Seagate intros desktop, laptop, PVR drives

Storage maker Seagate has announced several new hard drives, for a multitude of uses. At the fore is the Barracuda FDE, what the company claims is the first 3.5-inch desktop drive with native encryption. All material on a drive is AES-protected, and requires password entry before a computer can even finish booting. Deleting the encrytion key renders information unusable, a deliberate feature. 7,200rpm models with storage up to 1TB will begin shipping in 2008.

The Momentus 5400.4 is a 2.5-inch laptop drive, spinning at 5,400rpm with capacities rising to 250GB. Ramp-loading and special motors keep the drive quiet, and shock protection measures should protect it against harsh forces, up to 325Gs in operation or 900Gs when dormant. The first 5400.4s will ship in the fourth quarter of 2007.

The company's DB35 line of drives are aimed at DVR boxes and home media centers, and in their fourth generation, now have capacities up to 1TB -- enough in theory to hold 200 hours of HDTV content. These should arrive in the first quarter of 2008.

Finally, the Cheetah 15K.6 is an enterprise-level drive meant for servers and other storage systems, with an option of SAS or FC interfaces, and capacities between 147 and 450GB. Sustained transfer speed on an 15K.6 is said to be 164MBs, 28 percent faster than the previous Cheetah generation. Shipment begins in 1Q 2008.