Seagate

Seagate unveiled the world’s highest-capacity hard drive Wednesday with its Exos Mosaic 3+ HDD platform, hitting the 30TB mark for the first time, the company said. That’s enough space to store a thousand Blu-ray movies.

The company said it used several new technologies to get there, and its road map shows the arrival of even bigger storage devices in the coming years. And while businesses will certainly go for these megadrives, they will also be available to many kinds of end users and require no special hardware to read.

While Apple is finally putting out an M2 Mac Pro even as its powerful Mac Studio machines conquer most hardcore computing tasks, the truth is most users can more than get by with an M1 or M2 Mac mini. That goes for Bill Penhale, who sent us his setup from Shorewood, Illinois, near Chicago.

“I am pretty techy for 70, ha!,” the retired sales director told Cult of Mac. And judging by his M1 Mac mini-powered setup, with a fine 4K external display, solid audio and loads of external storage, that’s certainly true.

Gabriel B., a 13-year-old student and photographer in Baton Rouge, La., sent pics and commentary showcasing and describing his well-equipped MacBook Air-and-dual-display setup to Cult of Mac this week.

He noted his Intel MacBook powers an “army of peripherals,” but it’s not quite up to the work he asks of it. And how has he already filled 3TB of digital storage space, anyway? Well, that’s what heavy photo and video editing will do.

We could all use more space on our devices and a bit more fun and flair for said storage. The Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hard Drive combines a massive 2TB of storage with RGB LED lighting, and it’s now on sale for only $69.99 (regularly $104).

Thad K, a 63-year-old project lead and analyst for a U.S. Department of Energy contractor for the past 37 years, recently won an Ultimate Ears Wonderboom 2 Bluetooth speaker from Cult of Mac. The little speaker had no idea what a legion of tech equipment it was about to join — 69 pieces of gear in Stockton, California.

Apple could be about to sell back its stake in Toshiba Memory less than a year after acquiring it.

A new report claims Toshiba plans to buy back the shares it sold to Apple, Dell, Kingston, and Seagate after securing billions in loans from Japanese banks. It’s thought Toshiba later plans to become a public company.

Statistics on hard drive reliability just released by data-storage company Backblaze would seem to indicate it’s not a good idea to buy a Seagate hard drive. Of the 104,954 drives it uses, Seagate’s are the least reliable by a wide margin.

On the other side of the coin, this company has found drives made by Western Digital’s HGST to be much more reliable.

One year ago we were given some insight into which hard drives last the longest thanks to Backblaze media’s analysis of the tens of thousands of hard drives in their data center. The company uses regular consumer-grade hard drives due to the cheaper costs to power their unlimited storage offerings for customers, and this year they’re back with a new study revealing which 4TB hard drives are too big to fail.

After spinning 41,213 disk drives in its data center, Backblaze crunched the numbers at the end of 2014 to find that if want a hard drive with the lowest failure rate possible, go with an HGST drive.

When Samsung lost this summer’s $1.05 billion trial against Apple, we knew Samsung would try any means within their power to get the ruling overturned. And who can blame them for wanting to keep a billion dollars in their bank account?

Since the verdict was read, Samsung has learned that the jury foreman, Velvin Hogan, withheld key facts, like how he was sued by Seagate Technology and went bankrupt because of it. Seagate is partly owned by Samsung, so it could have been that Hogan had an axe to grind against them. Samsung thinks Apple knew all about Hogan, so Apple had to disclose everything they know about Hogan and when they knew it.

Judge Lucy Koh has agreed to re-examine the role of jury foreman Velvin Hogan, who found Samsung guilty of patent infringement and awarded Apple more than $1 billion in damages earlier this year. Samsung requested a retrial back in October after it became apparent that Hogan failed to disclose details of a lawsuit against Seagate that he was involved in 20 years ago.

Last year, Apple announced that a “small number” of 1TB Seagate hard drives used in 2011 iMacs could fail under certain conditions, and were eligible for a free replacement. Now Apple’s extended that program to all iMacs sold between October 2009 and July 2011.

According to the new support page, if you have a 21.5 or 27-inch iMac with a 1TB Seagate hard drive, Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider will replace the hard drive free of charge. They’ve even included a handy little form to figure out if your iMac is affected. (My 2009 27-inch iMac luckily isn’t).

One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t necessarily have to bring your iMac back to the Apple Store: in some areas, if you contact an AppleCare representative, you can take advantage of an in-office or home repair option, so if you are going to get your hard drive replaced and don’t want to lug forty pounds of aluminum and silicon to your local Apple Store, ask about this option.

Source: Apple

Samsung has asked Judge Lucy Koh to throw out the patent infringement verdict that saw Apple awarded more than $1 billion in damages this summer and order a new trial. The Korean electronics giant claims that the foreman of the jury, 67-year-old Velvin Hogan, is guilty of misconduct after he failed to answer the court’s questions truthfully and did not disclose a potential conflict of interest.

Seagate has bought French high-quality digital storage company LaCie for a reported $186 million. LaCie CEO Philippe Spruch will become head of Seagate’s consumer storage products division. LaCie makes Mac-friendly peripherals, and Seagate has been a long-time titan in the data storage business.

