Products

Optimized HDD Performance on Xbox 360

November 20, 2009 – 3:28 pm

dragonage1

While the predominant form of game distribution for the Xbox 360 and the PS3 is still the DVD, the improved performance opportunities of the hard drive are starting to get more attention.

Unlike the PC gaming space, console game delivery is still dominated by traditional brick & mortar retail. As a result, good old optical media is the means to load your game, even if a good majority of it is stored on the hard drive. The dirty little secret is that there are real performance limitations associated with loading and verifying a game from optical media. Now the game community is starting to call attention to this issue and it looks like games optimized for hard drive enabled game consoles are on the way.

Check out these interesting blog posts on the topic here:

http://www.hiphopgamershow.com/2009/11/xbox360-games-optimized-for-hard-drives-in-2010/

And here for a specific game that confirms optimization for hard drive play:

http://www.justpushstart.com/2009/11/02/dragon-age-origins-xbox-360-version-optimized-for-hdd-install/

Happy gaming…

By David Burks | Also posted in Digital Home, Digital Living, Seagate, Seagate Blogs, Technology, The Digital Den, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Complete Home Entertainment Ecosystem! From Seagate? YES!

November 17, 2009 – 8:25 am

Seagate_FA_TheaterPlus leftremoteSeagate Technology – the hard drive company that has been around for 30 years – actually has a complete set of products that can enable a home entertainment system that is beyond your imagination!

By using a Seagate BlackArmor NAS product (a 440/420, 220 or 110), or even a Seagate FreeAgent DockStar USB network dock, you can host all your content – pictures, music, videos and movies – and have it available to your Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ that is attached to your big screen television!

I’ve done this in my home, as well as my brother’s. Networked storage – even networked storage that is simple to setup and accessible outside the home and shareable – serving up all your content to your televisions, each TV enabled with its own Theater+. And for that content that you want tighter control over (not available to everyone on the network), simply put that content on a FreeAgent Go and slide it into the FreeAgent Theater+ when you want to enjoy it.

BA NAS440Thanks to the USB ports on the Theater+, you don’t even need a network to get this capability. You could simply take all your rich media content on your PC, put it on either a FreeAgent Go or any other USB storage device, and connect that directly to your Theater+ to bring it back to life.

With this simple setup, you can have: slideshows of all your digital pictures, complete with elegant transitions and music playing in the background; all your home movies off your camcorders, presented in easy to access menus for simple viewing; your entire music library available to you throughout the home, wherever you have placed a FreeAgent Theater+; all the movies and video content that you may have accumulated from whatever sources you have, complete with full menuing support for content that has it (like your ripped DVDs).

And the costs?  Well, it’s not thousands of dollars, as you might expect. No professional installers are needed. Each FreeAgent Theater+ will set you back $149.99 – you will want one for each television. A FreeAgent DockStar (where you use your own storage, but it is networked) lists for $99.99. If you wanted to move up to a BlackArmor NAS, they start at roughly $200 for a 1TB network attached storage system, complete with media streaming capability.

So….  A simple apartment setup could be as inexpensive as $250 (one Theater+ and one DockStar). A larger system – say a 3 television home – would be between $550 and $650 (depending on whether you go with a DockStar or a BlackArmor NAS 110).

DockStarAnd you can always add more storage. Sure, the costs will start going up, but adding storage to DockStar is as simple as plugging in standard USB drives, such as our FreeAgent Go, or FreeAgent Desk.

And all this is brought to you by Seagate – 30 years of quality and reliability for all your storage need!

How simple is that? Give it a try! Or ask me how you can do it yourself!

By Jon Van Bronkhorst | Also posted in Company, Digital Home, Digital Living, FreeAgent, Industry trends, Laptop PC, Media Center, Music, Photography, Seagate, Technology, The Digital Den, Uncategorized, Videos, desktop, freeagent go, laptop, trends | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

New O’Neill Video on Seagate FreeAgent Go for Mac

November 3, 2009 – 11:28 am

There’s a great new video out today about the importance of hard drive storage in the creative process. Marc Prefontaine, a Staff Photographer from O’Neill Surf, discusses all the many uses and needs he has for the Seagate FreeAgent family of products, specifically for the Mac.

