Seagate Announces two new 1TB Drives

Seagate has unveiled two new hard drive lines that both offer a maximum 1TB capacity: the Barracuda 7200.11 (consumer) and the Barracuda ES.2 (enterprise). Expect both to arrive sometime this quarter and note that Seagate prices the consumer 1TB HDD at an MSRP of $399. As with other Seagate drives, the new Barracuda 7200.11 and ES.2 come with five year warranties.

Seagate packs the 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 with 32MB of L2 cache, SATA 3.0Gbps and native command queuing support. The Barracuda 7200.11 makes use of four 250GB platters with second-generation perpendicular magnetic recording technology. The company claims the new Barracuda 7200.11 can sustain a 105MB/s data rate and only draws 8-watts during idle as well as 11.6-watts during seek. Acoustically, the Barracuda 7200.11 generates around 27-to-29 decibels of noise during idle and seeking tasks. Seagate also offers the Barracuda 7200.11 in 750GB (three platters) and 500GB (two platters) sizes with the same 32MB buffer and PMR technology.

Seagate’s new Barracuda ES.2 models are offered with serial attached SCSI, or SAS, interfaces. Seagate has also raised the MTBF rating of the Barracuda ES.2 to 1.2 million hours, up 200 thousand hours from the previous Barracuda ES.

DailyTech

Laptop hard drive with on-board encryption!

ASI Computer Technologies of Markham, Ontario, Canada will be the first to sell laptop computers using Seagate Technology LLC's computer hard drives with built-in encryption technology. The Scotts Valley, California-based company has included a chip that automatically encrypts all data written to the Momentus 5400 FDE (Full Disk Encryption) hard drive on the fly, rendering it unreadable without a digital key or password and allowing all data stored on it to be instantly erased.

Seagate says its hardware-based technology has an advantage over software-based encryption (example: Microsoft’s BitLocker, include in Ultimate and Enterprise editions of Vista), in part because it would make it impossible to even start a computer without proper authentication. The 2.5-inch 160 gigabyte-capacity hard drive is to include security management software by Wave Systems Corporation of Lee, Massachusetts, to help companies use the encryption technology.

Source: CBC News

Seagate still king in Hard Drive Shipments!

Global shipments of hard disk drives (HDDs) rose 15.5% in 2006, as suppliers managed to capitalize on growth opportunities while shrugging off challenges including price wars, component shortages and competitive upheavals, according to research firm iSuppli.

The HDD industry in 2006 shipped 434.2 million hard drives, up 15.5% from 375.8 million in 2005. In the fourth quarter of 2006, 119.7 million HDDs were shipped, up 15.8% compared to the same period a year earlier and an 8.3% increase from the third quarter, said the research firm.

Along with strong sales to established markets in computing and consumer-electronics products, the HDD industry benefited from the rise of a new application: external hard drives. In 2006, 2.6 million external HDDs were shipped, up 37% from 2005. Demand for external HDDs is being driven by the desire of consumers to store and backup large-sized video and audio files downloaded from Internet services, noted iSuppli.

The top-two leading HDD suppliers also made gains in the fourth quarter of 2006. Seagate's share of 34.6% in the fourth quarter was up a notch from 34.3% in the third quarter. Western Digital Corporation (WDC) held its second-place position at 20.5%, also up slightly from 19.9% in the previous quarter. However, number-three Hitachi GST's share was 17.2%, down slightly from 17.5% in the third quarter.

HDD supplier ranking for 2005 and 2006(ranking by percentage of unit shipments)
Rank	Supplier	2005	2006
1	Seagate	28.7%	33.1%
2	WDC	17.7%	19.6%
3	Hitachi GST	15.5%	16.1%
4	Samsung	7.2%	10.0%
5	Toshiba	8.7%	9.0%
6	Fujitsu	6.4%	6.9%
7	Maxtor	14.1%	3.7%
8	Excelstor	1.0%	1.4%
9	Cornice	0.4%	0%
10	GS MagicStore	0.2%	0%
	Other	0%	0%

Source : digitimes.com