Strengthening its external storage portfolio for small business Seagate today announced three additional BlackArmor product offerings: the BlackArmor NAS 220 storage server, the BlackArmor WS 110 external drive workstation and the BlackArmor PS 110 portable drive. Joining the existing network attached storage line up - the BlackArmor NAS 440 and BlackArmor NAS 420 storage servers - these new solutions share the same suite of robust backup applications for business professionals and home office use.

Seagate Technology today announced it has initiated a restructuring plan that includes a reduction of approximately 1,100 employees or 2.5% of the company's global workforce. This reduction is required to support a targeted run rate of product development and marketing and administrative costs of less than $300 million per quarter and to position the company to be cash flow and earnings positive within its fiscal year 2010.

The restructuring plan, which the company expects to be largely complete by the end of July 2009, is expected to result in total pretax restructuring charges of approximately $72 million. These charges will primarily be incurred in the June 2009 quarter and consist mainly of cash based employee termination costs which are expected to be substantially paid in the September 2009 quarter. The annual savings generated from this restructuring action is expected to be approximately $125 million.

Since the beginning of fiscal year 2009, and including today's announcement, the company has reduced its global headcount through attrition and restructuring, resulting in a reduction in the company's labor costs in excess of 25%. In addition, Seagate previously announced the realignment of its organizational structure to increase efficiency, as well as the closures of two recording media facilities and its Pittsburgh research facility, company-wide salary reductions announced in January 2009, and other cost reduction initiatives. Seagate continues to assess options to further reduce manufacturing operating costs.

Continuing its commitment to helping people preserve, protect and enjoy their digital content, Seagate today introduced a new backup appliance that completely eliminates the need to manually learn, manage, or dedicate any time to the backup process. Unlike most backup utilities, the new Seagate Replica backup appliance is a complete PC backup system, which automatically and continuously stores up-to-date copies of everything on a PC, including installed applications, operating system, e-mail, pictures, music, movies, Internet bookmarks and settings. Available in two configurations, the Seagate Replica solution delivers seamless backup for either a single PC or multiple PCs in a household.

Storage boss Seagate today adds a new line of hard drives, the Barracuda LP, to its existing Barracuda series. Barracuda LP stands for low-power and the whole line focuses on low-power, cool and quiet drives that come at an entry-level price. Barracuda LP drives are available in capacities of 2 TB, 1.5 TB and 1 TB and are ideal for desktop applications, such as USB, eSATA, low-power PCs, FireWire external storage, and SOHO NAS markets. All drives carry the latest 500 GB disk platters, 32 MB data buffers and special motors that spin not at the standard 5400 rpm but the rather unusual 5900 rpm. That moves the Barracuda LP drives somewhere between a 5400 and 7200 rpm in the performance chart, while being more energy efficient than normal drives. With this new motor, Seagate measured 3W power consumption at idle and 5.6W during load. Also improved are the noise levels, which now are rated at 19 dB and 20 dB for idle and seek. The suggested retail prices are $118 for the 1 TB Barracuda LP, $156 for the 1.5 TB model, and $358 for the 2 TB drive. Learn more here.

Seagate today introduced its Seagate SV35.5 Series hard drives, designed for optimal performance in digital video surveillance systems. The Seagate SV35.5 hard drive is built for rigorous 24x7 use, and combines best-in-class reliability, performance, capacity, acoustics and power consumption along with features that make SDVR integration easy, making it the ideal solution for the demands of the growing video surveillance market.

Demonstrating its ongoing commitment to provide small businesses with solutions that meet both current and future storage needs, Seagate, the world's leading provider of storage solutions, today announced a complete portfolio of products designed to protect data for sustained business continuity and optimum uptime. First introduced in 2008 as a portable Full Disk Encryption drive, the new Seagate BlackArmor product line is the family name for a suite of network-attached, workstation and portable storage solutions designed to meet the digital asset management needs of small business professionals.

AMD and Seagate are set to demonstrate the new 6 Gbps SATA storage device interface. The companies will hold the demo today, in New Orleans, USA. Although not a player in the enterprise storage controller market, AMD is using this demo to exhibit the kind of technology that will go into its future chipset. The company already has plans to build chipset for its own current-generation Opteron processors.

