned 1TB top model only needs 4 platters to store that amount of data. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 1000GB however needs 5 platters which in general needs a stronger motor and bearings which is in turn more expensive to produce.