Marc does a lot of photo shoots for O’Neill, and he has to protect the content that he shoots while still in the field, as well as make sure that he has backups of all his content libraries when he is in the office. Amazingly, Marc actually travels with 4 FreeAgent Go for Mac disk drives in his bag when he travels. He loves them for their reliability, capacity, and high speed Firewire 800 interface.  He keeps multiple copies right off the camera, and then makes additional copies when he returns to the office.

Marc knows from experience the value of the content he has on his Seagate FreeAgent hard drives, and he knows that he will need to have access to this content for a long time, whether he uses the images today or not. You never know when you will need something. So by having so many copies in the places he needs them, Marc is certain to always have access to the images he needs.

Marc carries as much capacity as he can with his FreeAgent Gos (models come in capacities as high as 1TB). He has even more capacity sitting on his desktop, with the FreeAgent line of desktop products that come in capacities as high as 2TB. And then with networked multi-drive products in the BlackArmor NAS line, we deliver capacities as high as 8TB.

Digital photography and video work require increasing amounts of storage space. Here at Seagate we take great pride in providing leading capacities with the quality and reliability that people like Marc depend on to store, protect and secure all the things that are so important to his livelihood.

By Jon Van Bronkhorst | Also posted in Business Solutions, Company, Digital Home, Digital Living, Film, FreeAgent, Industry trends, Photography, Seagate, Seagate Blogs, Technology, The Digital Den, data security, desktop, freeagent go, laptop, trends | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

NetFlix for PS3

October 27, 2009 – 9:37 am
Access to on-demand content just got a better if you own a PS3.  Sonyand Netflix just announced a deal to include Netflix streaming capability on the existing install base of PS3 consoles. Combining recent price cuts with Netflix functionality for free, it looks like Sony is taking off the gloves against Microsoft. While Xbox 360 users also have access to Netflix content, you have to be an Xbox Gold user which costs an additional fifty bucks a year.
One bonus of Netflix on an Xbox or a PS3 is that streaming quality can be enhanced by buffering content to the hard drive and not being totally at the mercy of your broad band connection. As the Netflix catalog of on-line content grows, I can see the benefits to owning a PS3 getting better and better…

PSNetflixAccess to on-demand content just got a better if you own a PS3.  Sony and Netflix just announced a deal to include Netflix streaming capability on the existing install base of PS3 consoles. Combining recent price cuts with Netflix functionality for free, it looks like Sony is taking off the gloves against Microsoft. While Xbox 360 users also have access to Netflix content, you have to be an Xbox Gold user which costs an additional fifty bucks a year.

One bonus of Netflix on an Xbox or a PS3 is that streaming quality can be enhanced by buffering content to the hard drive and not being totally at the mercy of your broad band connection. As the Netflix catalog of on-line content grows, I can see the benefits to owning a PS3 getting better and better…

By David Burks | Also posted in Digital Home, Digital Living, Gaming, Industry trends, Media Center, Seagate, Seagate Blogs, Technology, The Digital Den, Uncategorized, Videos | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Another Great Article on Why You Should Backup Your Hard Drivebackup

October 20, 2009 – 3:32 pm

I’m a hard drive guy – I admit it. I have been for a very long time now. And being a hard drive guy who works in the hard drive business, I have this tendency to believe that everyone knows of the fragile nature of rotating magnetic storage devices, and the need to back up these sensitive and fragile devices.

There was a fascinating piece posted today on CNNMoney.com titled ‘The tech catastrophe you’re ignoring’ that talks about how people still ignore the need to protect their data, and the companies that are making good profits opening these failed drives up to recover the lost data.

Most people don’t realize the value of what they have on their computers – until it’s gone. And then they want all those pictures back. Even if it costs a thousand dollars or more! A thousand dollars! Think about that cost when compared to the cost of an external hard drive (around $100), and the savings that can be had by having your information backed up!

Then there is the time value of the content. If you really do lose a hard drive to a failure, it will take weeks to get the data recovered. If anything on your hard drive is time sensitive, you just lost all the value of that information.

Backing up your computers is simple, quick and inexpensive. We should all do it. I actually now have at least three copies of every piece of important information that exists inside my home. Yes, I know – I’m a hard drive guy, and not a normal consumer. But I also know that I’m only a couple of years ahead of the standard use case. So… It won’t be long before the average customer is managing multiple copies of information, and for many reasons.

One of those will be for different uses. The rich media content needs to be made available to all the PCs in the house as well as to the televisions and stereo systems. So that information will likely reside on both the PCs themselves as well as on some sort of networked storage system. Networked storage systems provide an excellent answer to backup needs, as they also tend to centralize the information and make all those files available to whatever devices you wish to have access to them.

