Seagate Launches First Hybrid Hard Drive
Notebook Drive Incorporating Flash Memory Means More Battery; Many Other Products Announced
06.07.06

By Bary Alyssa Johnson On Wednesday, Seagate announced a number of new products to offer consumers increased access to digital home entertainment in an increasingly on-demand world, including its first hybrid hard drive that incorporates flash memory. The company also launched several hard drives for the consumer and enterprise markets, as well as a portable pocket drive and updated personal server.


Hybrid hard drives incorporating flash memory have been talked about ever since Microsoft introduced the concept at the 2004 Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. Last year, Samsung, the world's largest producer of flash memory, predicted that the first hybrid drives incorporating flash memory and rotating storage would come to market in 2006, a promise that has been borne out.

At the recent WinHEC show, both Seagate and Samsung showed prototypes of the new drive, which they dubbed "ReadyDrive".

The Momentus 5400 PSD is Seagate's first hybrid hard drive, incorporating 256 Mbytes of flash memory that serves as a fast cache for booting and saving data. When booting the PC, the operating system loads data from the flash memory first, speeding bootup times and negating the need to quickly spin up the drive, a power-consuming process.


Initially, Samsung forecast that the first hybrid drives would use 128 Mbytes of flash memory, and that booting from the drives would reduce power consumption by about 9 percent overall, increasing a notebook's battery life by about an hour. Seagate's Momentus 5400 PSD drive, however, reduces the power used by the hard drive by 50 percent, according to the company, and speeds up the time a system can wake up from hibernation by 20 percent.

Seagate's other introductions were less revolutionary.

"The future business model for content providers is the ability to transfer content from your home network to all kinds of devices like cars, iPods, ultra-mobile PCs," said Joni Clark, product marketing manager for Seagates desktop and notebook division. "The purpose of storage is to make content easily accessible."

The Mirra Sync & Share Server is a second-generation version of Seagate's Mirra Personal Server 2.0. The new server is both PC- and Mac-compatible and allows users to access their digital content via the Internet at any time. Functions include: data protection, file synchronization, and sharing between computers. It also comes with free online user accounts to enable file sharing with friends and family. The upgraded Mirra server is available with 320 GB or 500 GB of storage capacity and will retail for $499 and $599, respectively. It is slated to begin shipping in June 2006.

Seagate is also offering an 8-GB Pocket Drive that allows consumers to take tons of digital content with them for on-the-go access. The drive is capable of storing up to 2,560 digital photos, 133 hours of digital music, 8 hours of digital video or 4 computer games, according to the company. It is scheduled to ship in July and will retail for $149.

Also launched today, Seagate's 750GB Pushbutton Drive is an external hard drive that stores three-quarters of a terabyte of data. Size-wise, the product is comparable to a tape dispenser, Seagate said. The small form factor shouldn't fool you – Seagate's pushbutton drive is capable of storing all of the following, combined: a 25-DVD movie collection, 15,000-song music collection, 15,00-photo image library, 50-hours worth of video, and 50 computer games, with 300GB left over. The device has already hit shelves and retails for $559.

"Today's external storage is USB or firewire only," Clark said. "With this product we've put in an eSATA port so consumers can save their files externally as fast as they can internally."

A new line of ST18 Series hard drives are optimized for portable media players (PMPs) and GPS systems. The 1.8-inch perpendicular recording device comes with 60GB capacity and is compatible with the CE-ATA interface for handheld consumer devices. The ST18 Series is expected to ship out to retail stores in the first quarter of 2007.

Seagates' DB35 Series 750GB capacity hard drives enable increased HDD performance for DVRs, based on perpendicular recording technology. Seagate says it expects the drives to hit retail shelves during the third quarter of 2006.

The company has also unveiled two new products in its Momentus family of 2.5-inch notebook PC hard drives, which utilize perpendicular recording technology and offer up to 160 GB of storage capacity. The Momentus 5400.2 FDE is an encrypting drive that helps prevent outside access to data stored on the PC in case it is stolen, lost, or resold. The Momentus 7200.2 is a 7200-RPM notebook drive with 8MB cache and up to 160GB memory.

Perpendicular recording technology stands data bits vertically onto disc media, rather than horizontally, in order to fit more data into the same amount of space.

Seagate is offering its LD25 Series drives for the gaming and home entertainment sectors. The drives, available in 20, 30, or 40 GB capacity, use DynaPlay technology to offer up enhanced media capabilities like streaming video. The LD25 Series is slated to ship in the first quarter of 2007.

"Consumers may wonder why they need all of these different storage devices," Clark said. "The vision we're trying to influence is the ability to control and manage digital content across multiple devices from one main device. We're trying to influence the market and other industries with that vision."

Lastly, Seagate has launched two new enterprise drives, both of which will begin shipping in the first quarter of 2007.

The Barracuda ES with SATA capacity up to 750 GB incorporates multi-drive features for enterprise users. It also includes a "Workload Manager" feature to protect hard drives from high temperatures. The Barracuda is available in 250, 400 or 500 GB storage capacity.

The Savvio 10K.2 is a 2.5-inch enterprise-class disk drive with 146 GB capacity and 1.6 million hour MTBF reliability. Seagates' Savvio drive is available in two different interfaces: 3-Gbit Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 4Gb Fibre Channel.