Post con tag seagate
Seagate presente il primo hard disk portatile compatibile con gli iDevice
24 Mag
Qualche giorno fa a Milano Seagate ha presentato il nuovo hard disk portatile GoFlex Satellite. La caratteristica principale dell’hard disk, compatibile con Windows e Mac, è che ha, oltre al sistema di dock con diverse porte wired, la modalità Wireless 802.11b/g/n per poter essere utilizzato dai dispositivi iOS, tramite l’applicazione GoFlex Media. Il drive con Wi-Fi distribuisce autonomamente un segnale wireless, al quale l’iPad, l’iPhone, l’iPod touch si può collegare perché sia visto dal dispositivo iOS. In futuro anche Android.
GoFlex Satellite usa un hard disk @ 5.400 rpm per diminuire il consumo energetico, infatti la batteria incorporata assicura 5 ore di impiego in modalità wireless o 25 ore in stand by. In USA il modello GoFlex Satellite costerà 200$ il prezzo in Italia lo sapremo a metà agosto ed è molto probabile che sia di 200€. Compreso nel prezzo sarà disponibile un piccolo trasformatore con presa italiana ed uno per l’accendisigari dell’auto.
Technology and Hack
Seagate updates portable hard drive storage to 1.5TB
21 Set
Seagate has upped the portable drive ante again with their new 1.5TB FreeAgent GoFlex. The new drive comes with their GoFlex interface connected through a USB 3.0 (which is also 2.0 compatible). Though that won’t be of much use to Mac users at the moment (maybe in October?), the size will turn some heads. It is 50% bigger than any other portable hard drive.
If you are like us, you are wondering if you can pull this thing out of its case and plop it in your MacBook Pro. The good news is that Seagate’s Go Flex interface is just a snap on for a SATA connection and will work with any standard SATA drive. It also means that you can pull these drives out of their case and use them as internal drives. But this one looks pretty thick.
I’ve contacted Seagate who’ve given me the dimensions of the external enclosure which are:
4.71in L x 3.51in W x 0.87in D (120mm x 89mm x 22mm), Weight: 0.62lb (0.28kg)
That doesn’t bode well for its abilities to go internal because the maximum thickness of a MacBook Pro internal drive is 12.5mm.
Still. Nice to have a 1.5TB portable, USB 3.0-capable drive. List price however is a hefty $249.
Press release follows:
SEAGATE INTRODUCES INDUSTRY’S FIRST 1.5TB PORTABLE EXTERNAL DRIVE
New FreeAgent® GoFlex™ Ultra-Portable External Drive Packs a Punch with Pre-loaded Paramount Pictures Films, Unprecedented Amount of Storage and BlazinglyFast USB 3.0 Connection
SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. – September 21, 2010 – Designed to address the explosive worldwide demand for digital storage, Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) today launched the world’s first 1.5 terabyte (TB) 2.5-inch portable external drive. Available immediately, the new 1.5TB FreeAgent® GoFlex™ ultra-portable drive delivers an all-in-one, technically advanced solution to help jump-start, build, store and enjoy libraries of digital content in one’s preferred medium-whether on a Mac or PC, or a television, at home or on the go. With 1.5TB of capacity people can now store and carry up to 60 HD movies, 750 video games, thousands of photos or tens of thousands hours of digital music.
“Today’s announcement is a ‘triple-crown’ of consumer technology-packaging record breaking capacity, blazingly fast USB 3.0 connectivity and the bonus of major motion picture entertainment-making the 1.5TB GoFlex™ ultra-portable drive an unprecedented and innovative solution,” said Darcy Clarkson, vice president of Global Retail Sales and Marketing for Seagate. “Bringing this solution to market on the heels of our 3TB GoFlex™ Desk drive and the Momentus® XT solid state hybrid drive is proof of Seagate’s continuing technology leadership and tradition of setting storage industry milestones.”
Shipping now in the United States and rolling out globally later this year, all 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drives will ship with a USB 3.0 interface cable, accelerating the transfer speed of a drive up to 10x when connected to a USB 3.0 port, when compared to a USB 2.0 port. For example, a drive using a USB 3.0 connection can transfer a 25GB HD movie in under five minutes versus the 14 minutes it would take using a traditional USB 2.0 drive . In
addition, all GoFlex ultra portable drives will now also ship with the new superspeed USB 3.0 cable, which will still continue to work with existing USB 2.0 ports.
“Consumers continue to push the growth of digital music, photos, and video content, and increasingly want access to this content from a variety of CE devices, including a PC,” says John Rydning, IDC’s research director for hard disk drives. “Higher capacity disk drives in combination with higher bandwidth interfaces like USB 3.0 will help to make a greater number of large multimedia files more accessible from multiple devices in the home.”
A key addition to the GoFlex™ family, the new 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drive delivers ultimate flexibility in how people collect, protect, share and enjoy their digital libraries, all in a convenient compact package. In addition to coming bundled with USB 3.0 connectivity, the drive can be used with an array of add-on cables and accessories such as the GoFlex™ Net media sharing device and the GoFlex™ TV HD media player, that provide the flexibility to enjoy your content on a TV, a network, using a mobile device, or via the Internet.
