Seagate Expansion 1TB USB 2.0 Desktop Mobile External Hard Drive Storage Device

Stylish Sleek Design

• The Seagate 1TB External Hard Drive does not look as compact as that of its portable sibling, but still has the same looks at different dimensions of 4.53 x 3.11 x 0.83in(H x W x D). It has a very stylish rectangular shape, Seagate has cleverly avoided unnecessary scratches and finger print smudges on its drives body. Whereas, the style factor attracts the younger community that look for some style too along with storage solution. In the rear of the drive you will find the high speed USB drive and port for the power. And in the front you will find just the attractive logo of Seagate. 

Easy Installation

• Setup of this Seagate 1TB External Hard Drive is straight forward, simply plug in the power supply and USB cable and you are ready to go. It is automatically recognized by Windows, so there is no software to install and nothing to configure. Saving files is easy too, just drag-and-drop.

High Performance

• This 5400-RPM Seagate 1TB External Hard Drive features an ultra-quite Softsonic FDB motor and delivers 50 percent more performance than 4200-RPM drive, with no increase in power consumption. You get higher speed while conserving battery life

Data Transfer Rate:

• The mechanical nature of hard disks introduces certain performance compromises. The manipulation of sequential data depends upon the rotational speed of the platters and the data recording density. Because heat and vibration limit rotational speed, advancing density becomes the sole method to improve sequential transfer rates. While these advances increase both storage capacity and performance, the performance gains are on a far slower curve than that of capacity improvement

Rock-solid Reliability

• Designed and manufactured to mission-critical enterprise-class standards to provide enterprise reliability in high duty cycle environments. These drives have the highest available reliability rating on a high-capacity SATA drive.

Built for safety and security

• Seagate 1TB External Hard Drive is safeguarded by built-in self-monitoring technology that continuously checks your hard drive for date safely and drive performance.

Noiseless and Energy Efficient

• A notable feature of the Seagate External Hard Drive is that, it is energy efficient too. Seagate has employed a built-in power management feature for giving you an energy efficient operation. Additionally, the drive is a very silent operator, even while transferring large number of files, we were not able to hear anything. It was simply amazing.

Cost Effective

• Seagate 1TB Hard Drive is very cost effective. The price tag is stunning as for the capacity of 1TB, you will only find the drives at double the cost that is quoted for this drive.

Details:

• Simply plug this Seagate 1TB External Hard Drive in to a USB port and start saving or backing up your photos, music, video, and files

• It's not just easy to use - it's fast and energy efficient too

• Enjoy fast data transfer speed with USB 2.0 connectivity and 7200 RPM drive performance

• Aluminum alloy casing designed and slim appeared, this Seagate 1TB External Hard Drive even redefines the way people look at hard drive storage

• Designed and manufactured to mission-critical enterprise-class standards to provide enterprise reliability in high duty cycle environments

• These drives have the highest available reliability rating on a high-capacity drive

• Saving files is easy too, just drag-and-drop. You can even install programs on it

• Quite easy to operate and daily use. You can store absolutely anything you want including music, videos and pictures

• Comes with Leather Pouch and USB cable for convenient use, so what are you still waiting for?

Function Show:

Size in Detail:

NOTE:

• You do not need a power cable. Just plug this drive into the USB 2.0port of your laptop or other PC
• Connedct and disconnect without turning off your computer

What is a Hard Disk Drive(HDD)?

• A hard disk drive (hard disk, hard drive, HDD) is a non-volatile storage device for digital data. It features one or more rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a protective enclosure. Data is encoded magnetically by read/write heads that float on a cushion of air above the platters
• Hard disk manufacturers quote disk capacity in SI-standard powers of 1000, wherein a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes and a gigabyte is 1000 megabytes. With file systems that report capacity in powers of 1024, available space appears somewhat less than advertised capacity
• The first HDD was invented by IBM in 1956. They have fallen in cost and physical size over the years while dramatically increasing capacity. Hard disk drives have been the dominant device for secondary storage of data in general purpose computers since the early 1960s. They have maintained this position because advances in their areal recording density have kept pace with the requirements for secondary storage. Form factors have also evolved over time from large standalone boxes to today's desktop systems mainly with standardized 3.5-inch form factor drives, and mobile systems mainly using 2.5-inch drives. Today's HDDs operate on high-speed serial interfaces, i.e., Serial ATA (SATA) or Serial attached SCSI (SAS)
• The presentation of an HDD to its host is determined by its controller. This may differ substantially from the drive's native interface particularly in mainframes or servers

