Seagate showed off a number of milestones and advancements to their established lines as well as touting new business focused models and a data recovery service aimed at the general consumer base.
Thanks to their 5mm ultra thin drive form factor that still uses regular SATA, Seagate has since gotten a number of design wins with a number of large companies in ubiquitous models such as Dell, Lenovo, and HP. In the current condition, this drive form factor is also under consideration for a serious expansion in a tablet device. Representatives touted the fact that in testing, attempting to break the drive through shock and impact testing would likely break the screen of the device before doing anything to the drive.
Also at the Seagate presentation was their Backup Plus series with their Fast, Slim, and Desk sizes on display. The Fast and Slim series were revitalized using their ultra thin designs with 7mm drives, up to and including 4TB, with the largest of these running 2x2TB drives in Raid 0. So far, while their thin 5mm drives have been considered for another revitalization, the cost of using those drives has so far outweighed the benefits.
In an expanding market, the Business Storage sector now makes up 25% of Seagate’s overall revenue, and has prompted three new models, two of them rack mounted in a 1U configuration. The first two new business rack mounted items feature 4 bay and 8 bay mounting options and x86 architecture, with hot swappable drives and auto balancing fan loading, making for a very sleek and powerfully expansive solution coupled with their new NAS operating system. In a similar form to their previous 4 bay prosumer model, there is now a 4 bay windows server NAS intended to be integrated with a typical small to medium sized business Windows IT system. This NAS features a DC2701 Dual core 2.1 ghz processor, in comparison to the previous prosumer version that used an ARM based CS27701. The rack mounted versions begin at about $1000 without any drives.
Finally, touted for general consumers, Seagate offers a data recovery service plan called Seagate Rescue and Recovery. For a one time fee of $29.99 at the time of purchase, it covers 2-4 years for the life of the drive. With business integration with Amazon and Staples thus far, it seems to be a service that everyone will be seeing more of because of a 93% total recovery rate, far exceeding Seagate’s own expected numbers.
