Seagate Protects Data From All Angles

March 14, 2007: Seagate has announced the availability of its latest Momentus laptop hard disk. This time around, however, capacity is not the crux of the release with the company showing off the world’s first laptop hard drive with free-fall protection.

The announcement will surely please all those whose primary PC is a notebook, not to mention all those with slippery fingers. Free-fall protection comes in the form of a sensor that detects any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity, then parks the head off the disc to prevent contact with the platter when the machine hits the floor.

Cases, screens and even whole machines can be replaced. Data on the other hand, cannot. Seagate claims that the system can protect from falls as little as 8 inches.

Outside of drop-protection, the 7200-RPM drive features perpendicular recording, a 3.0 Serial ATA 3.0 Gbit/second interface and a capacity of 160GB.

“The growing number of computer users turning to laptops as their primary PCs want every inch of capacity, performance and durability they enjoy in their desktop systems,” says Michael Wingert, Seagate executive vice president and general manager, Personal Compute Business. “The new Momentus 7200.2 hard drive epitomizes Seagate’s focus on delivering cutting-edge storage technologies that make it easier to move, use and protect digital information in the home, in the office and on-the-go.”

In other storage news from Seagate, after being announced two years ago the company’s 2.5 inch Momentus 5400 FDE.2 (full disk encryption) drive is finally making its way into new laptops. Featuring on-the-fly 128-bit AES-based encryption integrated into the drive with chip acceleration, Seagate is promising absolute at-rest data security without a hit to performance. A boot password is required to access the drive, after this it’s business as usual with all data encrypted and unencrypted transparently.

The drive is shipping in 80GB, 100Gb, 120GB and 160GB 3Gb/sec SATA flavours.

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