Seagate's Upcoming Offerings

Perpendicular recording has been in the news recently, with Toshiba bringing to the market the first drive utilizing the technology. We asked Seagate how soon it would bring a product using the new recording method to the desktop and notebook market. Back in June, Seagate introduced the 160GB Momentus 5400.3 notebook drive, the highest capacity notebook drive to date, achieved by using perpendicular recording and higher density platters for the increased disk space. The 160GB version of the 5400.3 will use two 80GB platters in combination with 4 heads to achieve this capacity. The 5400.3 line will offer 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, and 120GB as well with an 8MB cache and both PATA and SATA 1.5Gb/sec transfer rate with Native Command Queuing.

Another offering that we are looking forward to is the Momentus with FDE (Full Disc Encryption) technology. This implements a hardware-based encryption method to protect the contents on a lost or stolen drive. Since the encryption is hardware-based, there is virtually no chance of breaking into a locked volume, and in cases where the drive is to be disposed, the Disc Erase feature will completely wipe the platters clean of any sensitive data. The Momentus 5400 FDE line will come in 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, 100GB, and 120GB sizes. It will feature an 8MB cache and looks like it will be offered only in the PATA flavor - at least initially.

The 7200.9 Series
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  • Lifted - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link

    Hopefully this will bring down the price of the 500GB drives a bit. Running out of space for TV shows, and I already have a couple 400's and 250. Anybody find a RAID-5 external enclosure yet that holds 3 or more drives? I've been looking for one for a while now. I'm getting nervous with all my stuff not being RAID or backed up.
  • Visual - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link

    Um, the hotplug/hotswap feature sounds interesting, is it supported on any of the integraded sata controllers? I know my nforce4 has some "safely remove hardware" icon for my drive, but im quite sure the hdd doesnt support such a maneuver. Its quite confusing...

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