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DISK DRIVE MAKER Western Digital has been ordered to pay 5m by an arbitrator regarding claims made by rival storage outfit Seagate.

Seagate alleged that Western Digital and one of Seagate’s former employees had misappropriated confidential information and trade secrets. The arbitrator in the case rendered the award of 5m against Western Digital, an assessment that Western Digital claims lacks any basis in law.

John Coyne, president and CEO of Western Digital said, “We do not believe there is any basis in law or fact for the damage award of the arbitrator.” Coyne continued, “We believe the company acted properly at all times and we will vigorously challenge the award. This does not affect our ability to conduct our operations, to complete the recovery and recommencement of our Thailand operations or, subject to obtaining the required regulatory approvals, to consummate our planned acquisition of Hitachi GST.”

Western Digital and Seagate recently announced that they will buy Hitachi GST and Samsung’s hard drive operations, respectively. The moves will see the two firms duking it out, with Toshiba a very distant third place.

The fact that Coyne mentioned the Hitachi GST merger shows how important it is for the firm to complete the deal. If it falls through and Seagate completes its purchase of Samsung’s hard drive division, Western Digital might be left at a disadvantage for competing with Seagate.

At present the hard disk drive industry has been reeling from the devastating floods in Thailand. With suppliers being forced to shutter factories, disk drive prices have increased sharply, though in recent days some models have started to slowly come down in price. µ

STORAGE VENDOR Seagate has announced a simplified line of its Barracuda hard drives.

The updated Barrucuda range of hard drives will offer between 250GB and 3TB capacity. This is up to 1TB per platter, the highest density currently available, and Seagate has cranked up the spin speed to 7200rpm from 5400rpm.

Scott Horn, VP of marketing at Seagate said, “The new Barracuda family reflects the reality that end-users want a full range of hard drive capacities and as much performance as we can give them to help manage and store massive amounts of digital content.”

Seagate has also said it plans to discontinue its Barracuda Green Drive in February next year. This is because the upcoming drives have almost the same power consumption but higher performance.

Seagate will relaunch the Barracuda XT, its fastest desktop drive, as a solid state hybrid within the Barracuda line. SATA 6Gbits/s is the standard interface used and the hard drives will have up to 64MB of cache. µ

Yesterday Seagate had three members of its Barracuda family of 3.5" hard drives: the Barracuda Green, Barracuda, and Barracuda XT. Today, all three lines are being folded under the Barracuda name. The Barracuda Green drives will cease production in February 2012. The Barracuda XT, Seagate's flagship 3.5" drive, will eventually be replaced by a solid state Hybrid drive at some point in the future. Until then, if you want a 3.5" hard drive from Seagate – it'll just be called a Barracuda.

The new Barracuda lineup is top-to-bottom 7200RPM. Seagate makes up for the extra power required to spin at 7200RPM (vs 5900RPM for the Green drives) by moving to 1TB platters and a faster cache. Increasing platter density has been the preferred route of increasing performance in hard drives over the past decade, causing spindle speeds to stagnate but sequential transfer rates to increase steadily. The new 1TB-per-platter Barracuda disks are no exception. Despite not carrying the XT label, the new 3TB drive is capable of noticeably higher sequential read/write speeds compared to the outgoing Barracuda XT. 

Seagate also updated the controller (now built on a 40nm process) and DRAM (now up to 64MB of DDR2) on the new Barracuda line. The 1TB platter drives are available in 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB and 3TB capacities. Their prices and model numbers are below:

Seagate's 1TB-per-platter Barracuda Lineup

Model Number

Capacity

MSRP

ST3000DM001

3TB

9.99

ST2000DM001

2TB

5.99

ST1500DM001

1.5TB

.99

ST1000DM003

1TB

.99

We'll have a full review of the new 3TB flagship drive later today.

STORAGE VENDOR Seagate has launched its Goflex Cinema, a multimedia storage hub for the home.

The Goflex Cinema is designed to plug straight into a device such as a TV to create a digital media centre. The drive comes in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB capacities to suit varying demands.

Seagate said, “This new high-capacity drive is designed to transform the television into a digital media center. The drive comes equipped with all of the port connections and support for popular file formats that make it easy to start enjoying movies, music and photos away from the computer environment.”

