Seagate celebrates a Momentus occasion

The technology company claims to have launched the world's first ever hard disk drive for notebooks

Seagate claims it has launched the world’s first 160GB 2.5in hard disk drive aimed at the notebook market.

The new Momentus 5400.3 was part of a 10-product flurry from Seagate last week and will be the first to use perpendicular recording. Seagate now joins Hitachi and Toshiba in the use of this technology, which allows data bits to be stored upright, as opposed to horizontally, resulting in larger capacity hard drives.

The new drive will perform at 5400rpm and boasts 25 per cent more capacity than its nearest notebook drive rival. The drive will use Seagate’s hardware encryption technology, Full Disk Encryption (FDE), which is built into the drive, not the operating system. Designed to protect data on notebooks, FDE is activated by a user key and can encrypt the data on the drive.

“More office and home users want all the capabilities of a desktop PC in a notebook computer – high performance and capacity, stronger security and quiet operation – combined with power efficiency so they can run longer between battery charges,” said Brian Dexheimer, Seagate executive vice president of global sales and marketing. “Some prefer lower cost notebooks with lower performance. All of them need products that can take a pounding during travel and remote use.

“Perpendicular technology has been around for a while, but Seagate is the first to bring it to market.

“It has always been good at getting product to market early,” added Ed Bateman, product marketing manager of disk drives, at distributor Bell Microproducts Europe.

“This first-generation 160GB notebook drive is just the start – there is 10-times growth possible with this technology. I’m expecting inventory soon,” he said.

Seagate has also unveiled it’s 500GB DB35 series of drives targeting the fast-growing digital video recording market, which allows users to record up to 500 hours of TV. There is also the 500GB Barracuda 7200.9 for PCs with 3GB/s SATA-interface throughput.