So please…. Don’t let yourself fall victim to the high costs of recovering information from a failed disk drive – be sure to back up all your information, and your most sensitive information needs to be backed up more than once.  Get a Seagate FreeAgent product and start backing up today!

By Jon Van Bronkhorst | Also posted in Business Solutions, Digital Home, Digital Living, FreeAgent, Industry trends, Laptop PC, Media Center, Photography, Seagate, Seagate Blogs, Security, Storage Systems, Technology, The Digital Den, Uncategorized, data security, desktop, enterprise, freeagent go, laptop, trends | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

Upcoming Windows 7 Release

October 15, 2009 – 8:46 am

Windows7October 22 is a week away – have you got your place in line at your favorite computer retailer so you can be the first on your block to get a copy of the latest in operating system releases from Microsoft?

Seriously… This is Microsoft’s largest OS launch since Windows XP. I think it’s safe to say that Windows Vista never lived up to the hype, and in fact was relatively soft pedaled in relation to the plans behind Windows 7.

I have been using Windows Vista on a system at home since it was released, and it really isn’t as bad as a lot of people have said. Yes, the constant reminders and security pop-up windows are pretty annoying, but the operating system itself is fairly robust.

Windows 7 takes all the best of Vista, adds more, and repairs the things that people complained about the most.

So just what are the new features in Windows 7 that people are all excited about?  To me, one of the most important new capabilities is around home networking – something that has been difficult for users for a very long time. Microsoft has made changes to simplify wireless networking, as well as created something called HomeGroup to make it easier to share files and printers on your home network. This is crucially important for us here at Seagate, as our BlackArmor Network Storage products are Windows 7 ready – installation and integration into your home network is now a whole lot easier.

There are some interesting graphic and view changes, like Snap (which allows you to very easily setup two screens side by side by dragging them to the edge of the screen), and enhanced desktop personalization settings.

Perhaps one of the greatest changes here is the ability to get better performance off old hardware than was available to you through Vista. This is pretty significant, as a lot of us have old computer systems lying around that are simply dogs running Vista. Now, with Windows 7, there can be life again!

Windows 7 has been in testing for a very long time now, and, in fact, Microsoft has already released its first set of updates and patches for the new OS even though it has not been officially released yet! This bodes well for the robustness of the OS.

We have worked hard here at Seagate to make sure that our customers have the same excellent experiences when they transition to Windows 7, so most all our external storage products are ready for Windows 7.

There are lots of other enhancements that make this a very worthwhile upgrade, and I can’t possibly go through them all here. Suffice it to say that the launch of Windows 7 is a big deal for Microsoft, for consumers, and for businesses as well. The adoption rates should be dramatically higher for Windows 7 than for any previous new release of Windows.

By Jon Van Bronkhorst | Also posted in Business Solutions, Digital Home, Digital Living, Gaming, Industry trends, Laptop PC, Media Center, Music, Photography, Seagate, Servers, Technology, The Digital Den, data security, desktop, laptop, trends | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

It’s cool to work for “green” company!

October 9, 2009 – 12:00 pm

newsweek gream

Being “green” today is certainly chic and politically correct.  But when it comes down to the “nitty-gritty” detail of actually developing and implementing environmentally sustainable strategies, high tech companies have a lot to deal with! I’ve seen these challenges first hand over years, touring manufacturing facilities close up and experiencing the negative side effects of ill-designed industrial operations.  I also get to participate and work on some of these issues here at Seagate.  So when Newsweek magazine recently recognized Seagate as the “greenest” hard drive company – it felt great!

A lot of the initiatives that Seagate participates in are things that we simply must do to comply with various regulatory mandates in order to be in the market. At Seagate, I see us going well beyond these minimum level efforts – from designing  aggressive programs for recycling and using recycled material to engaging employees in environmental clean-up activities, to being recognized for products that actually achieve best in class power consumption.

I see the company I work for actually walk the talk, and it’s awesome to see them recognized for it.

By David Burks | Also posted in Digital Home, Digital Living, Industry trends, Seagate, Seagate Blogs, Technology, The Digital Den, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Seagate DockStar – Networked, Access and Share – Your Personal Cloud – In Your Own Home!