The drive supports playback of files such as MKV, H.264, WMV and MP4 and supports full HD 1080p. Seagate has included HMDI and composite connections for video and composite or s/pdif optical for audio. It also has full size USB and microUSB ports.

Content such as photos can be transferred onto the Goflex directly, from a digital camera for example. Seagate includes a remote control for the drive and an on-screen user interface allows users to browse files and control playback easily.

If the standard capacities aren’t enough for your needs then the drive can be upgraded with a higher capacity Goflex Desk drive, said Seagate.

Seagate has told us that the device does not function as a digital video recorder (DVR) when plugged into a TV.

Based on prices at Amazon the cheapest model costs around £131, with prices going up to £165 and £191 for the 2TB and 3TB versions, respectively. µ

Product Seagate Goflex Satellite
Website Seagate
Specifications500GB, USB 3.0, 802.11 b/g/n, WPA security, supports Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later, 267g, five hours continuous streaming, 25 hours standby time, 120x90x22mm, 267g
Price £180

SMARTPHONES AND TABLETS are able to replicate most of the multimedia functionality associated with laptop and desktop computers, but one of their key limitations at present is on-board storage.

Step forward storage maker Seagate, which aims to allow users to share content using portable devices, negating the need to splash out on that 64GB Ipad or 32GB Android tablet.

The Goflex Satellite is an external 500GB hard disk drive that allows users to stream content to three devices simultaneously over WiFi. With dimensions of 120x90x22mm and a weight of 267g, the device is portable enough to carry around all day.

One of the things we like about the Goflex Satellite is its ease of use. Users can simply load movies, photos, music onto the hard drive, hit the switch to activate the WiFi and share content. The drive works on both PCs and Macs, with the latter requiring a quick manual driver install. The device comes with a USB 3.0 connection, facilitating high-speed data transfers for those who have the latest laptop or desktop.

Best of all, the Goflex works on pretty much any device that has a WiFi connection and web browser. The hard drive can also be used with a dedicated Apple IOS or Android app. However, once connected to the Goflex, it is not possible to use WiFi bridging, so if users need to connect to another hotspot to use the internet they will have to disconnect.

During our tests, we primarily used the web browser to view content and manage settings. When sharing content with friends or colleagues, the browser is the quickest and easiest way to view content. It doesn’t require users to download anything – handy if there is no nearby internet connectivity.

Once you are connected to the Goflex WiFi, simply type in any URL and the page redirects to the Goflex web interface.

We were able to stream content directly to an Ipad 2, a Blackberry Playbook, an Acer Iconia Tab, a Motorola Xoom, an HTC Flyer, a Google Nexus S and an HTC Desire S. Even when streaming video content to three devices simultaneously for prolonged periods of time, playback was smooth and the connection did not drop or stutter.

STORAGE VENDOR Seagate has lifted the lid on its Momentus Thin hard drives aimed at tablets.

Gadget maker Archos was the first to include Seagate’s Momentus Thin hard drives in its G9 series of tablets, however the firm didn’t go into much detail on the storage itself. Now Seagate has officially launched the Momentus Thin series of drives which have a 7mm profile, considerably lower than the firm’s standard 2.5in drives that have a profile of 9.5mm.

Seagate will make three Momentus Thin capacities available with 160GB, 250GB and 320GB in both 5,400RPM and 7,200RPM. All of the Momentus Thin drives will have a 16MB cache and there is the option of a hardware based encryption module.

Most of the tablets on the market today use flash based storage and while hard drives might not provide the same performance, they are considerably cheaper. It could be argued that with so much content located on the internet, it is more likely that the internet connection will be the source of delays rather than the storage medium.

There’s no doubt that flash based storage can produce thinner and more responsive devices, however if tablet makers use some flash memory as a cache, then traditional platter hard drives could well find a following among cheaper tablets. µ

HARD DRIVE MAKERS Seagate and Samsung have struck a deal to combine their hard drive businesses in a £845 million agreement.

This news comes only a day after we reported that Samsung was looking to sell its hard drive division. Though Seagate hasn’t completely bought Samsung’s hard drive operation, the deal between the two major players will see Seagate paying Samsung and will be split half and half between stock and cash.

The agreement means that Samsung will supply Seagate with NAND flash memory for use in its solid state drives and other products. Seagate will supply Samsung with disk drives for use in its range of products including PCs and laptops.

