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Western Digital and Seagate to reduce hard drive warranties in 2012

admin — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:47:58 +0000

Seagate and Western Digital are reducing hard drive warranties for hard drives shipped next year.

Now is the time to buy hard drives to get your warranties locked in.

The Western Digital Scorpio Blue, Green and Caviar Blue will be available with only a two year warranty rather than the current three year warranty. WD will however allow you to have a better warranty if you would like to pay an additional fee.

The Seagate Barracuda XT, ES.2, Constellation 2, and Momentus XT hard drives ship with an awesome 5 year warranty. However in 2012 the warranties are expected to drop to three years. Most of Seagate’s hard drive lines are also seeing warranty cuts. The less expensive Barracuda, Barracuda Green and the 2.5-inch Momentus hard drives will ship with only a 12 months warranty.

These warranty changes are probably as a result of the flooding in Thailand which caused prices to soar. Maybe eventually prices will drop, but I doubt that warranties will ever creep up again.

Seagate is Shipping their 3TB Enterprise Hard Drive

admin — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:09:49 +0000

Seagate’s has a new SATA6 3TB enterprise hard drive. The 3.5-inch, 7200RPM Barracuda XT ships with a 64MB cache and Seagate DiscWizard software that allows older computers to create a 3TB partition. The specialized software loads a driver for your 3TB hard drive so that it can be seen correctly by your older system. The ST33000651AS just started shipping at an $279 MSRP.

From the setup manual:

There are several capacity limitations that appear at 2.2TB.
Any systems built before 2011 and using a drive greater than 2.1TB will need
a device driver to access the terabytes above 2.1TB. DiscWizard software will
automatically detect and offer to install the appropriate driver for your Windows
OS and hardware (Windows 7, Visa or XP, 64- or 32-bit). The driver will mount the
remainder capacity above 2.1TB as a new drive letter, usually D:. This new drive is
also limited to a maximum of 2.1TB, so this will be repeated as necessary. A future
6.6TB drive will have three drive letters—C: managed by native Windows drivers;
D: and E: drives managed by the DiscWizard driver.

This is from the press release:

The Barracuda XT hard drive with free Seagate DiscWizard™ software is a complete, easy-to-deploy solution. DiscWizard software makes it simple to configure the computer operating system and device drivers to access the full 3TB of capacity on legacy systems using Windows XP and PC BIOS and on personal computers equipped with newer versions of Windows or the new UEFI BIOS. The new DiscWizard software is available for free download at http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/beyond-2tb/.

1.5 Terabyte drive and External Drive Dock Deal

Geek — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:09:50 +0000

Newegg Deal

1. Seagate ST31500341AS: $119.99
2. Thermaltake N0028USU: $36.99
Combo Discount: -$36.99
Combo Price: $119.99

1. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
show details

2. Thermaltake BlacX N0028USU External Hard Drive SATA Enclosure Docking Station 2.5″ & 3.5″ USB 2.0 – Retail
show details

SATA3 Expected by the end of the Year

Geek — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:58:05 +0000

AMD and Seagate are collaborating on a new hard drive with a Serial ATA (SATA) interface, tentatively called SATA3. SATA3 offers speeds up to 6Gbps, or 600MBps.

(SATA3, or SATA 6GB/second, was developed by the Serial ATA International Organization under the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 specs.)

In the current market most consumer-grade computers use either the SATA or SATA2 interfaces. These interfaces offer throughput speeds of 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps, respectively, or 150MBps and 300MBps. Because of software and hardware overhead, the actual speed of most SATA hard drives is still less than 200MBps.

The new SATA3 interface will raise the top throughput of hard drive speeds by 200 percent which will hopefully increase the actual transfer speed of hard drives accordingly.

The new SATA3 interface will be backward compatible with the existing SATA and SATA2 interfaces and will share the same cables and connectors. SATA3 enhances power efficiency and improves native command queuing, an inherent features of SATA standard, to increase overall system performance and data transfer speeds.

SATA3 is still in the final phase of development and there aren’t any actual products out yet. AMD said it would fully support the technology with a revision of its current 750 chipset and future chipsets.

Seagate estimates however that the first SATA3-based hard drive will be by the end of the year.

Via:Seagate

Seagate provides a fix and free data recover for Barracuda drive owners

admin — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:32:00 +0000

After a torrent of angry Seagate Barracuda owners voiced concern over their failing disk drives, Seagate has fessed up to the issue. According to Seagate, a firmware bug in DiamondMax 22, Barracuda 7200.11, and Barracuda ES.2 SATA drives could make the disks “inaccessible when the host system is turned on.” Seagate assures owners that their data is not lost (it’s still somewhere on the disk). However, should data loss occur, Seagate is providing free data recovery services on a case by case basis.

Check your Seagate drive here.

If your drive is one that affected, a link is provided at the bottom to contact Seagate to expedite resolution. They also have a piece of software at this link to check your drive. It is good of Seagate to recognize that they have a problem and to do something about it.