Capacity Measurements:

Hard Disk Platters & Head:



Performance Characteristics:

Data Transfer Rate:

• The mechanical nature of hard disks introduces certain performance compromises. The manipulation of sequential data depends upon the rotational speed of the platters and the data recording density. Because heat and vibration limit rotational speed, advancing density becomes the sole method to improve sequential transfer rates. While these advances increase both storage capacity and performance, the performance gains are on a far slower curve than that of capacity improvement
• As a result, even though the absolute read speed of newer hard drives is faster, it generally takes longer to back it up because capacity is increasing at a faster rate than performance

Seek Time:

• Seek time for non-sequential data ranges from 3 ms[55] for high-end server drives, to 15 ms for mobile drives, with the most common mobile drives at about 12 ms[56] and the most common desktop type typically being around 9 ms

Power Consumption:

• Power consumption has become increasingly important, not just in mobile devices such as laptops but also in server and desktop markets. Increasing data center machine density has led to problems delivering sufficient power to devices (especially for spin up), and getting rid of the waste heat subsequently produced, as well as environmental and electrical cost concerns (see green computing). Similar issues exist for large companies with thousands of desktop PCs. Smaller form factor drives often use less power than larger drives. One interesting development in this area is actively controlling the seek speed so that the head arrives at its destination only just in time to read the sector, rather than arriving as quickly as possible and then having to wait for the sector to come around (i.e. the rotational latency). Many of the hard drive companies are now producing Green Drives that require much less power and cooling. Many of these 'Green Drives' spin slower (<5,400 rpm compared to 7,200, 10,000 or 15,000 rpm) and also generate less waste heat

Audible Noise:

• Measured in dBA, audible noise is significant for certain applications, such as PVRs, digital audio recording and quiet computers. Low noise disks typically use fluid bearings, slower rotational speeds (usually 5,400 rpm) and reduce the seek speed under load (AAM) to reduce audible clicks and crunching sounds. Drives in smaller form factors (e.g. 2.5 inch) are often quieter than larger

Shock Resistance: 

• Shock resistance is especially important for mobile devices. Some laptops now include active hard drive protection that parks the disk heads if the machine is dropped, hopefully before impact, to offer the greatest possible chance of survival in such an event. Maximum shock tolerance to date is 350 Gs for operating and 1000 Gs for non-operating

Access & Interfaces:

• Hard disk drives are accessed over one of a number of bus types, including parallel ATA (P-ATA, also called IDE or EIDE), Serial ATA (SATA), SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and Fibre Channel. Bridge circuitry is sometimes used to connect hard disk drives to buses that they cannot communicate with natively, such as IEEE 1394, USB and SCSI

History:

• HDDs (introduced in 1956 as data storage for an IBM accounting computer) were originally developed for use with general purpose computers. During the 1990s, the need for large-scale, reliable storage, independent of a particular device, led to the introduction of embedded systems such as RAID systems, network attached storage (NAS) systems, and storage area network (SAN) systems that provide efficient and reliable access to large volumes of data. In the 21st century, HDD usage expanded into consumer applications such as camcorders, cellphones (for example the Nokia N91), digital audio players, digital video players, digital video recorders, personal digital assistants and video game consoles

Technology:

• HDDs record data by magnetizing ferromagnetic material directionally. Sequential changes in the direction of magnetization represent patterns of binary data bits. The data is read from the disk by detecting the transitions in magnetization and decoding the originally written data. Different encoding schemes, such as Modified Frequency Modulation, Group code recording, Run-length limited encoding, and others are used
• A typical HDD design consists of a spindle that holds one or more flat circular disks called platters, onto which the data is recorded. The platters are made from a non-magnetic material, usually aluminum alloy or glass, and are coated with a thin layer of magnetic material, typically 10-20 nm in thickness - for reference, standard copy paper is 0.07-0.18 millimetre (70,000-180,000 nm) thick- with an outer layer of carbon for protection. Older disks used iron(III) oxide as the magnetic material, but current disks use a cobalt-based alloy

The platters are spun at very high speeds. Information is written to, and read from a platter as it rotates past devices called read-and-write heads that operate very close (tens of nanometers in new drives) over the magnetic surface. The read-and-write head is used to detect and modify the magnetization of the material immediately under it. In modern drives there is one head for each magnetic platter surface on the spindle, mounted on a common arm. An actuator arm (or access arm) moves the heads on an arc (roughly radially) across the platters as they spin, allowing each head to access almost the entire surface of the platter as it spins. The arm is moved using a voice coil actuator or in some older designs a stepper motor