The two companies will look to co-develop enterprise storage products and extend the patent cross license agreement that already exists after a joint development agreement signed in August of 2010.

As part of the deal Samsung will receive significant equity ownership in Seagate of 45.2 million shares, which works out to 9.6 per cent ownership. A shareholder agreement has also been made under which a Samsung executive will be nominated to join Seagate’s board of directors.

The companies expect to close the transactions by the end of this year.

Seagate says the move will give the companies an advantage in future product development, accelerate time-to-market for new products and put them in a better position to compete in growing market areas such as mobile computing, cloud computing and solid state storage.

Steve Luczo, CEO of Seagate said, “With these agreements, we expect to achieve greater scale and deliver a broader range of innovative storage products and solutions to our customers, while facilitating our long-term relationship with Samsung.” µ

As a desktop user I never really jumped on the external storage craze. I kept a couple of terabyte drives in RAID-0 inside my chassis and there's always the multi-TB array in the lab in case I needed more storage. External drives were always neat to look at, but I never really needed any. My notebook's internal storage was always enough.

With the arrival of Sandy Bridge in notebooks however I've given the notebook as a desktop replacement thing a try. I've got enough random hardware if I need a fast gaming machine in a pinch, but for everything else I'm strictly notebook these days. As a result I've come to realize just how precious portable storage is. Most reasonably portable notebooks have one usable 2.5" bay at most (two if you don't mind sacrificing an optical drive). Network storage is great but what if you need something portable on the go with you?

I'm obviously a staunch advocate of spending your internal real estate on an SSD, but if you need the space you've gotta go mechanical for your external storage. If portability is what matters, an external 2.5" hard drive can be quite attractive as they're lightweight and can be powered over USB.

In the 2.5" world there are three predominant thicknesses available: 7mm, 9.5mm and 12.5mm. Most notebook drives are 9.5mm. You'll notice that Intel even ships many of its SSDs with a removable spacer to make them 9.5mm tall in order to maintain physical compatibility with as many notebooks as possible.

Thicker drives are needed to accommodate more platters inside, but as platter densities increase so do the capacities of thinner drives. A couple of years ago Seagate announced the world's first 7mm thick 2.5" hard drive and earlier today, it announced the thinnest external 2.5" drive: the GoFlex Slim.

Seagate recently announced the world's first 3TB 3.5" HDD. There's just one catch: it's external only. The FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3TB arrived in our labs over a week ago and we've put in a lot of hours testing this thing. Not only did we try it as an external drive but we cracked open the case and played around with it as an internal SATA drive to explore breaking the 2TB limit on present day PCs.

Read on for our full review!

PLATTER SPINNER Seagate has announced that it will work with Samsung to produce controller boards for enterprise solid state drives (SSD).

The hook-up sees two storage powerhouses work together in trying to crack the enterprise SSD market. Samsung, the world’s largest DRAM and NAND flash manufacturer will be offering its 30nm chips to Seagate for use in its enterprise SSDs.

Seagate, still the largest maker of hard drives, will look to trade on its brand name, built by peddling its legendary ‘Cheetah’ range of SCSI and SAS hard drives. The firm says that working with Samsung will allow them to create controllers for drives that can “attain the high levels of performance, reliability and endurance demanded by enterprise storage applications”.

While Seagate pushes its enterprise credentials, Samsung is far more keen to tout the energy efficiencies that SSDs bring. Dr. Changhyun Kim, senior vice president and Samsung Fellow said, “Our green memory solution is designed to enable more energy-efficient server applications, which is expected to increase the use of NAND-based SSD storage in enterprise applications.”

Hard drive manufacturers such as Seagate and Western Digital have been slow to embrace SSDs as they look to milk traditional hard drives for every last penny. While Samsung makes hard drives, it tends to concentrate on the consumer market and was quick to jump onto the SSD bandwagon.

SSDs have characteristics which make them particularly conducive to servers. Low latency means that SSDs are able to attain high I/O operations per second (IOPS) and with low power consumption, it allows more drives to be shoved into the rack.

This announcement is the clearest indication yet that hard drive manufacturers are finally moving on from mechanical platter drives and looking forward rather than going around in circles. µ