Seagate, on the other hand, is a large player in the hard drive industry, enterprise storage included. The company notes that SATA 6 Gbps will benefit solid-state drives before they can significantly help conventional hard-drives. "Flash will take advantage [of the new interface], in applicable markets, sooner than you think," said Marc Noblitt, senior marketing I/O development manager for Seagate. "Six-gig is a perfect interface. OEMs tell us that they want to have the same SATA interface for flash as for a 1.8-inch rotating drive, so they can swap in a drive for flash, or vice versa." he added.

Seagate today introduced its Constellation family ofnew enterprise storage solutions for Tier 2 nearline storage applications. The two new drive models, the 2.5-inch Constellation and the 3.5-inch Constellation ES hard drives, include a combination of features that enable high capacities, increased power efficiency, enterprise-class reliability, and data security. Both drives also include PowerChoice from Seagate, which decreases power consumption by up to 54% for record power savings in enterprise environments.

"The need for greater storage capacity will continue to expand in multiple directions and dimensions, but there will be an increasing scrutiny of all storage system purchases, with an eye to decreasing power consumption, footprint, and cost per GB in unprecedented ways," said John Monroe, a research vice president at Gartner. "Performance will not be ignored, but a flexible balance of capacity, cost per GB, power and speed will become more crucial in fulfilling end-user storage demands at varied price points."

Earlier this week, reports emerged of a simple firmware update going wrong for Seagate, rendering some batches of the company's Barracuda 7200.11 hard-drives useless. The flaw in the said firmware update (version SD1A) locked the drive's microcode, preventing the system BIOS from even detecting the drive, in case the user wanted to restore a drive damaged from the update. SD1A was released to fix stuttering problems caused as a result of a bad implementation of the drives' SATA micro-controllers, the earliest diagnosis of the problem the drives were facing. An employee of Seagate working in its engineering, attempted to explain the SD1A firmware debacle, from the perspective of someone who doesn't work with the company's public-relations.

The SD1A firmware, according to the employee, wasn't given out as a singular release, but rather in several revisions to individual customers on a support-customer level, rather than an all-out public download. That was to address customers quickly, when the issue first surfaced as a flaw with the firmware. The problem actually existed where errors during drive operation was written to the drive's firmware to build on a log. When that log reached 320 entries, it would cause errors during initialization of the drive, when it is powered on, when the drive's firmware micro-code is read by the system BIOS. Errors in that process would cause the drive not to be detected / improperly initialized by the system. In a Tom's Hardware report, the employee explains that normally, a customer would go through the usual process of contacting tech-support for the preventative update and "this firmware had to go through five different checks to make sure it applies to the specific conditions to qualify sending to a customer, before now. 5 chances for us to go 'your drive needs the other (or none) firmware update'." However, management, in order to quell the possibility of liability for drive failures, pushed a general public release of the firmware. "Suddenly, it's down to one check, and even that was more designed for a contingency just in case the wrong firmware was sent out." The SD1A firmware mostly affected 500 GB versions of the Barracuda 7200.11 series, after it was released last week. Seagate pulled back the SD1A firmware after the issue of the firmware damaging hard-drives became chronic. The company later released a newer firmware update that can be found here.

Seagate Technology today reported preliminary results for the quarter ended January 2, 2009 of 37 million disk drive unit shipments, revenue of $2.3 billion, a net loss of $496 million, and net loss per share of $1.02 for the quarter ended January 2, 2009. Net loss and net loss per share for the quarter include $18 million of purchased intangibles amortization and other charges associated with acquisitions, restructuring and related accelerated depreciation charges of $94 million, and a charge of $271 million that reflects an unfavorable adjustment to the valuation allowance related to the company's deferred tax assets. The aggregate impact of these items is a $383 million loss or approximately $0.79 per share loss. Of the $94 million restructuring and related charges, $16 million was for accelerated depreciation charges recorded in cost of revenue ($2 million) and product development expense ($14 million) with the majority of the balance related to the recently disclosed global headcount reduction.

You might want to think again before flashing your Seagate hard drive with whatever firmware the company provides as a 'fix' to pending firmware issues with some of its Barracuda 7200.11 series hard drives. The latest firmware by the company, version SD1A turned many hard drives to paperweights. After flashing the drives with the new firmware, users reported receiving disk failure messages, and systems not being able to access - let alone boot from - the drives. Users claimed to have lost data and backups stored on the hard drive, since the drive is rendered inaccessible from any machine.

