Seagate started off Tuesday by shipping its second-generation Momentus XT hybrid drive for notebooks. The upgrade is estimated to be about 70 percent faster than the earlier Momentus even as it goes to 750GB of internal storage. As before, the key is the inclusion of a 8GB solid-state drive, which here is twice as fast as before and should both cache and load much faster.
Archos took its turn at entering the full Android tablet category Thursday with the formal unveiling of its ninth-generation slates. The eight-inch and 10-inch 80 G9 and 101 G9 will both run Android 3.1 from the start and are unique in depending on spinning hard drives rather than flash. Either uses Seagate's Momentus Thin drives to fit as much as 250GB of storage.
Seagate today validated its teasers by revealing the Momentus XT. The drive is conceived as the best of both worlds for notebooks and includes both a traditional 2.5-inch, 7,200RPM hard drive with a 4GB, SLC-based solid-state drive and 32MB of DDR3 memory as a cache. Special firmware on the drive uses the SSD to optimize performance; it should boot almost as fast as a pure SSD and load about 80 percent faster than a regular 7,200RPM drive.
(Updated with pricing) Seagate has quickly confirmed early talk and launched its thinnest ever Momentus hard drive. The Momentus thin is just 7mm thick, or significantly thinner than the 9.5mm and 12mm heights common to most rotating storage. Slimming down the shape lets notebook designers build thinner systems without turning to more expensive solid-state drives or lower-capacity 1.8-inch spinning disks.
Seagate's promised 7mm notebook hard drive will be relatively limited in capacity if leaked details prove accurate. To be called the Momentus Thin, the line will purportedly top out at 250GB and have just one step down, a 160GB model, for those concerned about cost. The disks should nonetheless still spin at the same 5,400RPM as typical notebook drives measuring 9.5mm or 12mm tall.
Seagate on Monday announced it has teamed up with virus-protection software developer McAfee to develop its self-encrypting notebook PC hard drives from its Momentus Full Disk Encryption (FDE) line, in both 7200RPM and 5400RPM versions. Both are now available in 320GB capacities, or the highest of any FDE drive on the market, and Seagate promises to introduce even larger, 500GB versions soon.
Seagate today broke through a long-held barrier and released a 1.5 terabyte version of the Barracuda 7200.11. The storage is 500GB more than any other 3.5-inch desktop hard drive and is accomplished through extra refinement of perpendicular magnetic recording that allows it to fit 375GB on each of its four platters. The density also helps improve speed and lets the disk transfer data at a sustainable 120MB per second, or higher in bursts thanks to the extra bandwidth of its Serial ATA II connection.
