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Orders party platter for platter party Seagate is celebrating the shipment of its one billionth disk drive after 29 years in biz. The storage giant reckons it will reach its second billion in less than five-years' time. Seagate said it's shipped the equivalent of 79 million terabytes of storage since the company made its first hard drive in 1979. The ST506 hard drive Its debut product, the ST506 hard drive, had a 5MB capacity, weighed about five pounds, and cost $1,500 (£757). Today, Seagate sells 1TB drives for under a third of that price. The company figures its next 1,000,000,000...

Barely three weeks ago, Seagate CEO Bill Watkins simultaneously pronounced solid state drives (SSDs) to be toys for a niche market and then threatened to start suing people if it appeared that flash-based storage might become a threat to the magnetic storage industry. That date has apparently arrived. Seagate filed suit against US-based STEC today, claiming that the SSD manufacturer is in violation of four patents covering solid-state memory storage, memory backup, and a drive's ability to scan/test itself in order to check for errors. Watkins has already issued a statement "reassuring" the public that this is simply a case...

A small number of Seagate's Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 consumer hard drives are infected with a password-stealing virus. If you bought one of Seagate's Maxtor Basics consumer hard drives recently, check it for viruses. Especially if you're a gamer. Seagate is warning that a "small number" of its Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 hard drives recently shipped with the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah virus, malicious software that "searches for passwords for online games and sends them to a server located in China," according to a note posted on the Seagate Web site. Only drives purchased since August 2007 are affected, Seagate said....

Seagate Technology this week introduced a hard drive that it claims is the fastest hard drive available in a 2.5 inch form factor. Meanwhile ProStor Systems Inc. announced a new high-capacity removable disk drive as a replacement for tape media for workstations and servers in small and midsize markets. The Seagate Savvio 15K drive is a 15,000rpm serial attached SCSI drive (SAS). It is designed for use in both rack-mounted servers and blade servers. The Savvio drive is 70% smaller than other 15K drives on the market and has 30% less power consumption, the company said. The drive has a...

Seagate stakes claim By : Wednesday 03 January 2007, 08:12 PLATTER SPINNER Seagate thinks that it will be able to create a 300 TB hard-drive by 2010. According to Joystick, Seagate boffins are apparently working on a hard-drive which uses heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) techniques. The boffins think that this will mean that they can shove 50TB of data into a single square inch of drive space, or around 300TB of information on a standard 3.5-inch drive. This means that you can stuff the entire Library of Congress onto your hard-drive without any compression. Being a gaming magazine, Joystick points...

Alan Shugart, the iconic -- and iconoclastic -- co-founder of Seagate Technology, is dead at 76, according to the company. One of the creators of the multi-billion dollar hard drive industry, Shugart was also well-known for colorful antics like running his dog for Congress. He died at about 2 p.m. Tuesday at Community Hospital in Monterey. Shugart's health had declined following open-heart surgery six weeks ago. Until the day of his death, Shugart was still checking work e-mails involving Al Shugart International, his start-up incubator in Santa Cruz, according to his daughter, Teri Shugart. The legendary Shugart and his business...

Bill Watkins says his main competitor is the company he runs, Seagate Technology. "I worry less about our competitors than I do about us executing our strategy," said Watkins, chief executive of the disk-drive maker, in an interview. "If we execute, it will be hard for others to keep up." Seagate's rivals aren't keeping up. In the $30 billion industry for hard-disk drives, Seagate is king and getting stronger.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX - news) on Wednesday said it would buy rival computer disk-drive maker Maxtor Corp. (NYSE:MXO - news) for $1.9 billion in stock, aiming to cut combined costs and drive development of new products. In the deal, expected to be completed in the second half of 2006, Maxtor shareholders will receive 0.37 shares of Seagate common stock for each Maxtor share they own.At current prices, the transaction is worth about $7.25 a share for Maxtor investors, a premium of more than 60 percent to its closing price on Tuesday. Maxtor's stock has not traded...