Seagate attempts to make storage exciting

SEAGATE will launch a new series of portable hard drives at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week.

Called FreeAgent, the drives are a second stab at consumer storage after the launch of the Pocket Drive, a neat looking device that was confused by some buyers for an MP3 player, according to this Business Week article.

News.com, here, suggests the capacities will top out at 750GB.

The BW piece cites loquacious Seagate CEO as saying: "It showed us we didn't have a clue what we were doing in consumer.” That's pretty mild compared to some of the stuff Watkins has been saying recently.

The feature also suggests that Seagate's master stroke has been hiring an exec from Gibson Guitar who seems to be picking up the corporate culture of calling a spade a dull piece of gardening equipment, saying storage has “always been a low-involvement, boring category”.

Seagate seems to believe that smarter marketing will make its portable hard drives fly but the market is moving pretty quickly at the moment. Some users such as media bureaux types and graphics artists will always have the need to shift big files but with online storage offering a cloud's worth of capacity for free, 1GB SD Cards from £10.99 and 1GB memory sticks at a fiver, the entry-level is already taken care of.

Incidentally, while you were watching The Great Escape, drinking the Harvey's Bristol Cream and gorging on mince pies, Seagate has had a pretty busy time of late. The firm agreed to buy eVault just before Christmas in a deal that will give it web-based storage services. µ

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