Seagate launches 8GB one-inch HDD

Seagate announced a bunch of products today. Here's a quick look at the new storage solutions for the consumer electronics market. The ST1 Series with one-inch 8GB hard drives looks interesting for usage in small devices such as digital audio players.

From automobiles and entertainment, to home theater, handheld audio, video, communications and computing, Seagate's new consumer electronics offerings include:

The EE25 Series — a breakthrough hard drive designed specifically for use in cars, the world's first hard drive with extreme environmental resistance that can operate in temperatures from -30 to 85 degrees C and in high-humidity and high-altitude environments. With the industry's most stringent design for ruggedness, durability and protection from hostile environments, the drive will be an ideal choice to deliver the massive capacity needed for auto makers, system manufacturers and aftermarket companies to create DVD-free navigation systems and high-quality car entertainment services.

The ST1 Series — the first 8GB 1-inch hard drive designed for use in handheld and CompactFlash applications. It will let users store the industry's largest libraries of music (200 hours - or 4,000 songs), video and digital photos for this class of product. Seagate's unique RunOn Technology improves performance while in a high-vibration environment, such as jogging. The ST1 Series supports low-power modes, and the drive's time-to-ready is a mere 1.2 seconds.

The LD25 Series — the first 2.5-inch hard drive designed for the latest game consoles, and smaller, cooler-running and more cost-effective small footprint PCs and home entertainment devices. Today's home technology must come packaged in system designs that fit style criteria as much as they support technology requirements. Increasingly, this means smaller, thinner, lighter systems that require smaller form factor hard drives. The drive's power consumption specs are ideal for low-power systems and add-on storage device requirements, and its whisper-quiet operation will deliver pure enjoyment of digital media.

The DB35 Series — with a new 500GB capacity - the industry's highest - for DVR and home entertainment systems. It will provide up to 85 hours of High-Definition TV recording, 500 hours of standard TV recording, and up to 10 simultaneous TV streams. DynaPlay Technology fine-tunes the drive's operating parameters for entertainment applications, including performance for uninterrupted digital media, security to enhance fair use of digital programming, and power to give manufacturers more leeway in selecting cost-efficient power supplies and keep internal temperatures under control.

The 8GB CompactFlash Photo Hard Drive — with a new, unmatched 8,000 MB capacity in a tiny 1-inch size for digital cameras. Capable of storing 2,400 high-resolution (6 megapixel) and 6,400 standard-resolution (3 megapixel) digital photos. It will be sold through select retail outlets.

Seagate is shipping limited quantities of the Seagate 8GB ST1 Series and the Seagate LD25 Series now to select OEM customers.

Also launched by Seagate today are hard drives for the notebook and desktop market.