Following these reports, the company removed the firmware update pending validation. It is not known at this point as to how the company plans to address its disgruntled customers, whether it creates a window for hard drives failed as a result of upgrading to this firmware to be replaced under the company warranty or free of charge. The SD1A firmware update was released by the company to address stability issues certain models of the Barracuda 7200.11 series were diagnosed with.

Seagate has issued an official statement today, acknowledging all recent problems with some Barracuda 7200.11 drives. Based on the information posted in the company's forums here, select Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB 3.5-inch hard drives made in Thailand, suffer from a firmware issue that bricks the HDDs after a short period of time. After three to five months of normal operation these defective hard drives will suddenly lock-up as a protective measure and prevent the system from recognizing the drive from then onwards. In most cases the information won't be lost, but the drive will be completely useless, changing the drive's electronics won't help much either. This problem occurs not only to the 1TB Barracuda models, but to Seagate 1.5TB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB Barracuda 7200.11 drives, along with some Maxtor and ES.2 models. That's pretty disturbing, but now Seagate will provide its customers with an updated firmware if their drive is problematic.

Seagate today announced two new members of its award-winning Cheetah enterprise-class hard drive family: the Cheetah 15K.7 hard drive and the Cheetah NS.2 hard drive. Current economic challenges have put even more focus on reducing spending to ensure long-term business sustainability. For businesses that have an existing investment based on a standard 3.5-inch enterprise infrastructure, the new Cheetah drives bolster sustainability through easy drive/system integration, and provide improved levels of system performance, capacity, reliability, and lower power consumption.

Seagate today announced at the 2009 Consumer Electronics show two new additions to the Seagate Pipeline HD family of purpose-built hard drives for Digital Video Recorders - the Pipeline HD Mini and Pipeline HD.2. The Pipeline HD Mini hard drive is the world's first 2.5-inch drive engineered specifically for use in digital video recorders (DVRs). With 160GB and 250GB capacities now available, DVR manufacturers can benefit from the lower-power performance and slim form factor of these new, smaller hard drives without sacrificing capacity for their content-hungry customers. The Pipeline HD.2 is Seagate's second generation of the Pipeline HD drive built in a 3.5-inch form factor. These new Pipeline HD.2 hard drives, available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities, give home entertainment device manufacturers one and two disk, cost-optimized solutions for today's high definition video recording applications.

Seagate, the world's leading provider of storage solutions, today unveiled the new Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD media player, a complete home theater solution designed to enhance the experience of enjoying digital media by providing an easy way to play your favorite videos, movies and photos on your TV. The Seagate FreeAgent Theater media player is a new accessory designed to work with the company's award-winning FreeAgent Go portable hard drive, enabling people to easily enjoy stored digital media on their TV screens rather than their computer monitors. Just tuck the media player next to your TV, pop in your FreeAgent Go hard drive, point, click, and enjoy as your personal memories and favorite movies come to life before your eyes in HD quality video with surround sound. The announcement was made at the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show, taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Available in March, the Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD media player can be purchased as a stand-alone unit for use with any USB storage device, or a complete solution with a FreeAgent Go portable drive included, starting at just $129.99.

Seagate today announced first-to-market volume shipments of a mainstream desktop hard drive with the industry's highest areal density. Packing 1TB of capacity on just two disks, Seagate's Barracuda 7200.12 HD, a 3.5-inch 7200-RPM drive features an areal density of 329 Gigabits per square inch to deliver the best combination of capacity, performance and reliability for PCs, desktop RAID and personal external storage.

Symwave, a semiconductor supplier of high-performance analog/mixed-signal connectivity solutions for the PC, consumer and mobile devices, today announced collaboration with Seagate to demonstrate Symwave's USB 3.0 storage controller device designed to comply with the SuperSpeed (USB 3.0) specification revision 1.0. The technology demonstration is the world's first consumer product application of USB 3.0 and will take place at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada from January 8-11, 2009. The demonstration will showcase streaming data to and from a commercially available external storage device at speeds previously unattainable with legacy USB technology.

Seagate, a vetran with fixed data storage solutions, already holds the reputation of making the conventional HDD with the highest unformatted capacity, 1.5TB. The company now looks to step-up the per-platter storage density with the introduction of high-capcity HDDs with single platters.

Hard drives with single platters are not only economical to manufacture and sell, but also could actually have lower access times since data is read and written on only two surfaces (either sides of a platter). The first in line will be the 500GB Seagate Barracuda (model: ST3500410AS) under the new 7200.12 series which is yet to be announced. As the name suggests the drive will have spindle speeds of 7,200 rpm. The drive will have a 16 MB cache and will use the standard SATA II interface. These drives will be available in the first week of January, priced under 50€.

