June 24 - 10:05am EDT   Seagate today swept through its external hard drive line with a series of upgrades for just the Mac versions of its disks. Highlighting the launches is the FreeAgent Go Pro for Mac: the storage is one of the few wholly portable 2.5-inch external drives to include a FireWire 800 interface and also supports both FireWire 400 and USB. Every drive also spins at 7,200RPM and behaves more like a 3.5-inch drive in spite of its size. 250GB, 320GB and 500GB models ship this month at prices of $130, $150 and $190 respectively. [full story]

June 22 - 12:00pm EDT   Seagate today introduced three new units to its BlackArmor line of external data storage. The additions involve the BlackArmor NAS 220 Storage Server, the BlackArmor WS110 External Drive Workstation, and the BlackArmor PS 110 Portable Drive. All of the BlackArmor units include a bare metal recovery feature and automated full-system backup. SafetyDrill software, used to restore system data if something were to happen to the original data, is also included. [full story]

June 19 - 2:05pm EDT   Seagate today inadvertently spoiled its plans by posting a product page for a 640GB FreeAgent Go. The drive would represent one of the first 2.5-inch external drives to break the 500GB ceiling; differences aren't evident except for in color, where the 640GB disk will only come in black or silver instead of the several colors available with the smaller capacities. [full story]

May 5 - 6:00pm EDT   Today's featured DealNN deal is on the Seagate FreeAgent Go 250GB portable external hard drive from Amazon.com. It is regularly priced at $100, but has been reduced to $59.99 for today only. Get 250GB of portable storage space for photos, music, videos, documents and more. This hard drive is backed by a five year limited warranty from Seagate. [full story]

April 27 - 2:40pm EDT   Seagate started its week today by launching a device which comes closest to replicating the behavior of Apple's Time Machine backup for Windows PCs. The Replica performs an automatic, continuous backup of an entire Windows system and lets users either restore all their third-party apps and documents after a crash or else return individual files that might have been deleted or lost. The drive maker promises a simple process where the drive will auto-install and configure itself over USB. [full story]

April 22 - 9:25am EDT   Seagate on Wednesday seized on the eco-friendly trend with the launch of its Barracuda LP (Low Power) hard drives. The disks have the same capacities as regular desktop drives, up to 2TB, but throttle the rotation speed back from 7,200RPM to 5,900RPM. This and other optimizations help cut the active power use by as much as half versus regular drives. The company also aggressively claims that the LP series uses about 25 percent less power than competing hard drives. [full story]

April 8 - 6:10pm EDT   Today's deals at DealNN include a wide range of storage devices. Amazon.com's Gold Box deal of the day for today features the Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA bulk hard drive priced at $79.99. That's a price drop of $100 off the original price and it includes FREE shipping. Make it an external hard drive with the Startech InfoSafe USB SATA HDD enclosure priced at $31.24 with FREE shipping at Buy.com. [full story]

March 30 - 11:10am EDT   Western Digital this morning grabbed an edge against rival Seagate by acquiring flash storage maker SiliconSystems for $65 million. The deal takes effect almost immediately and will set the new division towards producing solid-state drives (SSDs) for its parent. No immediate product plans have been announced, but SiliconSystems currently makes SSDs for notebook-friendly 2.5-inch sizes and smaller, including 1.8-inch and memory card-sized drives. [full story]

March 24 - 11:55pm EDT   Seagate on Tuesday kicked off the launch of a new network-attached storage line in the form of the BlackArmor 400 series. The array is built to provide automated backup over RAID for home and small offices that might not necessarily have the resources to support a professional system, even with as many as 50 users. It uses simple drive cradles to hold as much as 8TB of storage in four bays, sports a built-in status LCD and lets users access the array's contents over the web without compromising the network's core security. [full story]

March 9 - 9:50am EDT   Seagate on Monday at the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans has shown off a hard drive with a SATA 3 interface that allows it to transfer files at burst speeds up to 6 gigabits per second, or a real-world 600 megabytes per second. This is double the theoretical maximum of 3Gbps of the current SATA 2 interface and quadruple that of SATA drives, which peak at 1.5Gbps. The drive, developed in partnership with chipmaker AMD, will be backwards compatible with the existing SATA and SATA 2 interfaces, using the same cables. [full story]

February 26 - 5:15pm EST   Hard drive and flash-based memory maker Seagate announced on Thursday that is has dropped its patent suit against competitor Stec and that Stec has likewise dropped its countersuit, Forbes reports. Seagate said in a statement that pursuing the matter is no longer cost-efficient and the recent poor economic conditions have slowed Stec's sales of the technology that was being disputed in the lawsuit. [full story]

February 3 - 5:30pm EST   Hard drive manufacture Seagate has introduced its first 2TB hard drive on Tuesday, which is part of the 3.5-inch, 7,200RPM Constellation ES family that also includes versions with 1TB and 500GB capacities. At the same time, Seagate has announced the release of two 2.5-inch, 7,200RPM Constellation drives with the lowest power consumption in their class and 500GB and 160GB capacities. All five drives in both new lines are meant for enterprise applications, working under heavy workloads in business servers. [full story]

January 28 - 3:50pm EST   Seagate has outlined specific instructions for Mac users to remedy firmware problems with certain Barracuda 7200.11, ES.2 SATA, or DiamondMax 22 hard drives. The issue can cause the drive to lock on certain systems, leaving the stored data inaccessible. Upgraded firmware can only be installed on Intel Macs, such as the Mac Pro and iMac. The 2.5-inch notebook drives are not affected, ruling out the need to install firmware on the MacBook, MacBook Pro or Mac Mini. [full story]

January 22 - 7:25pm EST   Seagate has released a firmware revision that addresses continued issues with certain Barracuda and DiamondMax hard drives that have failed for a large number of customers. The problems began with reports of a bug that caused the drives to lock during normal boot procedures. The company on January 16th released firmware that was intended to address the problem, but apparently caused compatibility issues for some users. Seagate claims that any affected drives will still retain the written data despite the temporary inaccessibility. [full story]

January 14 - 3:25pm EST   Toshiba on Wednesday revealed (reg. required) that talks are currently underway to investigate buying Fujitsu's hard drive business in a deal estimated to be worth roughly $448.8 million. No details have been revealed, but Fujitsu itself has acknowledged the talks and says that Toshiba is one of "several" candidates for a possible deal, which in the past have also included Western Digital. [full story]