September 16, 2009 – 5:20 am

dockstar-photo-screen-grabSeagate just introduced the most fascinating new product I have seen in a very long time – FreeAgent DockStar. Docks for FreeAgent Go drives are nothing new for Seagate – they have the FreeAgent Go Dock, FreeAgent Go Dock+, FreeAgent Theater and the new FreeAgent Theater+. The Go Docks are simple to understand – they plug into the USB ports on your computer. The Theater-class products are easy to understand also – they plug into your Television and you use your FreeAgent Go to provide the content that you want to enjoy.

But this dock – DockStar – is completely different. This doesn’t plug into your USB port. This doesn’t attach to your television. No. This is different. This dock plugs into your router. Yes, your router.

Why? Good question.

Let me put it this way – this is the absolute easiest way to take any and all content that you may have on your FreeAgent Go (or any other USB connected mass storage device) and make it available to all the computers on your network. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Well…. That’s just the beginning.

With DockStar, all that content is not only available on your network, but it is also available to you from any computer with a web browser and internet access anywhere in the world!

Sound interesting yet? I’m not done – there’s more!

DockStar also allows you to share any storage device that is attached to it, or any folder located on any storage device attached to it, with anyone, anywhere, any time, all through the same interface, and all with just a simple email address.

Yes…. It’s really that simple. Choose to share a folder with your best friend. Type in their email address, and they will get an email invitation to view your content. You even get to choose whether to give them read-only or read-write access.

dockstar-photo-previewThe web-based interface for your DockStar is full of simple and powerful capabilities. It works on PC’s, Mac’s, and even on Linux systems. I have used it with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. And it’s the same on each and every one of them. The browser interface gives you access to thumbnails of images, including the ability to scrape and present the first frame of supported video files. It allows you to generate a web-browser-based slideshow of all images located in the folder. It lets you play music files from the shared folder right there in your web browser. And it even lets you stream video content in your browser window (provided the file type is supported, and there is sufficient bandwidth on both ends to stream the content faster than playback speed).

There are small client apps for Windows, Mac and Linux that let you mount your Dockstar drives and all associated shares you have from others as local desktop disk drives, making drag and drop possible, as well as using them as a possible target for backup applications of other functions.

And there is even a free iPhone app (called Pogoplug) that gives you access from your iPhone (other phone apps are in development). Imagine the ability to have iPhone access to your entire photo library that is located on the FreeAgent Go sitting at home, and also the ability to upload your iPhone taken pictures directly up to your DockStar for instant sharing with friends and family.

All shares come with the ability to set them up as RSS feeds, giving people instant notifications of changes to the files or content in the shared folders.

And then there’s the ability to use DockStar to host the content for the pictures and videos and music files that you want posted on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter! The beauty of this is you still have total control over your content – if you ever decide you don’t want that picture on Facebook anymore, simply cancel the link, or remove the drive from your DockStar.

By now you’re likely asking yourself ‘Sure… sounds great. But I bet it’s hard to install!’

Well… That’s the other amazing thing about this product. You simply plug it into your router, plug in the power, connect a FreeAgent Go (or other USB storage device) to it, and then go to the activation website and create an account, The signup process activates your DockStar and puts it on the network without any additional input from you. No router issues. No firewall issues.  It really is that simple! And, if you really want to, you can have multiple DockStars on a single account, giving access to even more stuff.

We all know what the ‘cloud’ is – that great unknown out there that we are supposed to trust as a hosting spot for all of our digital stuff. But that’s the point – we don’t know where it is, or what it is, or who has access to it. So now, with DockStar, you can have the same access at all times and from all places as you do with cloud-based storage, but that storage is now located in a place you completely trust – your own home.

This has the potential to change how we all access and share the stuff we have collected on our computers. No longer do I have to email individual photos to my Mom when I want her to see the latest pictures of the kids – I simply put them on my DockStar in a folder that I have already shared with her, and she gets notified that there are new images to view.

And now, when I’m clear across the country, and I want to show someone one of my latest pictures, I can just pull out my iPhone, navigate to the image location, and then display the picture right on my iPhone.

Powerful. Simple.

Seagate FreeAgent DockStar. Get it now at www.seagate.com/dockstar

By Jon Van Bronkhorst | Also posted in Cloud computing, Digital Home, Digital Living, Film, FreeAgent, Industry trends, Laptop PC, Media Center, Music, Photography, Seagate, Seagate Blogs, Technology, The Digital Den, Videos, desktop, freeagent go, laptop, trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Seagate’s Latest Twist on Enjoyment – FreeAgent Theater +!