QNAP Systems, Inc. is pleased to announce Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB (ST31500341AS) hard drive is supported by the entire TS-109/ 209/ 409/ 509 Turbo NAS series.

"The good news is, our Turbo NAS users now have more choices when selecting the hard drive models and more storage space. For example, the TS-509 Pro supports up to 7.5TB storage capacity," said Laurent Cheng, Product Manager from QNAP. The HDD compatibility list is available here.

The TS-409 and TS-509 series supports Online RAID Capacity Expansion which allows increasing the storage capacity by replacing the hard disk drives with the data reserved and not turning the server off. To read the online tutorial, please visit this page.

Seagate announced a decision which will dramatically reduce its carbon footprint in Derry. The company has switched from traditional electricity supply to environmentally friendly wind power, supplied by Airtricity, Ireland's leading renewable energy company. Airtricity specialises in the development of onshore and offshore wind farms and currently has 24 wind farms in operation throughout Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Scotland. Going forward, the electricity required to run the massive Springtown plant will be 100 per cent renewable, reducing the site's carbon footprint by 41,800 tons of carbon dioxide, which equates to 95 percent of the total carbon emitted each year by Springtown. The reduction is the equivalent to the carbon dioxide emitted by 4,500 households per year.

Seagate, the biggest hard drive manufacturer, has announced today that effective January 3, 2009, the company will be making some important changes to its limited warranty terms for selected drives. The warranty period for consumer electronics (Seagate Barracuda 7200 included), notebook (Momentus 7200 and Momentus 5400 included) and personal storage bare drives sold to Seagate Authorized Distributors will be changed from 5 years to 3 years. Seagate believes that the new warranty period and terms better reflect current industry standards. Seagate enterprise class drives and Seagate and Maxtor external retail products that have 5-year warranty periods will not be affected by this change. Please take a look at the Seagate Warranty Matrix for more information.

For people that still experience the freezing problems with their 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives, here is some relief for you. As previously reported here, Seagate has released a new firmware for the small number of drives with strange behaviour. Here's the official statement:

Some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drives may show uncharacteristic operation when used with Mac and Linux operating systems in multi-drive configurations. Users may experiences pauses in video streaming applications or a dropped drive from RAID arrays. Customers seeing these symptoms should contact Seagate Technical Support for a firmware upgrade. In order to assure the proper application of the new firmware, please email a description of the issues you're seeing to Seagate (discsupport@seagate.com) Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. Also, please describe your system, operating system and the application in use when the issue arose, and you will receive a prompt response with appropriate instructions. As an alternative to the contact email address above please access http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/.

Again, to obtain the firmware first you need to find your HDD's model number, serial number, current firmware version using either Seatools for DOS or just look at the drive's sticker it should be written there, and finally you need to describe your system specs, operating system and the application in use when the disk freezes. After you have that information, please contact Seagate Technical Support, by email or by phone, they'll send you the new firmware and probably tell you how to update.

Seagate, the world's leading provider of storage solutions, unveiled today a gift idea that will keep on giving for years to come. Originally introduced in September with a choice of four colors, the new award-winning FreeAgent Go portable hard drive is now available in all the colors of the rainbow, including: think pink, ruby red, solar orange, spring green, forest green, royal blue, sky blue, champagne gold, titanium silver and tuxedo black. The initial color options of ruby red, royal blue, tuxedo black and titanium silver are still offered and widely available.

Seagate, the world leader in storage solutions, today introduced the Maxtor Central Axis Business Edition dual-drive network storage server, a storage solution designed to satisfy the long-term business continuity needs and growing storage requirements of small businesses. The Central Axis Business Edition network storage server takes the guesswork out of network storage management by providing simple, automatic backup with solid data protection and secure remote access to business critical information from any web browser. Available in early November, this small-business network storage solution will help companies keep their competitive edge by delivering access to, and protection for their business critical information while in the office or on the road.

Last week Tom's Hardware had covered a bit about the freezing problems with Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard disk drives. Today, they bring some more info directly from Seagate:

Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware. We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions

Seagate also unveiled the part numbers and firmware versions for the affected models, they are as follows: part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18. If you're one of the "lucky" owners affected by this specific issue, please contact Seagate via their regional support channels. Seagate is also currently working on a firmware update for the affected models.