For years we’ve heard a lot of hype about SSDs and how they’re going to change computing, but their progress has been slow, and the masses have been getting impatient. Well CES 2012 will be the start of SSDs officially entering into mainstream use thanks to Apple Inc. The best purchase I made in 2011 was when I replaced my MacBook Pro with the new 11″ MacBook Air. Not only is the MacBook Air lighter than any laptop I’ve owned, it’s also powerful enough to do some really awesome things I’d never thought possible on a miniature computer (like playing graphic intensive games like Star Wars the Old Republic). Most of these technological marvels are all thanks to Apple’s inclusion on SSDs in the MacBook Air lineup. Of course, Apple didn’t invent the SSD, nor were they the first company to use them, but they’re responsible for bringing SSDs to the masses at an affordable price.

Launched a few weeks ago, the Pogoplug Series 4 ($100) is Cloud Engines’ latest attempt at making their network-attached storage device as ubiquitous as the microwave oven. Like its predecessors, the S4 allows you to attach a hard drive or flash drive to create your own cloud, which you can use to stream media, share files or create slideshows, all of which can be accessed over the Internet and shared with others. Additionally, it can also be used for remote backup.

Review by Jordan Trimas

The Seagate GoFlex Slim Performance Hard Drive ($100) is a compact, sleek, and fashionable storage accessory good for both Mac and PC users. If you’re looking for a sexy and functional piece of computer candy, the GoFlex Slim is the Prada of portable storage solutions.

Sure, the 32GB iPad has enough storage space for a bunch of apps, some songs and maybe even a movie or two. But for those of us with large media collections, even the mega 64GB version will start to feel a little cramped when stuffed full of music and videos (and I have no idea how those of you with 16GB iPads get by).

So, what if you could just stick a portable external drive into your iPad, like you would with a MacBook? Bam, extra storage! Well, yeah — but you can’t, right? Wrong! Well, sorta — you can’t plug one in physically; but the 500GB Seagate GoFlex Satellite ($200) gets around the whole physical connection thing by supplying its own wifi hotspot that lets you create a wifi link between it and your iPad. Genius.

Seagate’s new, largest-in-the-world GoFlex Desk external hard drive ($250) weighs in at a strapping four terabytes. I know, that’s only one terabyte more than their next biggest desktop drive; but that’s enough storage space for 30.3 million more press images like the ones above; 833,333 more GoFlex user guides; or 2,272 more videos of me trying to duct tape some gadget to my forehead in a hilariously misguided attempt to gain interesting yet incredibly useless data about something or other.

Apple has announced that a “very small number” of 1TB Seagate hard drives used in 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMac systems may fail under certain conditions. The problem only applies to systems that were sold between May 2011 and July 2011. My own 27-inch iMac purchased in June 2011 is affected by this recall.

For complete information about the recall click the read link.

Seagate is set to launch a new addition to its GoFlex range called the Satellite – a battery-powered hard drive that connects to any device equipped with Wi-Fi, including your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

Samsung could be about to sell its dwindling hard disk drive business as flash memory becomes increasingly popular, according to a person “familiar with the matter.” Thanks to the success of devices such as the iPod, iPad and MacBook Air, Apple has boosted the adoption of flash memory devices and encouraged consumers to ditch standard hard drives for speedier storage.

Samsung has set a target price of $1.5 billion for its hard drive business, but the Korean company is reportedly keen to sell it for under $1 billion if the right customer comes along. The Wall Street Journal report notes that Seagate Technologies could be a candidate for the business, though neither company has commented on the rumor.

Apple is considered to be the largest consumer of flash memory in the world, and predominantly responsible for the shift away from conventional hard drives to solid state drives. It’s believed the company’s iPad is entirely responsible for the complete reorganization at Acer – whose netbooks sales were hit hard by the popular tablet.

Apple is undoubtedly responsible for my personal adoption of SSD drives; after purchasing an 11-inch MacBook Air my other Macs felt incredibly slow in comparison. It seems once you go flash, there’s no going back.

[via Electronista]

Is your MacBook’s 250GB hard drive just not cutting it? SeaGate has just unveiled their newly updated FreeAgent GoFlex external hard drive, boasting two huge features that make it easy to recommend to on-the-go Mac owners with large media libraries, or those looking for a beefy and portable Time Machine repository.

First of all, there’s the size: the new FreeAgent GoFlex is the world first 1.5TB portable drive. Better, it’s entirely bus-powered, which means no power cable or dual-USB cable.

Even better, though, is that Seagate’s new drive comes standard with the company’s USB 3.0 adapter… a standard which no Macs support now, but definitely will sooner rather than later. In the meantime, the GoFlex is backwards compatible with both USB 2.0 and — if you snap on an adapter — even FireWire.

The SeaGate FreeAgent GoFlex comes formatted for Windows’ NTFS file system by default, but you can either reformat it with Disk Utility or avail yourself of the included NTFS driver for Mac. The price is quite reasonable too: it’s available now for just $229.99, which is $20 less than the MSRP.