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.

For now 300 terabyte storage devices may sound like science fiction, but again Seagate discovered plans to release 1TB hard disk drive products within 6 months. The 1TB hard disk drive will be based on perpendicular recording technology. The 1TB Barracuda from Seagate Technology is expected to hit the market sometime in the first half of this calendar year. No additional information available.

Seagate announced a while ago that they would use heat-assisted recording technology once perpendicular recording reached it's limits. And as development of heat-assisted recording technology continues, Seagate has discovered that they can store much more data on a drive than they initially thought. Seagate claims that they can stick 50 terabytes in a square inch of data, meaning a standard 3.5" drive can hold a whopping 300 terabytes of data. That's equivalent to 6,144 50GB Blu-ray disks, the entire PlayStation 1, 2, and 3 library with room to spare, or the Library of Congress.

Seagate Technology today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held EVault, Inc., a leading provider of online backup services, as part of its effort to extend the company's storage solutions offerings and strengthen the Seagate Services group. The company's strategy for Seagate Services includes offering market-leading services in the areas of data recovery, online backup/recovery and archiving for small-medium businesses (SMB).