Seagate upgrades hard disk drives

Mumbai: Seagate, the world's top manufacturer of hard disk drives, has unveiled an array of new products that include upgraded disc drives and digital devices. Seagate has upgraded almost all its disk drives of its Barracuda series. The upgraded Barracuda 7200.10 has a srorage capacity of 750GB against 500 GB of 7200.9 version.

Seagate's new Barracuda 7200.10 hard disk drive uses a perpendicular recording technology that boosts the capacity of the drive by almost 50 per cent. The perpendicular technology stands the magnetic media particles on their end instead of laying them on their side, thereby significantly increasing the density.

The enhanced storage capacity is backed by faster processing and better broadband and wireless connectivity. Using the new Seagate products allows users to deliver and access music, movies, photos, data, and other digital content anytime, anywhere.

There are six different capacities of drives in the 7200.10 range with a choice of ATA100 and SATA 300 interfaces. The 750GB, 500GB, 400GB, 320GB models all have 16MB of cache, the 250GB comes in both 8MB and 16MB versions, while the 200GB model has a mere 8MB cache. The 200GB drive is perhaps the first baby of the new range.

Besides the 7200.10, Seagate has launched nine new products that include 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch hard drives, each with up to 750GB of capacity. The company has also launched an 8GB pocket drive.

The new products are meant for both individual consumers and enterprises, including notebook and the desktop PC segments.

The company has introduced a notebook drive that combines rotating disc and flash memory, as also adds Macintosh support to its next generation Mirra personal server. This perhaps is the first device to synchronise and share data between Macs and PCs.

The new Mirra Sync, with a 320GB storage capacity, allows users to access digital content over the internet while providing automatic synchronisation and back-up of Windows and Macintosh files.