BusinessWeek says it’s stylish, affordable, and simple to use
Simplicity stands out in BusinessWeek’s review of the Seagate FreeAgent Go. So true! The biggest challenge with consumer technology in general remains its ability to be used by normal people.
As digital content moves into every corner of our lives, the winning products will be those that meet us where we are, and don’t try to turn us all into techno geeks.
Categories: Backup · Digital Home · Products
Tagged: BusinessWeek, christmas gift, FreeAgent Go, portable storage, review, Seagate
Style, performance and desktop dock made it their #1 portable drive choice
PC Magazine covered some new ground in their review of Seagate’s FreeAgent Go. Excerpts:
The Seagate FreeAgent Go (500GB) is the portable hard drive to beat. Its innovative dock, stylish design, generous five-year warranty, and included software give you just about all you need from a portable external drive.
Let’s hear from owners this drive. What do you think?
Categories: Digital Home · Products
Tagged: 500 GB, FreeAgent, FreeAgent Go, PC Magazine, review, Seagate
Faster than USB or Firewire
Computerworld reviewed the new Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme drive. They liked it well enough, but what turned their heads was the extreme speed of the eSATA port – more than twice as fast as their Firewire 400 test results.
Future-proof your next PC
eSATA stands for “External SATA”. This relatively new standard brings the performance of SATA – the internal PC hard drive interface - out of the box. eSATA connectivity is worth watching for on your next PC, as it will be increasingly available on external drives.
Categories: Digital Home · Industry trends
Tagged: Computerworld, eSATA, external storage, Firewire, FreeAgent Xtreme, review, USB
Enterprise SAS drives are today’s best choice for most IT shops
The smart guys at Tom’s Hardware have done a yeoman’s job of sorting the facts from the fiction regarding SSDs for the enterprise. Their conclusions:
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends · Products
Tagged: Cheetah 15K, enterprise, Flash, hard drive, Hitachi UltraStar, review, SAS, SSD, Tom's Hardware
Comprehensive evaluation of the top four 7200 rpm notebook drives
Tom’s Hardware compared performance notebook drives from Seagate, Hitachi, Samsung and WD with the depth and precision that only Tom’s can. The value-add here is their understanding of the complex mix of factors that interact in real-life notebook use: performance, power, durability, security.
Note that “performance” class 7200 rpm drives are on their way to becoming “mainstream” class, since more people are replacing desktops and expect desktop performance.
Conclusions from the review:
Seagate sees the importance of 7200 rpm for notebook and Tom’s sees the results in Momentus. Expect to see more of the good stuff in future versions of this winner.
Categories: Laptop PC · Products
Tagged: 7200 rpm, G-Force, Hitachi, Momentus, notebook, review, Samsung, Seagate, Tom's Hardware, WD, zero-G
Performance delta between vendors highlights different designs
Richard Poelling at The Tech Lounge recently reviewed three 1 terabyte SATA drives. Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 drives came out on top compared to Hitachi’s DeskStar 7K1000 drive.
Additional takeaways:
1 TB SATA disk drives with blazing speed to boot…this industry has come a long way.
Categories: Products
Tagged: 1 TB, Barracuda, Barracuda ES, DeskStar, disk drive, Hitachi, review, Richard Poelling, Seagate, The Tech Lounge
Server SATA drives spice up desktop PCs without adding much cost
Want your desktop PC to stand out in a crowd? You probably wouldn’t think of using storage – at least not without adding a lot of cost.
Think again.
Good Gear Guide reviews the Seagate Barracuda ES, a 7200 RPM SATA drive with a difference. It’s a server drive, but unlike 15K RPM and 10K RPM drives, it’s priced at a small premium to mainstream desktop drives. Plus, it has the high capacity (up to a terabyte) desktops demand these days.
Seagate’s details on the Barracuda ES can be found here.
Seagate designed this drive for high capacity business applications, but as this review shows, it creates an opportunity for system builders and consumers to build a better desktop.
Categories: Desktop · Products
Tagged: Australia, Barracuda ES, Desktop, Good Gear Guide, review
SSD is kinda cool in MacBook Air, but not worth today’s price
Ars Technica’s review of the MacBook Air provides a thorough user-level evaluation of the value of SSD in a notebook.
The conclusion:
The $1,300 question is whether the SSD is worth the extra cash. The answer seems to be no. I experienced only moderate gains in battery life and not very noticeable speed differences. The one major benefit of the SSD model is that it doesn’t cause the same types of slowdowns as the HDD model during times of high disk activity, and that’s certainly a huge plus. Speedy read times are great, too, but they are balanced out by pokey write times.
Still, even if it’s more usable, it’s hard to justify the huge price difference for the SSD model. If you’ve got an extra $1,300 to blow and, for some reason, haven’t just bought a second computer with it, perhaps the SSD model is for you. For anyone else looking to buy an Air, the HDD model appears to provide the most bang for the buck.
You get what you pay for. For SSDs, the ‘gets’ aren’t worth $1300 bucks. The big surprise to me was that in some ways the SSD notebook was actually worse than the disk drive version.
Don’t worry, the premium will drop and SSD’s will improve. But it’s going to be years, not months, before most of us choose SSD.
Categories: Laptop PC
Tagged: Flash, MacBook Air, notebook, review, Solid State Drive, SSD
N’Gai Croal at Newsweek has an insightful article on D.A.V.E., a wireless mobile storage device from Seagate highlighted at CES.
It’s 60GB of storage that quietly sits in your backpack, pocket, etc. and streams your movies or TV shows to your phone, car or wherever else you want to watch.
It breaks through the limits of the mobile phone industry business model that precludes cell phones with lots of storage space inside to feed your mobile viewing habit.
You can take it with you after all!
Categories: Digital Home · Industry trends · Products
Tagged: D.A.V.E., Newsweek, review, Seagate
