Movies Come Preloaded On Seagate Hard Drive

Scotts Valley, California-headquartered Seagate Technology LLC and Hollywood based Paramount Pictures Corporation have entered into an agreement, whereby 20 movie titles from Paramount have been preloaded into the hard drives of Seagate. Customers who buy these specially-marked hard drives will get to watch these movies after buying the license keys to unlock them.

The hard drives that have received this special treatment are Seagate’s 500GB FreeAgent Go ultra-portable hard drives. The movie that can be unlocked for viewing without any additional cost is “Star Trek”, the 2009 version. The other 20 movie titles require online purchase of the license keys, whose cost ranges from USD 9.99 to USD 14.99. This amounts to over 38 hours of movie viewing on a small, packet-sized hard drive.

The movies range from the classic “The Manchurian Candidate” (2004) to science fiction “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”, from “The Italian Job” (2003) to “The Love Guru”, and from “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” to “Enemy at the Gates”.

Paramount has now shifted its business model from the traditional cinema hall / DVD to distribution of its products on online, mobile and portable devices, videogames and emerging technologies.

Read more about this interesting arrangement between Seagate and Paramount, here.

The Savvio From Seagate – World’s Highest Capacity Enterprise Storage

Seagate has done it yet again. The Scotts Valley, California headquartered company has come out with the world’s highest-capacity enterprise hard disk drive in the enterprise storage category. The Savvio 10K.4 can hold 600GB worth of data.

Savvio 10K.4 measures 14.8mm (H) X 70.0mm (W) X 100.2mm (L), and weighs 208g. It has a spindle speed of 10,000 RPM, and a sustained data transfer rate of 141 Mb/s. The average latency time is 3.0 ms. Savvio requires a random seek time of 3.89 ms and a random write time of 4.54 ms, to operate an overall I/O data transfer rate of 600 MB/s.

Savvio 10K.4 has an interface of 6 Gbps SAS, and a cache of 16MB. With a reliability of 2 million hours of MTBF, the annual failure rate is estimated to be about 0.44%. Savvio requires a 12V start max current of 1.65A and 5V start max current of 0.86A. The average idle power requirement is 4.6W.

The device’s firmware comes with enhanced data protection features such as a self-encrypting drive (SED) option.

Read more about a new height achieved by Seagate in the arena of storage media, here.

Western Digital Introduces New Portable Drive For Mac

A new line of portable storage media has been unraveled by Lake Forest, California-headquartered Western Digital Corporation. The storage media is christened “My Passport SE”.

The My Passport SE drives are available in two capacities: 1 terabyte and 750 gigabyte. The product is compatible with Apple Time Machine software, and is formatted for the Mac. While the 1TB version is available for USD 199.99, the 750 GB model comes at a tag of USD 179.99. Both the products are available at WD’s online store.

The drives work on USB 2.0, and afford a serial bus transfer rate of 480 Mbps. Operating it is simply plug and play. The devices measure 0.70 inch (H) X 4.30 inch (L) X 3.20 inch (W), and weigh 0.42 pounds. According to the company press release, the devices being USB-powered, do not require any external power adapter to function. The firmware of the device comes with 256-bit hardware encryption with password protection feature, which prevents unauthorized access to the data lying within.

Founded in 1970, the company is a market leader in storage media solutions.

Read more about the latest introduction of storage media for Macintosh users, here.

Seagate Launches 2TB Enterprise Class Drive With 6Gb SAS

Scotts Valley, California-headquartered Seagate Corporation has announced the launch of a 2TB Enterprise-Class (ES) drive that features 6Gbps SAS interface. The drive has been christened “Constellation”. The drive is offered with either a 3 Gbps SATA interface or a 6 Gbps SAS 2.0 interface.

A fourth-generation enterprise-centric device, the drive is touted as the industry’s first such drive by the company. Constellation is best suited for enterprise apps where data demand is extremely high. The 6 Gbps SAS helps in very high data integrity thanks to its error detection and correction (IOEDC/IOECC).

Measuring 26.1 mm(H) X 101.6 mm (W) X 146.99 mm (L), the device weighs 710 gm. The cache has a capacity of 16MB. The drive spins at 7,200 RPM, and can sustain data transfer at a rate of 150 Mbps. With an average latency of 4.16 ms, random read seek time of less than 8.5 ms and random write seek time of less than 9.5 ms, the product has one of the best performances for its particular category.

Constellation requires an average idle power of 8.0 W, runs on an average operating power of 12.2 W, and requires 11.2 W for seek.

Read more about an industry-first achievement by Seagate, here.

Intel Launches A New SSD, X25-V

Santa Clara-headquartered Intel Corporation has launched a new solid state drive called X25-V.

The new device is available for USD 125. Its capacity is 40 GB, and employs 34nm NAND flash memory technology. The target market for this drive is netbooks and dual-drive / boot drive desktop set-ups.

Salient features of solid state drives are that there are no mechanical, moving parts or spinning platters inside their body. This makes the drives especially useful in rugged environments such as netbooks that are portable and therefore liable to be used more roughly than are the traditional desktops. Further, the lack of any mechanical motion implies that responsiveness to system’s demands for read and write is faster than the traditional hard disk drive (HDD).

On a desktop, the SSD can be installed with the OS and favorite applications and fitted into the system. When booted, the desktop can then take advantage of the superior speed of the SSD to function, while data and files can be stored on the HDD. The SSD speeds operations at the time of boot-up, opening of apps and resumption from hibernation / stand-by.

Read more about the latest solid state drive launched by Intel, here.

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