A Silver Plated Hard Drive?

As a new year dawns, so does new technology. Seagate, a world leader in hard drive manufacturing, has just announced what they have in store for us at the 2014 CES stage, a new type of hard drive.

Designed with a silver-plated hard drive in a sphere shape, Seagate’s new drive may change the way future hard drives will be built.

Handcrafted in France, the LaCie Sphere hard drive will be an external drive constructed out of steel, and have a starting capacity of 1TB (up to 4TB) with a USB 3.0 connector. Seagate also plans to create Thunderbolt editions as well. There is however a small catch… the price.

At $490, this new technology isn’t cheap. With current 1TB hard drives ranging between $50 and $70, Seagate better quickly figure out a new price range for its LaCie hard drive if it ever intends to become a reality.

Seagate’s main intentions here are to focus this new LaCie brand at Mac users as it can store up to 500 movies, 160,000 songs or 190,000 photos and then serve them up to five devices at once using Seagate’s wireless hard drive software called the Fuel. The $200 Fuel add-on is also compatible with AirPlay which can stream your content to an HDTV or Apple TV.

The target market for this expensive, yet clever, hard drive is focused towards Mac videographers, but we may begin to see many Windows or non-Mac owners wanting a piece of this technology.

I would like to see Seagate take this silver plated drive technology and expand on it more before offering it to the desktop market. As I said above, it’s a clever idea, but it needs to be affordable for the average desktop user before other manufactures like Western Digital or Toshiba begin to pick up on it.

Lastly, Seagate announced that they will be partnering with PC manufacturer Lenovo to deliver the Yoga 2, a new, flexible, laptop that will have a Seagate 5mm ultra thin laptop hard drive. Seagate will also demo their new 5mm ultra mobile hard drive later on in the CES event.

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