Seagate Drives Aim to Ease Home Storage

LAS VEGAS -- PC vendors and digital media enthusiasts believe that there's no such thing as too much storage. New hard drives from Seagate Technology introduced Wednesday at the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show here use a relatively new recording technology to allow users to take large amounts of data on the road.

Seagate announced a 160GB Portable Hard Drive that weighs less than a pound and will cost $379 when it goes on sale next month, the company says in a release.

The 2.5-inch drive is the latest in a series of Seagate Portable Hard Drives that essentially serve as mobile safe deposit boxes, but the new model is based on an emerging technology called perpendicular recording.

Vertical Storage

Whereas older hard drives store data by lining up bits end-to-end on a flat drive, perpendicular recording stacks bits of information vertically. This frees up more space on the drive for data, enabling hard-drive makers to continue pushing the boundaries of storage capacity.

Perpendicular drives have been released for mobile devices and for PCs, but industry observers don't expect the technology to become a mainstream product until later this year or early next year.

Seagate also unveiled a 500GB backup drive Wednesday. Pricing information was not specified for the 500GB eSATA Pushbutton Backup hard drive, which, according to the press release, will be available in April.

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