Seagate Mass producing 5TB HDDs

Seagate has tried its hardest to shrink the read/write heads of hard drives even further, but with the latest 1 TB 3.5-inch platters, the company believes they've hit a physical brick wall: the head simply can't get any smaller. The same goes for the tracks on the platters, which Seagate claims are as close together as physically possible.

Seagate and Western Digital announce reduced warranties for hard drives

Seagate and Western Digital have both announced that they are slashing warranty coverage on many of their consumer-grade hard drives. Seagate drives are taking the hardest hit with the company shaving as much as four years off select drives.

In a letter to an authorized Seagate distributor, the company announced that they will begin new warranty policies effective December 31, 2011. In summary, Barracuda and Barracuda Green 3.5-inch drives and Momentus 2.5-inch drives will now ship with a one year warranty. SV35, Pipeline HD Mini and Pipeline HD products will come with a two year warranty and Momentus XT, Barracuda XT and Constellation 2 and ES.2 drives will have a three year warranty.

On the Western Digital front, the company is cutting the warranty period for Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue drives from three years to two years. Caviar Black and Scorpio Black drives will retain the same five year warranties as before. WD’s new policy goes into effect for drives shipped after January 1, 2012.

Seagate claims their warranty reduction is being implemented to be more consistent with other companies in the consumer electronics and technology industry. Reducing warranty overhead will effectively give them more money to funnel into future product development. Western Digital didn’t provide a specific reason for the reduction but explained that they will be unveiling an extended warranty offering with special pricing in the near future.

Hard drive prices in general have shot through the roof as a result of the catastrophic flooding that plagued Thailand earlier this year. Given the high prices that available drives are commanding and the reduced warranties on the horizon, now might be as good a time as any to consider a switch to a solid state drive – at least for an OS drive.

Seagate completes acquisition of Samsung's hard drive division

In April, Seagate agreed to purchase Samsung's hard drive division in a transaction valued at $1.4 billion. Technically speaking, the acquisition is complete and Seagate has launched a web pagededicated to the purchase for customers. Logistically speaking though, the companies have their work cut out for them as they restructure and combine their products, resources and talent.

Currently, Seagate is providing mechanical hard drives for Samsung PCs while Samsung is returning the favor with flash chips used in Seagate's enterprise SSDs and consumer hybrids (ie. Momentus XT).

As a result of the deal, both companies have extended and improved an existing patent agreement allowing them to dip into each other's R&D efforts. Also, Seagate will be gaining significant inroads to customers in China, South East Asia, Brazil, Germany and Russia. In addition to patents and distribution, Samsung will also be appointing a nominee who will join Seagate's executive board of directors.

Samsung's current HDD product line-up will also be Seagate's property. This includes Spinpoint M8, MP4 and S3 portable products. While it is uncertain if Seagate will choose to retain any products from Samsung's meager production portfolio, the Samsung brand name will live on for the next 12 months as per the agreement.

This latest acquisition seems to be yet another nail in the coffin for mechanical hard drive manufacturers as they continue to reduce down into just a handful of companies. Incidentally, Western Digital is still working on its own acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. If the merger completes next year like WD believes, there will be only three major HDD manufacturers left in the world: Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba.

Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Review

The hybrid drive gets a capacity boost and more NAND cache

In the storage world, nothing matches a solid-state drive for speed, and nothing matches a mechanical hard drive for capacity and price per gigabyte. Recognizing these two great tastes would go great together, many vendors have attempted to find the perfect hybrid storage solution, with variable—and often clunky—results. Seagate’s Momentus XT, which we first reviewed in September 2010, offered a 500GB 2.5-inch drive with 4GB of NAND flash with an adaptive algorithm to ensure that the most frequently used files are mirrored in the NAND. This means your boot drive feels faster than a mechanical drive, if only for the stuff you use the most. We liked the first Momentus, but complained that it could use more NAND. Seagate aims to remedy that complaint with this new Momentus.

The Momentus XT ups the mechanical portion of the drive to 750GB, while doubling the NAND cache to 8GB. The SATA controller is now 6Gb/s, the industry standard for all new drives. Unlike other hybrid solutions, the onboard controller performs the entire caching computation, so there’s no CPU hit. And there are no weird driver issues or frustrating installation procedures—we’re looking at you, OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid. Seagate’s adaptive memory algorithm simply moves the most-accessed LBAs to the NAND cache.