September 15, 2009 – 5:20 am

theater-plusSeagate just released its newest version of its HD media player product – FreeAgent Theater+. Marketed as the easiest way to get content from your PC to your television, Theater+ keeps all the simplicity of the first Theater product (announced at CES this year), and adds significant new functionality.

New to Theater+ are: HDMI video connectivity, 1080p video resolution support, numerous new file format support (both video and photo), and an Ethernet jack for access to the network in your home, as well as access to some interesting internet based information.

The easy to use remote control and completely new user interface that shows all content of all attached storage devices – simple access to your movie collection, your photos and all your music – make this version even easier and more complete than the first!

theater-plus-home-screenSeagate’s strategy with this product is to allow you to simply and easily bring your most precious and emotional content from your PCs and notebooks back to your large screen televisions – making that content and that experience social again. No longer must you gather around the computer screen to view the pictures from the latest vacation, or that home video of the first birthday party of your 10-year-old.

But there is so much more to Theater+ than just your own pictures and videos. It also comes equipped to play all your stored videos, whether they be MP4 files, DVD folder structure (complete with full DVD menu support!), AVI files, MOV files, even MKV and RMVB files. There is so much support here that it’s hard to find a file format that will NOT play on it! And now, with Theater+ and network/internet connectivity, whenever Seagate adds new functionality through a firmware upgrade, you’ll be automatically notified and given the opportunity to upgrade your system without having to go to the PC and download the update and then manually install it (you must have your Theater+ connected to the internet for this function to work).

Now not everyone has an Ethernet port in their entertainment center. And Seagate realizes this. That is why they have also announced that they will make available a wireless adapter for Theater+ – in October. With this adapter, you can connect your Theater+ to the network and the Internet without having to have a hard-wired connection. It is an 802.11n adapter, and is proprietary to the Theater+ product. You might think that since it is proprietary, that might translate to expensive. But not in this case – the wireless adapter will only cost $69.99 when made available. Not too bad!

So now, with Theater+, you have simple access via your FreeAgent Go to all your pictures, videos and music. And you also have easy access through the network connection to all the content on any shared storage devices or folders that are located on your network! And, you have access to Flicker, Picassa, stock quotes and weather reports through the included web widgets!

Simplicity, yet amazingly advanced capabilities, all in a product that lists for only $149.99! Theater+ is available now at www.seagate.com. Get yours today! Enjoy those memories, and get the simplest way to play back all those movies in your collection!

By Jon Van Bronkhorst | Also posted in Digital Home, Digital Living, FreeAgent, Media Center, Music, Photography, Seagate, Seagate Blogs, The Digital Den, Uncategorized, Videos, desktop, freeagent go, trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Replica! On Today! Simple Backup Finally Exposed!

August 28, 2009 – 9:04 am

seagate-replica1Yesterday morning on the Today Show, my good friend James Oppenheim (www.jamesgames.com) discussed several great back to school products and technologies for kids, ending his segment with something near and dear to my heart – Seagate Replica.

Replica, as James points out, is the simplest and most complete way to backup any Windows-based PC. All you have to do is plug it in! And it backs up EVERYTHING – your data, your pictures, your videos, your music, your applications AND your operating system! So, should you ever have any kind of problem with your hard drive or the data on your hard drive, Replica can help you recover from a single file to a complete hard drive.

The exposure for Replica on the Today Show is a wonderful thing, as Replica is really designed for the non-tech consumer. There are lots of external storage products in the market designed for and marketed to the tech consumer – the entire Seagate FreeAgent line of products fits that need. But there is an entire segment out there that is not currently marketed to with true, simple solution products for data protection.

Seagate Replica is just that – a dedicated appliance product whose only function is to simply backup all your information in the background, without any direct customer interaction.

Everyone who has a digital camera, or an iPod, or an email account, or even just a Windows-based computer of any kind (desktop, notebook, netbook) should own a Replica. By having Replica, you will have the comfort and security of knowing that ALL your information is ALWAYS safe.

Check it out! At www.seagate.com/replica.

By Jon Van Bronkhorst | Also posted in Digital Home, Digital Living, FreeAgent, Gaming, Laptop PC, Music, Photography, Seagate, Technology, The Digital Den, Videos, data security, desktop, laptop | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Older posts »