Looks like the marketing department at Seagate have been working overtime and have come up with the next generation of Maxtor OneTouch storage units to be unleashed on the world. There are three flavours of unit, the secure Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus ranging in capacity from 250 GB through to 1 TB, the also secure yet portable OneTouch 4 Mini (80 GB to 160 GB) and finally the OneTouch 4 for everyone who doesn’t care who sees their files, ranging in capacity from 250 GB to 750 GB.

The drives sport an intriguing design that initially reminded me of building blocks for a space station from a 70s sci fi TV series, but on closer inspection do look quite snazzy and would not look out of place on your desk.

The secure units feature the Maxtor SafetyDrill software, which allows complete recovery of your hard drive’s contents if it goes belly up. Simply boot the stuffed PC from the supplied SafetyDrill Recovery CD and the software restores your PC’s drive using the data on the OneTouch drive - simple, eh?

Again both the OneTouch 4 Plus and Mini have a password protected folder to store secret squirrel data in and there’s also Maxtor DrivePass firmware, which restricts access to vital files if the hard drive is removed from the unit and attached to another PC.

Here’s a list of specs for each of the units for you to have a quick look at

All units play well with both Windows XP upwards PCs and Mac OS X (10.4.7 upwards) machines with the MSRP pricing as follows - OneTouch 4 $99.99 for 250GB, $169.99 for 500GB, and $269.99 for 750GB, OneTouch 4 Plus $129.99 for 250GB, $199.99 for 500GB, $289.99 for 750GB and $359.99 for 1TB, OneTouch 4 Mini $99.99 for 80GB, $119.99 for 120GB and $149.99 for 160GB - all prices USD. And they are all available at the Maxtor store now, apart from the 1TB beastie which will make an appearance in October.

Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate, the well-known HDD manufacturer, ‘disclosed’ in an interview to the Wall Street Journal that the company intends producing solid state drives using flash memory next year. No surprises there really, with flash memory capacity increasing almost daily, it’ll soon be on a par with magnetic storage. Of course, flash memory storage is great for your laptop as its lighter and more importantly consumes less power than its positive and negative counterpart.

The thing that struck me as strange about the ‘disclosure’ from Bill was that Seagate already have a hydrid magnetic/flash drive available. Their absurdly named Momentus 5400 PSD already enables laptop users to have a 160 GB drive with the flash/magnetic storage combo.

Come on Bill tell us something we didn’t already know or couldn’t at least guess.

Source: enGadget

More hard drive news today with Seagate announcing its very own 1TB internal desktop drives, the Barracuda 7200.11 and ES.2. Both boast a SATA rate of 3GB/s with the ES.2 offering an SAS interface option, and have transfer rates of 105 MB/s with a 32MB cache, 4.16 msec latency and they’ll spin you right around at 7200 rpm.

The 7200.11 (aimed at desktop users) will retail for US$400 and will be available in the third quarter of the year. The price and the spec practically match the 7200.11’s main competitor the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000. This launch smacks of ‘if they’ve got one out there we have to have one too’ kind of mentality as the drive really offers nothing new. But competition is always good in the computer hardware arena.