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.

Seagate today announced sweeping advances in its global push to help secure notebook computer information from theft or loss. To combat growing threats to mobile information, Seagate, the world leader in storage solutions, is now shipping its groundbreaking, self-encrypting notebook PC hard drives, now with up to 320GB of capacity, to the worldwide distribution channel, with 500GB models coming soon. Additionally, Dell is now shipping a notebook with a 160GB self-encrypting hard drive. McAfee is set to provide software for the enterprise-wide management of notebooks with Seagate Secure hard drives.

Powerful, easy-to-use notebook data security is increasingly important as the global adoption of mobile PCs continues to soar and more notebooks are used to store sensitive personal and business information. Lost or stolen notebooks can cost companies millions of dollars in compromised proprietary information and threaten consumers with the high cost of identity theft, yet many computers remain unprotected. According to the United States FBI, a notebook computer is stolen every 53 seconds and 97% are never recovered*.

Hard drive king Seagate officially confirmed today that it is investing as much as $100 million in a very own line-up of Solid State Drives. Seagate's CEO, Bill Watkins said:

We'd love to have an SSD range, that's why we're investing (as much as $100m), as there are a lot of things that we like about them. But there are also some problems.

The new line-up Seagate is building will try to overcome some of the problems current SSDs have. At present we're aware of SLC (single layer chip) and MLC (multiple layer chip) SSDs, and we know that the latter is cheaper but has reliability issues. Seagate will try to create a new technology that combines both single-layer cell (SLC) and multi-layer cell (MLC) tech, making better, faster and cheaper SSDs, the drives we all want.
Seagate's senior vice president of global marketing Pat King also revealed that the company is working on a network attached storage solution for the home. Unfortunately, that's all the information we have. Hopefully this new line-up will be a big step in the SSD industry.

Seagate, the world leader in storage solutions, today announced the Fall 2008 lineup of the company's award-winning FreeAgent external hard drives. This new generation of the Seagate FreeAgent family includes attractive desktop and mobile options, for both Mac and Windows operated PCs that make it a breeze to back up, share and protect valuable digital content like photos, videos and music.

Seagate today unveiled the industry's first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives to meet explosive worldwide demand for digital-content storage in home and business environments. The debut of the Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drive, the eleventh generation of Seagate's flagship drive for desktop PCs, marks the single largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives - a half-terabyte increase from the previous highest capacity of 1TB, thanks to the capacity-boosting power of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.

With announcements coming in from of rolling out Solid State Drives (SSD) and that it would become a prominent player in the SSD business, Seagate is still in requirement of trade relationships with a NAND Flash manufacturer, add to that it doesn't have production facilities of its own.

This has gotten analysts to speculate on where Seagate will source its chips from, a possibility being buying Intel's share of the Intel-Micron JV. Such a buy-out would set Seagate back by close to $1 bn. Another possibility would be to acquire SanDisk or Hynix (Hyundai) which focus on making entry-level solid state drives, but are a major players in the overall NAND flash market. If it will be SanDisk, Hynix or any other flash maker remains to be seen, but it wouldn't come as a surprise if Seagate announces the acquisition of a flash company soon.

In an effort to make data accessible anywhere in our home Seagate today presented Maxtor Central Axis, a network storage drive that can be used by the whole family. The hard drive inside Maxtor Central Axis is a 7200 rpm model with 32MB cache and has 1TB of storage that every computer in the home can back up to or stream at any time. Users connect to the drive via a single gigabit ethernet port, but there are also two USB ports for adding extra peripherals that can be shared across the network along with the NAS storage device. Also because the Central Axis drive is connected to a router and not formatted for an individual computer, files can be accessed and stored from both Mac OS X and Windows operated PCs. Besides that, you can easily log into a remote access service from an Internet browser and securely access or share the files you have stored on the device. There are no applications to download or plug-ins required. Central Axis establishes a secure connection to the service without the need to disable firewalls. All that is needed to access the drive from any Web browser is a username and password. The Maxtor Central Axis 1TB capacity drive is expected to be available in the US in July from major retailers, distributors and online stores, as well as at Maxstore, for a suggested retail price of $329.99. Availability in Europe and Asia will come later this year.

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).