Continuing the special offer with Paramount Digital Entertainment, a division of Paramount Pictures Corporation (PPC), specially-marked packages of the new 1.5TB and the 1TB GoFlex ultra-portable drives will contain Paramount Pictures’ popular film, Star Trek (2009), which can be activated free of charge. Each drive will also contain an assortment of 20 Paramount Pictures movies that can be easily and securely unlocked by purchasing a license key online. The films will be licensed for multiple devices to allow for portability and enjoyment on a Windows® OS desktop computer, laptop computer, or widescreen television, by connecting the drive to one of the two available USB ports on a GoFlex TV HD media player . Paramount content will also be added to additional capacities of the GoFlex Pro ultra-portable drive in October.
All 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drives are compatible with both the Windows® operating system and Mac® OS X computers. Each drive includes an NTFS driver for Mac, which allows the hard drive to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without reformatting. The NTFS driver is simply installed once on the Mac® OS X computer, allowing it to read and write files on a Windows formatted drive.
The 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drive with USB 3.0 adapter is available in black and can be purchased on Seagate.com and through select retailers for $249.99.
Tech&Hack
Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drive review
10 Ago
Earlier this year, Seagate promised to flip the 2.5-inch HDD industry upside-down, but it wouldn’t do so by using an SSD in sheep’s clothing. Rather, it’d be doling out a new breed of hard drive, one that actually has a pinch of pure, unadulterated NAND inside for picking up the pace in certain scenarios. The idea of a hybrid hard drive isn’t totally new, but the Momentus XT is one of the first hybrid HDDs to actually make it out of the lab and into the hands of consumers. The most intriguing aspect of the drive is the price — at around $130, it’s just under half as pricey as Seagate’s conventional 500GB Momentus 7200.4. That uptick in price isn’t nothing, but it’s still far less than what you’d pay for a 2.5-inch SSD with half the capacity. We’ve already shown you the benchmarks, so we figured we’d slap this bad boy in our main rig for a few weeks to see if we actually noticed any real-world performance increases to justify the cost. Head on past the break for our two pennies.
Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drive hands-on
The Momentus XT is a curious beast. It actually doesn’t reveal its true colors when taxed in standard benchmarks, which makes a longer-term, real-world evaluation of it that much more important. You see, this 500 gigger actually has 4GB of NAND onboard, but given just how small 4GB is in relation to the other 496GB, the drive obviously has to be extra choosy when determining what goes where. Standard benchmarks will prove that a straight-up read / write on this drive is similar to any other 7,200RPM drive of this caliber. Frankly, there’s no real gains if you’re using the drive to shuffle 30GB files from server to server each day. The whole point of this drive is to make "the little things" snappier in everyday use for the Average Joe / Jane, largely by evaluating what applications consumers use most and then dedicating the NAND for those high-use apps.
Needless to say, there’s not really a great benchmark tool out for that kind of work. This all sounds fine and dandy in theory, but the real question is how does it act in practice. We swapped our standard 7,200RPM drive (also 500GB) out for this unit, cloning the contents along the way. Upon boot, we noticed a 1 – 2 second improvement in how long it took to show us a useable desktop; hardly Earth-shattering, but a decent start. From there, we fired up Firefox, Photoshop CS5, Skitch, TweetDeck and iTunes in succession. Again, a 1 – 2 second improvement in total load time. But after using the apps for a bit, we shut our machine down and rebooted, doing the same song and dance all over again. And again. And again. We went through this process four total times, with each one getting a bit quicker when it came to load time. After we’d given it ample opportunity to grasp our preferred flow, we noticed a 6 – 8 second improvement in total load time. That may not sound like a lot, but percentage wise it’s hardly worth sneezing at.
So, if booting up apps was quicker, how’s about the actual in-app performance? We used Lightroom 2 as our main test bench here, selecting 300 RAW files and waiting as graphical representations of the color balance lit up in the corner. The difference here was striking. On the prior drive, it took a few seconds per image to display graphical elements about any given image; on the Momentus XT, they popped up instantly. One area where we didn’t see such a huge increase in performance was during renders; we exported a 32GB iMovie project into a .mov file for easier transport, and the total time for the task to complete was essentially the same on both drives. Granted, we fully expected this type of behavior, but it goes to show that 4GB of NAND won’t exactly alter your universe when looking at chores that require lengthy reads and writes.
All told, we’d have a tough time not recommending the Momentus XT, particularly the 500GB version. If you’re in no need of that much space, we’d almost recommend saving up for a pure SSD at 256GB or less. But currently, the price difference between this drive and the half-as-big solid state drives makes Seagate’s new alternative that much more attractive. We’d also recommend this only for those who are looking for performance gains in the simplest of tasks; opening your email client, sifting through images in Lightroom, switching between the ten apps you have open, etc. Comically enough, this performance-oriented drive best reveals its talents in the most mundane of tasks, but like it or not, that’s what the bulk of us are buried in from 9 8 to 5. If you’ve outgrown your existing laptop HDD, and you need a capacious replacement, the Momentus XT is an option that’s worth the price premium in our estimation. It may not make your Core 2 Duo feel like a Core i7, but it’ll definitely get your through the day with a few less pinwheels / hourglasses.
Tech&Hack
