Even more hard drives kick the bucket

DISK FIRM Seagate has announced its own vision for next-generation hard drives.

Not to be out-done, in the dying days of the hard disk, the firm launched a new range of Momentus 5400 PSD (Power Saving Drive) drives targeted at mobile users. These interesting devices are one of a new range of HHD (Hybrid hard drives) which combine traditional magnetic drives with flash memory.

The drives, currently offering capacities of upto 160GB, incorporate a 256MB non-volatile cache which stores frequently-accessed data for faster access by the system.

Spokesman, Ian O'Leary, said that they will offer higher notebook performance whilst extending battery life by reducing power draw by up to 50%. The drives will allow faster booting and resume from sleep mode as essential data is read first from the cache, providing the hard drive time to spin-up in the background.

He added that customers moving to Vista will see even greater performance increases, as Seagate has been working closely with Microsoft who have provided optimizations in Vista code.

Also announced today is the Momentus 5400.2 FDE which sports on-board hardware encryption of the data stored on it. The AES 128-bit encrytption/decryption is carried out by the drive's own adaptive hardware and so does not interfere with system performance.

For users, all that is needed is a password for full access to their data, while third-party enhancements enable thumb print and smart card options for self-authentication. In addition, no time-consuming disc initialization or configuration is required to deploy the encrypting drive, said O'Leary.

Both drives sport IDE or SATA 3Gbps interface and offer a 5-year warranty. µ