Seagate ships first electronics hard drives using new standard

Our Convergence Bureau
29 October 2003

A result of Seagate's close collaboration with top CE companies, Seagate's new CE hard drives are the industry's first to implement the new ATA standard streaming command set adopted by the T-13 committee as the new industry standard. Because of the company's unique design, manufacturing and customer-focused processes, Seagate is the hard drive supplier that global CE brands want to work with.

"Seagate drives have been at the heart of the consumer electronics revolution since it's beginning in 1997," says Brian Dexheimer, executive vice-president of sales, marketing and customer service. "Based on our intimate customer relationships over the years, in development meetings and at our CE design service centres, we developed these drives to deliver the features CE manufacturers asked for — quiet acoustics, high reliability and top-streaming performance.

"These Seagate CE drives are also compatible with ATA/7 standard firmware, providing flexibility to CE OEMs who want to optimise the drive for their application. And Seagate consumer electronics engineers are ready to help solve HDD integration issues through design service centres. Seagate is the only hard drive company to provide consumer electronics manufacturers with a comprehensive partnership — products, technology and services."

What makes a Seagate CE hard drive different
Seagate's new CE hard drives are based on industry standards, rather than proprietary solutions, built from the ground up to be compatible with the new ATA/7 streaming commands standards. Customers told Seagate they no longer want to choose between varied, incompatible methods for ensuring reliable video streaming in digital video recording devices. Seagate's ATA/7-compatible streaming commands give CE manufacturers greater flexibility in tuning the drive for best results with specific applications.

With easy-to-use stream management commands, Seagate's CE drives are optimised for the sequential work of streaming continuous A/V files. This delivers more consistent video streaming performance than PC hard drives designed for fragmented text-based documents. CE manufacturers also require that A/V streaming be a higher priority than the repetitive error-checking procedures used in PC applications, which slow down video streaming. Seagate's CE drives are optimised for A/V streaming performance, with manufacturer-defined error-checking parameters for smoother streams.

Seagate also designed these new drives to meet CE power requirements. Seagate CE drives' power management technology uses less peak power at start-up than other drives in their class, allowing DVR manufacturers to use less expensive components in their power architecture. Seagate drives are also the world's quietest, for pure audio enjoyment with virtually no discernible operating sound. And the rugged design of Seagate drives delivers high non-operating shock tolerance and low failure rates.