Seagate's New Drives

Today has been a great day for Seagate Technology as it announced three new 2.5-inch mobile hard drives built on perpendicular recording technology with up to 160GB capacities. The first of the new laptop hard drives (Momentus 5400 PSD) combined flash memory and magnetic storage to reduce power consumption and increase performance, which Microsoft's upcoming Vista operating system will utilize with certain technologies. Seagate's new notebook disc drives will be able to take advantage of breakthrough features in Windows Vista that will benefit customers by delivering faster boot times and longer battery life.

The second drive uses encryption technology to provide on the fly hardware-level security. The Momentus 5400 FDE, or Full Disk Encryption, drive is a 2.5-inch notebook drive which packs in a hardware encryption algorithm for on-the-fly protection of data without any user intervention during the reading and writing process. The drive is packaged and ready to allow the user to enter a password ( or up to 5, if used by multiple users) which allows access to the disk in a laptop. The user will only need to enter the password once during the boot process to "open" the disk's contents.

Rounding out the trio of new drives is the second lineup of 7200RPM models for super-speedy laptops, bringing capacities to 160GB.

Momentus 5400 PSD, Momentus 5400.2 FDE and Momentus 7200.2 are scheduled to ship in the first half of calendar 2007. Seagate's newest notebook hard drives will be available in 40GB to 160GB capacities.