It might look like an ordinary 2.5-inch mechanical drive, but the Momentus XT is packing 8GB of NAND cache and three-quarters of a terabyte under the hood.

On the raw disk level, the Momentus XT 750GB is identical to a standard Momentus 750GB drive, as borne out by low-level benchmarks like HDTune. The adaptive algorithm shows its worth in real-world benchmarks and tests, such as PCMark Vantage’s HDD subtest and PCMark 7’s secondary storage suite. As we ran PCMark Vantage multiple times, the algorithm copied the LBAs we accessed most to the NAND, bringing the HDD subscore from a first run of 5,471 to a stable score of 14,759. That number is three times higher than what the standard Momentus is capable of, but it doesn’t come close to 52,000-plus score a second-gen SandForce drive can rack up. In the more modern PCMark 7, scores stabilized around 3,295—almost double that of the standard mechanical drive, but nowhere near the 5,070 of the SSD. When we installed Windows on the drive, our system stabilized at a boot time of around 25 seconds—just a few seconds slower than a SandForce-powered SSD, and a solid 13 seconds faster than the vanilla Momentus.

The ongoing hard drive shortage makes prices on existing drives, and thus the Momentus XT’s value proposition, difficult to determine. At press time, the 750GB Momentus XT’s MSRP of $245 makes for a $95 premium over the street price for existing stocks of the first-gen 500GB Momentus XT, or the vanilla 750GB Momentus, but those existing stocks could run out any time. A 120GB SSD would presumably cost about the same as the 750GB Momentus XT, but would deliver just a fraction of the latter drive’s capacity. 

The 750GB Momentus XT offers a solid speed boost in real-world applications that you use frequently, compared to a regular mechanical drive.  Its updated capacity, 6Gb/s SATA controller, and 8GB of NAND are much appreciated. If you don’t want to deal with clumsy multi-drive hybrid solutions or shell out for a tiny SSD, the Momentus XT offers an easier, better way to get both capacity and speed.

Seagate launches new Momentus XT hybrid drive

Seagate has begun shipping the next generation of its Momentus XT solid-state hybrid drives, improving upon its predecessor with faster speeds and increased capacity. Whereas the original drivefeatured a 500GB HDD paired to 4GB of SLC NAND flash and a SATA 3.0 interface, today's update brings a maximum storage capacity of 750GB, with 8GB of SLC NAND flash, and a faster SATA 6.0Gbps interface.

Much of the underlying technology is similar, but Seagate has tweaked its hybrid data management tools and adaptive memory algorithms to boost performance. The latter monitors what applications and data are first loaded into a system and then "learns" to place that data on the SSD for faster read speeds.

Besides these enhancements, Seagate has added what it calls FAST Boot, which cuts a computer's boot time in half compared to the previous generation Momentus XT. The feature basically sets aside a small portion of the solid-state cache for data used during the boot process, where it will remain for the life of the drive, so that your system always boots from flash and not the Momentus XT's spinning disk.

All in all Seagate says the new Momentus XT drive should be around 70% faster than the first iteration, and up to three times faster than traditional HDDs. The 750GB drive is now shipping worldwide with a MSRP of $245.

Western Digital must pay Seagate $525 million

An arbitrator has ordered Western Digital to pay Seagate a hefty $525 million in damages this week. The feuding drive manufacturers sought private arbitration in Minnesota after Seagate accused Western Digital of coaxing "confidential information and trade secrets" from a former Seagate employee. Unfortunately for inquiring minds, further details are unavailable, but Western Digital has denied those allegations and it plans to contest the ruling.

"We do not believe there is any basis in law or fact for the damage award of the arbitrator," said chief executive John Coyne. "We believe the company acted properly at all times and we will vigorously challenge the award." Coyne went on to mention that the $525 million penalty won't affect Western Digital's operations, nor will it prevent the company's planned acquisition of Hitachi GST, a $4.3 billion deal that's expected to close in the near future.

