Seagate

Seagate says it now fixes 7200.11 drives for real

After releasing a bug-fixing firmware that actually caused havoc by potentially rendering some drives seemingly dead, Seagate on Thursday offered this statement:

Seagate has isolated a potential firmware issue in limited number of Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives and related SATA drives based on this product platform, manufactured through December 2008. In some unique circumstances, the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.

While we believe that the vast majority of customers will not experience any disruption related to this issue, as part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, … Read more

If you're IBM (and maybe HP), ain't life grand?

What with a deepening recession and concern about the health of financial system, the best-case expectations for technology spending ranged between the bleak and the desperate.

So what do we get? A counter-intuitive start to the earnings season.

The sub-text to IBM's post-earnings conference call on Monday easily could have been: "We're in a recession and ain't life grand?" (We'll have to wait until next month for Hewlett Packard to report its December quarter, but barring a shocker, HP may sing a similar tune.)

Not because these are salad days for the hardware businesses-just … Read more

Seagate fixes 7200.11 drives--except when it doesn't

Seagate on Tuesday released a fix to a bug in its current generation of drives that caused them to become undetectable by a computer. Users have found, however, that the fix breaks 500GB drives--the fix has since been retracted.

A member of Seagate's community forums raised the issue in November, with Seagate taking close to two months to offer a fix.

The bug affects a significant portion of not only Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 drives, but Barracuda ES.2 SATA and Maxtor DiamondMax 22 drives. Forums across the Internet have been filled with warnings not to buy drives that feature the SD15 revision of firmware; however, Seagate's own documentation shows that SD16, SD17, SD18, and SD19 are also affected within certain model numbers.

This is not the first time Seagate has had a firmware issue with the 7200.11 series of drives. The SD04 and SD14 firmware revisions were found to be under-performing because they weren't accessing the full cache of the drives, and were replaced with version AD14 to fix this.

The new SD1A firmware was meant to be preventative only, but some users have found success updating and reviving already dead drives, according to Seagate's forums.

Users of Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 500GB product, however, have found that the update "bricks" their drives--terminology used in the tech industry to mean the unit is dead.

Seagate has since removed the firmware update, claiming it is "in validation."

U.S. customers have been offered free data recovery should the firmware bug have resulted in data loss.

The affected drives are listed below. … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 893: Self-eating soup

We're all predictably aghast at Belkin's fake user reviews, but at least they apologised. Cooley and Tom think netbooks are done, but Veronica disagrees. And finally Cooley accidentally invents self-eating soup. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE_893

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Belkin’s Amazon Rep Paying For Fake Online Reviews http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F17%2F166226&from=rss

Fake reviews prompt Belkin apology http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10145399-92.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Analysis: EU’s Internet Explorer ruling looks back to 1990s http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090118-eu-vs-microsoft-bundling-wars-ad-nauseam.html … Read more

Seagate Cheetahs now run even faster

After some time focusing on 2.5-inch hard drives and sort of neglecting the 3.5-inch segment, Seagate announced on Tuesday its new Cheetah 15K.7 and Cheetah NS.2 hard drives.

These high-speed drives are geared toward enterprise storage environments by offering speed, capacity, and reliability, along with low power consumption.

Both drives offer up to 600GB of storage and feature second-generation PowerTrim technology, which dynamically optimizes drive power consumption at all levels of activity. However, the Cheetah 15K.7 is geared toward the highest possible performance, while the Cheetah NS.2 focuses on power savings. Seagate claims the … Read more

CES attendance down by 23 percent

Attendance at the Consumer Electronics Show, which wrapped up in Las Vegas on Sunday, was reportedly down about 23 percent, from 141,150 last year to 110,000 this year.

This is a lot fewer than preliminary estimates from CES officials, and it doesn't surprise me at all. I didn't count heads at the show, but I did the next best thing by talking with cab drivers who universally told me that their business was considerably lower than previous years. It was also obvious from the thinner crowds at the show and the fact that hotel rooms were … Read more

Seagate replaces Watkins as CEO

Updated with additional information about layoffs.

Disk-drive maker Seagate Technology announced Monday that Chairman Stephen Luczo is now also serving as CEO and president of the company.

That spells the end of the tenure of Bill Watkins, who has been with the company for 12 years and has served as CEO since 2004. Seagate said that Watkins will be advising Luczo to ensure a smooth transition and that the two executives will "confer over the next week" on whether Watkins will have any continuing role at Seagate.

The company also announced that it is laying off 800 people, … Read more

Why Netbooks are good for Seagate

LAS VEGAS--When Acer and Asus first started pushing Netbooks, it was all about flash memory. But now, a majority of the small, Atom-powered notebooks have hard drives. And Bill Watkins, chief executive of hard drive market leader Seagate, likes it that way.

When the two Taiwanese Netbook makers first talked with Seagate about the category, they told Watkins they didn't need storage for their tiny Atom-powered, Linux-based Netbooks since they'd be used only for surfing the Web and all data would be stored in the cloud.

Just two years later it's a totally different story. Besides more … Read more

Seagate bumps Pipeline DVR hard drives to 1TB

Seagate just announced two new additions to the Seagate Pipeline group of hard drives made to fit in digital video recorders. The Pipeline HD mini and Pipeline HD.2 focus on acoustics to attract consumers.

Seagate managed to keep the sounds of operation down to a silent 21 decibels while at the same time increasing the amount of recyclable materials used to build the drives. Both drives are made of 50 percent recyclable materials and achieve a 52 percent power-saving improvement over its last iteration.

The Pipeline HD mini uses a 2.5-inch hard drive in either 160GB or 250GB … Read more