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.

Seagate Ships FreeAgent Family of Data Movers, Growing Beyond Traditional Backup and Storage

FreeAgent Family of Data Movers Combines a Sophisticated Design with Easy-to-Use Lifestyle Tools for Anywhere, Anytime Access of Digital Content

FreeAgent Pro data movers allow consumers to automatically synchronize their content anytime, anywhere and allow access to Seagate Internet Drive, an online service that provides a "24/7 ATM" to post, access and share files from anywhere using the Web. The FreeAgent Pro comes in 320GB, 500GB, and 750GB capacities.

FreeAgent Go data movers plug into any computer's USB 2.0 port for mobile access to your computing environment - including Web favorites, passwords and settings, IM, email, contacts and digital files and is available in 80GB, 120GB, 160GB capacities.

FreeAgent Desktop data movers provide simple add-on storage for people to gather and access their content in one place. The FreeAgent Desktop data movers are available in 250GB, 320GB, and 500GB capacities.

Hard drive manufacturer Seagate has announced that it has begun shipping its new 5400 FDE.2 80GB hard drive, which features full disk encryption. With a technology called "DriveTrust", the drive uses hardware-based encryption which gives strong file protection and requires just one key to encrypt all data on the drive, not just certain areas. The technology also separates the security keys from the operating system to provide increased protection from hackers and tampering compared to most software alternatives, and eliminates disc initialization and configuration which is another a downside of software encryption. The drive also allows users to instantly erase all data to prevent private information from being stolen or copied. The disk has started shipping in ASI's C8015 notebook and is expected to be popular with government agencies such as the FBI, which managed to lose 317 laptops over a 28 month period.

Seagate announced that it has begun shipping its Momentus 7200.2 2.5" hard drive with a 3 GB/s SATA interface. The Momentus 7200.2 with a platter rotation speed of 7200 rpm and perpendicular recording technology has been shipping for some time with a 1.5 GB/s SATA port and now promises twice the available bandwidth. The capacity remains at a maximum of 160GB; 80GB, 100GB and 120GB versions are available as well.

Despite recent releases of flash-based storage that holds as much as a hard drive needs to, the hard drive business is still alive and well. For those of you who don't know (like me), Maxtor was recently aquired by Seagate. This gave Seagate quite a nice boost in sales. The rest of the story is told by the chart below, which was made by iSupply.

Seagate Technology today formally introduced the Digital Audio Video Experience (D.A.V.E.) technology - the project previously code-named "Crickett" - at the DEMO 07 Conference. The DAVE platform can deliver 10-20 GB of wireless storage to mobile phones, PCs, and other wireless-enabled devices. The DAVE reference design is about the size of a centimeter-thick credit card, with dimensions of 3.5 x 4.7 x .47 inches (61 x 89 x 12 mm) and weighing only 2.5 ounces (70 grams). It has rechargeable lithium ion battery which delivers up to 10 hours of media-streaming performance and up to 14 days of standby power. Using Bluetooth 2.0 or WiFi 802.11b and 802.11g connections, DAVE stays into your pocket while establishing connection to your mobile device anywhere up to 30 feet (9.1 meters) between the devices. The DAVE mobile storage platform is expected to be available to leading cell phone manufacturers and telco service providers for products in the second calendar quarter of 2007.

Seagate Technology has released what it claims to be the world's fastest hard drive: the new Savvio 15K. Featuring a read seek time of just 2.9ms, this beats both Seagate's Cheetah (3.5ms) and Western Digital's raptor (4.6ms), with a spin speed of 15,000 rpm. Using a 2.5" form factor, this drive is not only quicker than Seagate's next best offering, but it's smaller, uses 30% less power and is supposed to be more reliable. Both 36GB and 73GB variants are available now, with HP already shipping systems featuring these drives.