Seagate showed us their new entries into the market for this year, aside from an almost complete acquisition of LaCie (who also released a few interesting things recently), a new focus on demystifying the wireless storage experience as well as displaying a new secure erase method which leaves all previous methodologies in the dust.
Building on their previous GoFlex wireless drive, the release of the new Wireless Plus portable drive brings data to wherever it is needed.By connecting it to any wireless network, the drive can be accessed as up to three independent media streams via a series of applications built into the device, which makes it perform very much like a Smart TV. It is available now at an MSRP of $199.
Up next is the Central, a consumer level NAS (Network Attached Storage) which aims to ease the general perception of network based storage to the average consumer as well as making it easy for the end user to jump in and begin to immediately use it. With a category growth in consumer NASs in the double digits last year, and projected figures for the upcoming year being even greater than last, it is not a big surprise that Seagate would want to jump into this market. They say that name of the device is twofold, on the one hand being a central part of their digital storage line, but the other being that the device should also be a central part of the home. The unit is fully DLNA optimized and supports cross OS browsing of the files, as well as up to 3 independent media streams. The Central sports gigabit ethernet, 1 USB 2.0 port for additional extra storage, the Seagate dashboard software and cloud functionality for storage and backup, and will come in 2, 3, and 4 terabyte models. The MSRP for these devices will be $179, $219, and $259 respectively.
Probably the most interesting thing in the Seagate suite was a small, rather humble display concerning their Seagate Security currently undergoing evaluation by NIST, having reached the 3 month milestone phase. All of Seagate’s enterprise drives currently have a unique ID printed in both character and 2D barcode format on the side of the drive itself, identifying a unique ID for the drive itself and interacts with the Seagate security software by providing a way of generating a security key. This key is used to read the drive, which automatically writes in an encrypted format to the drive itself. The usual method to securely erase a normally secure hard drive is by making multiple passes to write junk data on the drive, which can be extremely time consuming (Cited average is around 39 hours). What Seagate’s security does instead is to simply alter the drive’s security key, which prevents any data currently on the drive from being read, ever again in any coherent format. This method allows a very quick and secure ‘erasure’ which can be accomplished in seconds instead of minutes or hours.
