Seagate

Seagate announced Thursday that it has initiated a restructuring plan that includes laying off approximately 1,100 employees, or 2.5 percent of the company's global workforce.

According to the hard-drive maker, this reduction is required to support a targeted product development, marketing, and administrative costs of less than $300 million per quarter. In addition, it will also help position the company to be cash flow and earnings positive within its fiscal year 2010.

Seagate expects the layoffs to be completed by the end of July and result in total pretax restructuring charges of approximately $72 million. These charges, … Read more

On today's show: thoughts on a bigger Kindle made for reading newspapers (fail), Sprint's earnings report (fail), whether Microsoft will allow downgrades from Windows 7 to Vista (fail) and "silver ooze" (winner!).

NYT says giant Kindle is on the way this week (as Times Co. threatens to shut Boston Globe in as little as 60 days.) (Press event scheduled for 10:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday.) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/technology/companies/04reader.html?_r=4&ref=business http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124143635883282991.html?mod=googlenews_wsj … Read more

A few months after being ousted as chief executive of Seagate, Bill Watkins is back with a new start-up that's cooking up ways to pack high-density flash memory chips into small devices.

Watkins is now a board member of Vertical Circuits, which is developing a "silver ooze" intended to make already small devices, like laptops and handheld gadgets, even thinner, The New York Times reports.

Vertical Circuits' main business is working on "3D stacking," which looks to decrease the space between memory chips by stacking them on top of each other, thereby creating smaller devices. … Read more

Seagate's new Replica drives are designed to do one thing and do it simply: back up your entire Windows PC. They literally make a replica of your system, operating system and all.

The Replica comes in two configurations. The entry-level $130 Replica (250GB) is geared to single PC backup, while the $200 version (500GB) comes with a dock and is capable of backing up multiple PCs.

We have the multi-PC model in our labs now and we're putting it through its paces. There isn't much to test because all the Replica does is make a copy of … Read more

To celebrate Earth day, Seagate announced Wednesday the availability of its new, extra-low-power desktop hard drive, the Barracuda LP (LP stands for low power).

If Western Digital's new WD RE4-GP desktop hard drive has no spinning rpm specification, Seagate's Barracuda LP has a rather unconventional spinning speed of 5,900rpm.

Generally, the spinning speed is associated with the performance of hard drives. For example, drives with 5,400rpm tend to have a lower performance than those with 7,200rpm, which is the current spinning speed of most desktop hard drives.

However, the faster the hard drive spins, the … Read more

Storage brands like Western Digital, Seagate, and Iomega are looking for ways to tap into the growing number of consumers who have multimedia files stored on their computers and want to bring them to their TVs without much fuss. FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player currently comes in three versions--two include FreeAgent Go storage drives (either 250GB or 500GB) as part of the package, while a third model is a "bring your own drive" version that retails for substantially less.

Previously we reviewed the Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player and the Iomega ScreenPlay TV Link, both of … Read more

I got my hands on Seagate's BlackArmor 440 NAS server and it seems different from most NAS servers I've reviewed.

The BlackArmor 440 is one of two products in the BlackArmor NAS server family that Seagate introduced last Tuesday. The other is the BlackArmor 420. The only difference between the two is the 420 ships with only two hard drives preinstalled, leaving two bays empty, while the 440 comes fully populated with four drives. Both devices are aimed at business and home office environments.

These are the first NAS servers that are truly from Seagate. The company does sell and support a few others, such as the Central Axis, but under a different brand.

The BlackArmor NAS server has a rugged and compact look for a four-bay NAS server and comes with an easy-to-use, tool-free design. It can take up to four SATA hard drives of up to 2TB of storage.

Unlike other NAS servers I've seen, the BlackArmor has four USB ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The USB port can host other external USB hard drives that can be set to contain the backup of the NAS server's internal storage. According to Seagate, this allows for offsite backup rotation.

… Read more

Seagate claims that its all new family of hard drives offers the lowest power consumption and record-setting for any tier-two enterprise applications.

The Constellation family, as it's called, includes two models: the 2.5-inch Constellation and the 3.5-inch Constellation ES. Both drives also include PowerChoice from Seagate, which decreases power consumption by up to 54 percent, arguably the highest in the industry.

According to Seagate, the PowerChoice technology is designed to deliver the power-reduction savings without sacrificing performance and data integrity. In addition, the Constellation family features enterprise-grade reliability and is rated at a full 1.2 million … Read more

A lot happened this week, and we don't blame you if you were more caught up in the inauguration frenzy than keeping up with the latest gadgets. Here's a quick way to catch up:

• Speaking of our new president, could we freak out any more about what kind of mobile communications device Obama is using?

• Zune sales took a nosedive during the holidays.

• Seagate promises it fixed the Barracuda 7200.11 drive issue. We've heard that before.

• An uber Mario fan laser-etched his Eee PC.

• Check out Dan Ackerman's overflowing wire box. It's a delightful … Read more