Seagate has announced that it has partnered with DensBits for the development of SSDs for consumer and enterprise markets. The goal of the two companies is to develop low-cost and high-performance solid-state drives for consumer and enterprise markets and Seagate has made an equity investment in DensBits. Exactly, how much Seagate invested in DensBits is unknown.
This week two giants in the digital data storage industry, Seagate and LaCie, have announced that the former has signed a purchase agreement which will give it controlling interest in the latter. This agreement was announced on the 23rd of May and today has been signed by both parties, it tying together a deal which has Seagate purchasing all of the shares controlled by LaCie’s chairman and CEO Philippe Spruch and his affiliate. This amount of stock represents 64.5% of the outstanding shares of LaCie and gives Seagate top seat at the company.
Seagate is one of the biggest names in hard drives and storage in the world. The company has all manner of traditional hard drives in just about every form factor you can think of ranging from bare drives for notebooks and desktop computers to external backup drives using USB or other connectivity options. Seagate has announced its latest backup drives called the Backup Plus.
Seagate has announced that it is buying a majority stake in rival hard drive maker LaCie for $186 million. The Paris-based LaCie is a long-time maker of premium consumer hard drives for Macs and the first ones to feature Apple's Thunderbolt technology. Seagate believes that the acquisition will complement its mainstream hard drive lines and help it expand into new consumer markets, particularly in Europe and Japan.
When a company gets much too rich for it's own good, it's time to do as Seagate is doing today: repurchasing a whole lot of shares in their own company. Here Seagate has decided that because of their confidence in their own ability to generate cash at this time, they'll pick up $2.5 billion (of the $3.5 billion they're actually authorized) in outstanding ordinary shares. Seagate will be repurchasing this stock with a combination of cash on hand, future cash flow from operations, and "potential alternative sources" whatever that ends up being.
Seagate has released an update to its GoFlex Satellite WiFi-enabled external drive and its companion iOS and Android apps, adding support for simultaneously connecting via WiFi to the portable HDD and to a separate data network. Announced last May, the GoFlex Satellite is a 500GB drive positioned as a way to offload data from your smartphone and tablet, while still being able to stream it easily. However, until now using the WiFi connection meant your phone or tablet was unable to also connect to a home or office WiFi network.
Seagate today announced that it has reached a new milestone in hard drive technology. The company claims to be the first hard drive manufacturer to achieve a storage density of 1Tb (1 terabit = 1 trillion bits) per square inch. This makes it possible for massive 60TB (terabyte) hard drives to arrive within the next decade.
The massive flooding in Thailand has severely limited the supply hard drives for the computing industry all around the world. One of the companies that was hard hit by the flooding was Seagate. I'm sure Seagate, and the computer industry hoped that the hard disk drive shortage would be over this year, but it doesn't seem that will be the case. Seagate is now reporting that the shortage of hard drives will continue throughout 2012, just as some research firms were predicting.
If you need a little more enterprise-friendly functionality in your broadband mobile router, Seagate and Verizon have a treat for you. Their new combination storage/mobile access device allows for sharing both a Verizon LTE mobile connection and files across the built-in hard drive.
Seagate has completed its $1.4bn acquisition of Samsung's hard-drive business, taking on production as well as research & development of traditional platter-based discs while Samsung focuses on flash memory. Announced back in April, the deal will also see Samsung provide NAND flash to Seagate for use in the company's SSDs and hybrid SSD/HDD drive line-up.
Seagate has announced that it is chopping the warranties that it offers on some of its hard drives down to size. Seagate says that the reason it is cutting warranty length is to be consistent with the industry. Other major HDD makers like Western Digital have cut warranty length recently as well. This warranty shortening may be a response to reduced profits in the HDD industry in the wake of flooding in Thailand that has lead to shortages.
The folks at Seagate have announced the 3rd generation unit in their Momentus solid state hybrid drive line, here in the Momentus XT 750GB - as large as an HDD and as fast as an SSD, and at one tenth the price. This newest unit comes with 750GB of space, SLC NAND at 8GB, and a SATA 6GB/s NCQ interface. This newest drive has 50% more capacity than the previous generation Seagate Momentus, is 1.5x faster, and has both double the NAND flash and double the interface speed of its predecessor. Though it has the same name as its 500GB older sibling, this newest generation hybrid drive acts as the new plateau for Seagate and is available at a handful of online retailers today.