This news comes at an inopportune time for Western Digital, which is experiencing significant production setbacks after the flooding in Thailand. Whereas Seagate is only being affected by resulting supply constraints, Western Digital actually has factories in the flood zones. Overall, the industry is expected to ship 50 million drives less than its target of 180 million. Nonetheless, Western Digital says the arbitration won't affect its recovery process.

Competition between the rivals could get interesting in the coming years as the hard drive segment becomes more consolidated and less relevant. Along with Western Digital's purchase of Hitachi GST, Seagate recently agreed to buy Samsung's hard drive division. Meanwhile, flash storage is growing more affordable in desktop and notebook form factors, while consumers are increasingly reliant on smartphones and tablets for basic computing tasks.

Seagate announces 4TB GoFlex Desk external hard drive

Seagate today announced a 4TB variant of its GoFlex Desk external hard drive, touting it as the highest capacity single-volume external storage device on the market. The company is not saying how many platters are inside the new drive but considering it has already announced 1TB per platter drives, we're assuming they went with four platters with an areal density of 625Gb/s per square inch.

They aren't mentioning spindle speed or cache size, either. What they do mention is that the GoFlex Desk will ship with support for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0, while a Mac version shipping later this month will offer USB 2.0 and FireWire compatibility. The company’s GoFlex Desk for Mac hard drive offers similar features but comes pre-formatted in the HFS+ format.

Like other members of the GoFlex Family, the GoFlex Desk allows users to change adapters to work with a range of interfaces (USB, FireWire, eSATA), and apparently a Thunderbolt update could be on the way.

Seagate is also introducing a new design that will become standard across the entire GoFlex line by the end of the month. Although the company mentions that the GoFlex Desk's new design should leave "a smaller footprint," this external drive still weights 2.93 pounds and includes a power supply cord, so naturally it doesn't quite qualify as portable.

The GoFlex Desk is retailing for $250 on Seagate's website and comes with a two year warranty.

Seagate streamlining Barracuda hard drive line

Seagate has announced that they will be streamlining their family of desktop hard drives under a single product name. The new Barracuda family increases the platter rotation speed on all models to 7200 RPM, thus eliminating slower 5400 RPM drives in the process.

Seagate was able to make the transition from the slower rotation speed thanks to a new read / write head technology that allows more data to be added to a platter. Capacities of the new Barracuda line range from 250GB up to 3TB and will first be available online through Amazon, CDW, Newegg and TigerDirect.

Seagate’s Barracuda Green drive is one such product on the chopping block. Scheduled to end production in February 2012, the company discovered that new Barracuda drives have a nearly identical power consumption profile as energy efficient hard drives but deliver much higher performance. The Barracuda XT line will also be included in the new family and reemerge as the company’s desktop solid state hybrid drive.

Technically speaking, new Barracuda drives will feature a SATA 6Gbps interface, 7200 RPM platter speed and up to 64MB of cache. Drives will continue to ship with Seagate’s SmartAlign, a technology designed to ease the transition from 512 byte to 4096 byte sector sizes as mandated by the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA). 4k sector sizes allow for better error correction at higher storage densities and capacities.

Seagate ships pencil-thick GoFlex Slim external hard drive

Although it may be handy to have your data with you throughout the day, most external hard drives are too encumbering to haul around. Hoping to lighten the burden, Seagate has launched its new GoFlex Slim Performance Drive, which offers 320GB of storage space in a form factor that is roughly as thick as a pencil.

The GoFlex Slim weighs 0.356lbs (160g) and measures 4.91 x 3.07 x 0.354in (124 x 78 x 9mm). That's pretty impressive when you consider most 2.5-inch notebook hard drives are 9.5mm thick without an enclosure. Being only a bit larger than today's smartphones, the drive should be easy enough to slip into a jacket pocket.

Seagate has opted for a spindle speed of 7200RPM instead of 5400RPM and the GoFlex Slim uses USB 3.0 for both data and power. We haven't seen any official throughput figures, but Engadget reports that the drive reached upwards of 40MB/s during an in-house transfer test, which isn't too bad all things considered.

The GoFlex Slim is currently available online for $100 and comes with backup and encryption software as well as a three-year warranty. Although it's preloaded with an NTFS driver for Macs, you'll have to reformat the drive to HFS+ to use it with Time Machine. An HFS+ version will hit Apple stores sometime next month.