Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions, today announced the closing of the transaction to acquire the hard disk drive (HDD) business of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in digital consumer electronics and information technology.

Under the terms of the transaction, Seagate has gained select elements of Samsung's HDD business, including assets, infrastructure and employees that enable Seagate to drive scale and innovation. These assets include Samsung's leading M8 product line of high-capacity, 2.5-inch HDDs. Samsung employees joining Seagate include a number of senior managers and design-engineering employees from Samsung's Korea facility, who will focus on development of small form-factor products for the mobile compute market. N.Y. Park, senior vice president and general manager, will oversee Seagate's product development activities in Korea and serve as country manager of the Korea design center, reporting to Bob Whitmore, Seagate's executive vice president and CTO.

"Together, Seagate and Samsung have aligned our current and future product development efforts and roadmaps in order to accelerate time-to-market efficiency for new products and position us to better address the increasing demands for storage," said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO. "It is an exciting time in the industry with rapidly evolving opportunities in many markets including mobile computing, cloud computing, and solid state storage."

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Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced that it is now shipping its new Ultrastar C10K900 enterprise drive family.  Continuing its quality and performance leadership, the Ultrastar C10K900 leads the industry with 18 percent faster sequential and up to 17 percent faster random performance than the nearest competitor. It also features a high-performance SAS 6Gb/s interface for reliable data throughput and packs a 64MB cache buffer to optimize the read/write response time.  The new Ultrastar drives feature average seek times as low as 3.8 milliseconds, and its fast rotational speed reduces average latency time to below 3.0 milliseconds, enabling customers to access data more quickly and efficiently.

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As the company’s fourth-generation, small form factor enterprise hard drive, the Ultrastar C10K900 also hits the industry’s highest 10K capacity point at 900GB, delivering more capacity for less space for greater configuration flexibility. The new Ultrastar C10K900 family is available in 900GB, 600GB, 450GB and 300GB capacities.

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hitachi_5k4000.jpgFor many, the hard drive is the hub of a digital life. It’s a workhorse in your Mac or PC. It’s a place where you edit video, store digital memories, watch home videos and movies, and save your most important files. It houses your operating system, programs and games, and can even help you protect all of your digital content. With an award-winning reputation for delivering quality and reliability, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced the industry’s highest capacity 4TB storage solutions – the Deskstar 5K4000 Internal Hard Drive Kit and the Touro Desk External Hard Drive – to help store and protect your growing digital life.

The 4TB Deskstar 5K4000 is a 3.5-inch hard drive with a 32MB cache buffer that provides an exceptional blend of power efficiency and performance, making it an ideal solution for power-friendly desktop computers. Providing 33 percent more capacity compared to current 3TB drives, the Deskstar 5K4000 drive features innovative CoolSpin technology, expanding this class of performance-optimized, energy-efficient drives that run cooler and require less power. The CoolSpin technology, along with other Hitachi power management techniques, gives the Deskstar 5K4000 up to a 28 percent idle power savings over Deskstar 7K3000 7,200 RPM drives and an idle acoustic level of only 2.5 bels. The new 4TB Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 Hard Drive Retail Kit is currently shipping in limited quantities to online and retail stores with a suggested retail price of $399.99.

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seagate_momentus_xt_hybrid_hdd.jpgSeagate is now shipping the second generation of Momentus XT, its groundbreaking solid state hybrid drive for consumer and commercial laptops and the company’s fastest drive ever for personal computers. With a simple drive upgrade, users can boost boot-up speed and overall performance to turbo-charge their laptop PC. Seven original equipment manufacturers are gearing up to ship laptops powered by the Momentus XT drive. The drive is now available at online retailers Amazon, Canada Computers, CDW, Memory Express, NCIX, Newegg, and TigerDirect.

Powering the Momentus XT drive are Seagate’s Adaptive Memory™ and FAST Factor™ technologies. Adaptive Memory technology works by identifying data usage patterns, and then moving the most frequently retrieved information to solid state memory for faster access. Adaptive Memory effectively tailors hard drive performance to each user and the applications they use. FAST Factor technology blends the strengths of SSDs and hard disk drives for faster access to applications, quicker bootup and higher overall system speed.

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Iomega, an EMC company and a global leader in data protection, today announced the completion of its new Mac-oriented hard drive line with the launch of the new Iomega® eGo™ Mac Edition Portable Hard Drive, an on-the-go stylish drive with plenty of storage that can withstand drops and still travel easily in a pocketbook or briefcase.

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Combined with the recent launches of the Iomega® Helium Portable Hard Drive and the Iomega® Mac Companion Hard Drive, Iomega now has a complete new line of portable and desktop hard drives for Mac users. All three new drives are formatted HFS+ for compatibility with Mac computers right out of the box, making them perfect complements to today's Apple notebooks and desktops.

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In addition to their well-known "QuickPort" docking stations, which provide computer connection to unobstructed SATA hard drives, the Sharkoon "QuickDeck" has long been a table adapter in their product line in which data mediums are not standing upright, but rather inserted laying down. The Sharkoon QuickDeck is also immediately available in a "Pro" edition, with a USB 3.0 port and stacking feet.

