Seagate drives into whitebooks

Hard drive vendor Seagate is targeting the whitebook builder space with an expanded line of notebook hard drives and interactive online tools.

Seagate has announced the availability of its Momentus 5400.2 100GB hard drive, which the vendor claimed was ideal for the whitebook market. It had "industry-leading" areal density of 50GB per disk, Seagate said.

Robert Yang, general manager at Seagate in Australia, said Momentus would help Seagate ramp up its partnerships in the notebook PC market.

"We see Seagate's partnerships in the notebook PC market growing with our expanding range of hard drive capacities and spin speeds," Yang said.

"[Whitebooks are] generic enough for system integrators to customise and take about 10 minutes to build, providing a simplified way for system integrators to get into the notebook market," Seagate said in a statement.

Unbranded, locally assembled PCs have been around for some time and provide a cost-effective option for large deployments. However, unbranded notebooks are a newer entrant to the market, given that building a good, robust notebook has often been considered more tricky.

"Momentus 5400.2 is among the first to offer 100GB capacity and 5400rpm spin speed, which delivers almost 50 percent more performance than 4200rpm drives. The 5400.2 has a battery consumption on par with traditional 4200rpm notebook drives, which allows users to work longer," Seagate said.

The vendor also claimed that Momentus was the world's first notebook hard drive with a five-year warranty for all units shipped through authorised distribution and retail channels.

Seagate also announced a new interactive online tool to help partners develop plans to build and sell notebook PCs for different markets. Partners could use the tool - available from Seagate's website - to research different vertical whitebook markets, the company said.