Seagate lines up 11 new harddrives

Scotts Valley (CA) - Seagate has announced to introduce eleven new harddrives over the coming months. Not happy with the game of the mainstream-only player anymore, the company will move into new segments such as the much-hyped 1 inch drives, market niches and the high-capacity market.

Seagate is about to drastically change the face of its product line. While the company so far was a good source for the mainstream harddrive, customers will see some new products, they usually wouldn’t expect from the Scotts Valley-based manufacturer. New devices will be introduced in the coming six months across the firm’s enterprise storage, personal storage and consumer electronics line.

The big news is that Seagate wants to play its part in the high capacity-market. For Q4 of this year, the company plans to introduce its fiber channel-based NL35 series targeted the nearline segment. The drives will be available with space up to 500 GByte. For entry level servers, Seagate will update its Barracuda 7200. Currently, the drives top out at 200 GByte, the eighth generation SATA drive will offer up to 400 GByte.

The new Barracuda is carried over to the consumer segment as PATA as well as SATA device with capacities ranging from 250 to 400 GByte. Seagate expects the drives to be available in Q3. The firm’s Momentus drive line for notebooks will be extended also in Q3 by a 7200rpm-series and increase current maximum space of 40 GByte to 100 GByte. Access times for read/write processes drop from 14.5 ms to 12 ms.

Completely new territory for Seagate are external 1, 2.5, 3.5 inch drives. Ford desktop PC the company offers a 3.5 inch, 7200 rpm drive with 250, 300 and 400 GByte (Q4), for portable applications such as audio players a 2.5 inch, 5400 rpm drive with 40 GByte (Q3) and a 3600 rpm 1 inch drive with capacities of 2.5 and 5 GByte.

The latter is a surprise in the announcement, since Seagate was less than vocal about this segment so far and Hitachi and Toshiba have been creating all the buzz. These 1 inch drives will come in Compact Flash II as well as PATA flex form factors and offer an interesting new option for users of digital cameras or PDAs which are used as audio players. Detailed pricing guidelines of these drives are not yet available, but Jeff Loebakka, Seagate’s vice president of global product marketing indicated that these drives will cost less than $150. While some criticized Seagate has not jumped into this segment earlier, Loebakka believes that the timing for the 1 inch drives is "just right" : "The industry will have a hard time meeting the demand for these drives in this year, which will reach about eight million in 2004 and about 20 million in 2005. This segment is about to take off."

Compared to its past product strategy, Seagate said that the new product line was developed in response to customer demands. Rather than focusing on the mainstream, the company will cover about 95 percent of the harddrive market.

All new Seagate products are listed below.