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The Sharkoon QuickDeck offers room for SATA hard drives in both 2.5 and 3.5 in formats. The drives are simply inserted horizontally into the front and open top plastic frame. A rail fixed to the floor folds up for smaller 2.5 inch hard drives. The hard drive can be easily detached from the QuickDeck with the help of an ejection lever attached with the SATA port. External connection occurs over the fast USB 3.0 port.

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addonics_raid_tower_xiii.jpgAddonics Technologies today announced the RAID Tower XIII, which features thirteen 5.25 inch drive bays in a sturdy and stylish sheet metal chassis that can hold up to twenty 3.5 inch hard drives.

The RAID Tower XIII is built on a sturdy steel chassis with a stylish acrylic front bezel. Each unit comes integrated with a 500 watts power supply and two 120 x 120 mm low noise high CFM cooling fans for efficient ventilation.

Each set of five drives can be configured as a RAID group. You can connect 20 drives to your system via four eSATA cables, four USB 3.0 cables or a single mini SAS cable. For the USB connection, each RAID group can be shared on an LAN by attaching to an optional Addonics NAS adapter.

Addonics' family of RAID Towers is a perfect solution for adding external RAID storage or a large number of hard drives without RAID to any system. The RAID Tower XIII is ideal for a wide range of applications that demand large storage volume, such as video storage, data backup, server storage or cloud storage.

There are five different models. Each model comes with everything needed for connecting to the computer. Simply add your own hard drives and configure the RAID via either the onboard dip switches or the included Windows software utility and your storage tower is ready to do the work.

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Seagate is streamlining its flagship family of desktop drives under a single product that hones in on performance and big capacities to help satisfy the explosive growth in content creation and consumption by businesses and consumers worldwide. The new Barracuda® family makes it easier for consumers to find the product they need and reduces costs for Seagate’s original equipment manufacturer and distribution channel customers by reducing the number of product qualifications and amount of inventory they need to manage.

“A simpler desktop drive product family is exactly what Seagate customers are asking for,” said Scott Horn, vice president of Marketing at Seagate. “The new Barracuda® family reflects the reality that end-users want a full range of hard drive capacities and as much performance as we can give them to help manage and store massive amounts of digital content. In addition, our OEM and channel customers want to reduce overhead costs by having fewer product lines to qualify and manage in their inventory.”

Desktop PC performance is growing in importance as computer users consume and otherwise use more and more multimedia – a blend of text, audio, images, animation and video – and other rich-content files in areas as diverse as business, advertising, art, education, entertainment, engineering, medicine, mathematics and science. Higher hard drive performance often means a faster computer and quicker access to this content.

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pqi_h552v_usb3_portable_hard_drive.jpgPower Quotient International (PQI) has just released its all-new H552V USB 3.0 2.5” portable hard drive! The drive features sharp and refined curves that create a stylish sports car-like appearance, a dual curved back case that lends it a stunning beauty, and a precision engraving polishing technique and ornate buffing that manifests a high quality combination glossy/matte black finish. The device’s smooth surface texture, which is both aesthetically pleasing and comfortable to the touch, subtly exudes a reserved sense of extravagance. The PQI H552V boasts stylish race car-like curves and also features a USB 3.0 transfer interface crafted like a hawk-eyed double headlight. The bright LED light at the center of the headlights clearly displays transfer status to help avoid interrupting data transfers—and thereby losing one’s important data—as a result of accidentally removing the device at the wrong time.

In addition to its remarkable appearance, PQI’s H552V provides 3 different capacities to choose from: 500G, 750G, and 1TB. The back of the device features 4 specially-designed grip pads to effectively prevent sliding, reduce noise while the drive is in use, and avoid undesirable scratching. As users increasingly demand higher quality multimedia, the highly anticipated introduction of the USB 3.0 interface not only provides a maximum transfer rate of 5Gbps/sec—which is 10 times faster than USB 2.0 (480Mbps/sec) and is a great time saver for data transfers—but is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 as well. Its stable current helps prevents data loss and makes it consume less power consumption and be more eco-friendly. Because PQI pays attention to the needs of consumers, the H552V comes with exclusive software for data security protection and large file transfers. It also has a special TurboHDD USB acceleration device which offers data transfer rates up to 53% faster than average external USB hard drives, which greatly reduces waiting times during large file transfers. In addition, Ur Fortress data encryption software utilizes AES256 encryption technology to provide high-level data security for users, including data protection for classified files and guaranteed privacy for personal photos so that users can back up data and manage file encryption more efficiently. Users may also visit the PQI global website and download the Ur-Smart Mobile Office Software to bolster mobile management of personal documents and achieve higher efficiency. PQI continues to work towards advancements in technology in order to a build a better and more convenient life for all.

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Sony is making data storage and backup easier, safer and more enjoyable with its latest range of external hard drives. The new HD-EG5 and HD-EG5U offer advanced features in a slim, stylish package that enable users to save and access their data quickly and conveniently, wherever they go.

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The new drives with 500GB capacity provide USB 3.0 compatibility and use pre-loaded Data Transfer Accelerator software to increase transfer speeds up to three times as compared to data transmission without the software. When connected to a USB 2.0 port, the software boosts transfer speeds up to two times. These features make them one of the quickest 2.5-inch hard drives in the market.

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