seagate

The scarcity of hard disk drives will only get worse in the coming weeks and months, according to an analyst at Piper Jaffray.

"We could run out of drives by the end of November," Piper Jaffray analyst Gus Richard said in an interview Tuesday while discussing the shortage in the wake of the severe flooding in Thailand, where roughly half of the world's production of HDDs takes place.

"Availability is really going to tighten up. I'm seeing prices quoted anywhere from up 10 to up 60 percent," he said. And Richard said he is … Read more

Barclays Capital has slashed its PC growth forecast for the fourth quarter due to the shortage of hard disk drives and continued weakness in the PC market, according to reports.

The investment bank cut its global PC growth forecast for the fourth quarter to 4.3 percent from 7.2 percent "due to continued weak demand and a shortage of hard drive disks (HDD) resulting from the flooding in Thailand," according to a number of Asia-based outlets such as the China Post, citing a Barclay's research note.

And the bank didn't stop there, lowering its full-year … Read more

The humble hard disk drive may become a more precious commodity in the coming months, according to analysts and Apple.

Apple CEO Tim Cook made this very clear this week in the company's earnings conference call, referring to the impact of the floods in Thailand. "Like many others, we source many components from Thailand and have multiple factories that supply these components. There are several factories that are currently not operable, and the recovery timeline for these factories is not known at this point," he said.

Cook continued. "We would say that our primary exposure is … Read more

It's been a little over a year since Seagate Technology announced the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk, which offered up to 3TB of storage, and today, the company once again broke the storage barrier by introducing its first 4TB single-volume external hard drive, the 4TB GoFlex Desk.

Four terabytes of storage is equivalent to about 160 Blu-ray Discs' worth of storage space. When used to host compressed digital content, the new drive can store about 2,000 HD movies or millions of digital photos.

Other than the substantial increase in capacity, the new GoFlex Desk is very similar to the previous … Read more

If you've been in the market for a portable hard drive, you've surely heard of Seagate's GoFlex family. These portable drives offer not just storage space and portability, but also flexibility that others can't even come close to.

Today, the company adds another member to that series, the GoFlex Turbo Performance drive.

The new portable drive is similar, if not basically the same, as other drives in the family, such as the GoFlex Pro and the GoFlex Ultraportable, with one big difference. Its internal drive now spins at 7,200rpm (as opposed to 5,400rpm or slower as with previous models). Seagate says this helps boosts the drive's performance.

I got a hold of one a couple of days ago, and in our testing, the drive was indeed faster than previous models via USB 3.0. It wasn't the fastest we've seen, however, and when used with USB 2.0, the drive could use some improving. To make up for this, Seagate, for the first time, bundles with the drive's two-year warranty its SafetyNet data recovery services, similar to what ioSafe has for its disaster-proof external hard drives. … Read more

Here's something you can't get with an iPad: 250GB of internal storage. Archos' upcoming Android "Honeycomb" 3.2 tablet will pack a 250GB hard disk drive that's been tweaked to perform more like a flash drive.

The Archos G9 will sport a 250GB Seagate Momentus Thin 2.5-inch hard drive--a mere 7 millimeters thick. Though not as compact as a 1.8-inch HDD (like Apple once used in its MacBook Air and iPod), it's not as expensive either.

And Archos has tweaked the Seagate drive a bit to allow it to perform more like … Read more

Running out of storage space on your iPhone or iPad? Then you may want to take a look at Kingston's new Wi-Drive.

Now available for sale through a variety of retailers, the Wi-Drive stores content that iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users can access directly on their devices. So you can house documents, music, videos, e-books, and other files on the drive and then wirelessly stream that content onto your iOS device. You don't even need a local Wi-Fi connection; the drive uses its own built-in Wi-Fi to communicate with up to three mobile devices at one time.… Read more

Apparently a batch of the 1TB Seagate hard drives that shipped with iMac systems between May and July of 2011 may fail under certain conditions, and as a precaution Apple has started up a replacement program for the affected iMac systems. The Macs will be either the 21.5-inch or 27-inch models, provided they have been configured with the 1TB drives; other drive configurations such as the 2TB or SSD options are not affected.

If you have purchased one of these iMac configurations, Apple will likely contact you regarding the drive replacement, provided you gave a valid e-mail address when … Read more

Seagate announced today that it's now shipping the Pulsar XT.2 solid-state drive (SSD). This is one of two enterprise SSDs that were unveiled back in March. The second drive is the Pulsar.2 that will also be available for purchase by the end of this month.

The Pulsar XT.2 SSD is the company's flagship solid-state solution for enterprise. Seagate says the drive combines single-level cell flash with a native 6GB/s serial-attached SCSI (SAS) interface and is the fastest internal storage drive in Seagate's portfolio.

The drive comes in the traditional 2.5-inch design and … Read more