"Seagate launched the world’s first 4TB drive today, but you can’t just pop round the corner and get yourself one just yet. First of all the 4TB GoFlex is an external 3.5-inch drive, naked desktop variants will follow soon. Secondly, the drive is only available through www.seagate.com, but a few lucky retailers will have it in stock shortly. The price stands at $249, which sounds fair. On the tech side of things, the drive is pretty much your regular run of the mill 3.5-inch external drive.

"Bloomberg is reporting that hard drive maker Seagate has recently turned down a takeover proposal from Western Digital. It is believed that such a deal would have come under scrutiny from antitrust regulators and that it could prompted a management reshuffle, resulting in redundancies." | more

"Rembrandt IP Management is "focused on attaining fair value for infringed patents," and it thinks it has two winning patents on its hands that could affect the entire US hard drive industry. Rembrandt today filed suit against both Seagate and Western Digital in federal court, alleging that most of their hard drives violate a pair of patents Rembrandt purchased from inventor Uri Cohen." | more

"Seagate, one of the world's largest maker of hard disk drives, said that solid-state drives (SSDs) will be survived by hybrid drives that feature both flash memory and traditional magnetic media. Moreover, according to Seagate, only a fraction of expensive computers feature SSDs." | more

Seagate announced the newest addition to its GoFlex family of external hard drives: the GoFlex Home line. The new models are focused on the mainstream user, allowing for additional storage space to at-home networks. Users simply connect the drive to a wireless router via an Ethernet cable.

"The only SSD drives that are affordable to most end users are mearly 80GB SSDs which is pretty small and doesn’t leave much room for applications and/or games. There is a new option on the market provided by Seagate called Momentus XT which is a hybrid drive which has the storage of a SATA and SSD-like performance"

If your 2TB hard drive is feeling a bit cramped these days, Seagate feels your pain: Seagate's senior product manager confirmed to Thinq on Monday that the company is planning to announce a 3TB hard disk drive later this year.

However, if you're currently running Windows XP or the 32-bit version of Windows Vista, you may need to upgrade. According to Barbara Craig, senior product manager at Seagate, moving to 3TB (3 terabytes, or 3072 gigabytes) involves more than just "upping the areal density."

Likely to arrive later this year

While hard drive manufacturers are looking at the future, at least one company is apparently ready to smash the 3TB barrier with the introduction of the first 3TB drive to market later this year. Seagate apparently has a 3TB model on their roadmap for release later this year according to our sources.

"Today for review I’ve got another USB3.0 enabled product, this time it’s actually a kit from Seagate. This kit includes the new BlackArmor PS110 500gb 2.5” portable hard drive that is equipped with a 7200RPM drive inside and of course a USB 3.0 interface. The kit also includes a USB3.0 ExpressCard so you can have your laptop or netbook USB3.0 enabled. It’s a nice kit overall, it includes everything you need to add USB3.0 to your computer.

"SATA 3.0 may have been available to consumers for the past couple of months, but the number of hard drive options out there are ultra-slim... just one. That drive is Seagate's Barracuda XT. The question we're looking to answer here is whether or not the $100 premium for SATA 3.0 is worth it, at least on a mechanical offering."