• The magnetic surface of each platter is conceptually divided into many small sub-micrometer-sized magnetic regions, each of which is used to encode a single binary unit of information. Initially the regions were oriented horizontally, but beginning about 2005, the orientation was changed to perpendicular. Due to the polycrystalline nature of the magnetic material each of these magnetic regions is composed of a few hundred magnetic grains. Magnetic grains are typically 10 nm in size and each form a single magnetic domain. Each magnetic region in total forms a magnetic dipole which generates a highly localized magnetic field nearby.
• HD heads are kept from contacting the platter surface by the air that is extremely close to the platter; that air moves at, or close to, the platter speed.[citation needed] The record and playback head are mounted on a block called a slider, and the surface next to the platter is shaped to keep it just barely out of contact. This forms a type of air bearing
• In modern drives, the small size of the magnetic regions creates the danger that their magnetic state might be lost because of thermal effects. To counter this, the platters are coated with two parallel magnetic layers, separated by a 3-atom-thick layer of the non-magnetic element ruthenium, and the two layers are magnetized in opposite orientation, thus reinforcing each other. Another technology used to overcome thermal effects to allow greater recording densities is perpendicular recording, first shipped in 2005,[11] and as of 2007 the technology was used in many HDDs
• Grain boundaries are critical in the design of modern hard drives, as the magnetic grains can magnetize surrounding grains, thereby increasing the number of incorrect bits or adding excessive noise. A clear grain boundary weakens the magnetic influence of the grains to their surroundings, and subsequently increase the signal-to-noise ratio. In longitudinal recording, the single-domain grains have uniaxial anisotropy with easy axes lying in the film plane. The consequence of this arrangement is that adjacent magnets repel each other.

Future Development: 

• Because of bit-flipping errors and other issues, perpendicular recording densities may be supplanted by other magnetic recording technologies. Toshiba is promoting bit-patterned recording (BPR), while Xyratex is developing heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)

Error Handling:

• Modern drives also make extensive use of Error Correcting Codes (ECCs), particularly Reed-Solomon error correction. These techniques store extra bits for each block of data that are determined by mathematical formulas. The extra bits allow many errors to be fixed. While these extra bits take up space on the hard drive, they allow higher recording densities to be employed, resulting in much larger storage capacity for user data. In 2009, in the newest drives, low-density parity-check codes (LDPC) are supplanting Reed-Solomon. LDPC codes enable performance close to the Shannon Limit and thus allow for the highest storage density available
• Typical hard drives attempt to "remap" the data in a physical sector that is going bad to a spare physical sector-hopefully while the number of errors in that bad sector is still small enough that the ECC can completely recover the data without loss. The S.M.A.R.T. system counts the total number of errors in the entire hard drive fixed by ECC, and the total number of remappings, in an attempt to predict hard drive failure

Architecture:

 

• A typical hard drive has two electric motors, one to spin the disks and one to position the read/write head assembly. The disk motor has an external rotor attached to the platters; the stator windings are fixed in place. The actuator has a read-write head under the tip of its very end (near center); a thin printed-circuit cable connects the read-write head to the hub of the actuator. A flexible, somewhat 'U'-shaped, ribbon cable, seen edge-on below and to the left of the actuator arm in the first image and more clearly in the second, continues the connection from the head to the controller board on the opposite side
• The head support arm is very light, but also rigid; in modern drives, acceleration at the head reaches 550 Gs
• The silver-colored structure at the upper left of the first image is the top plate of the permanent-magnet and moving coil motor that swings the heads to the desired position (it is shown removed in the second image). The plate supports a thin neodymium-iron-boron (NIB) high-flux magnet. Beneath this plate is the moving coil, often referred to as the voice coil by analogy to the coil in loudspeakers, which is attached to the actuator hub, and beneath that is a second NIB magnet, mounted on the bottom plate of the motor (some drives only have one magnet)
• The voice coil itself is shaped rather like an arrowhead, and made of doubly coated copper magnet wire. The inner layer is insulation, and the outer is thermoplastic, which bonds the coil together after it is wound on a form, making it self-supporting. The portions of the coil along the two sides of the arrowhead (which point to the actuator bearing center) interact with the magnetic field, developing a tangential force that rotates the actuator. Current flowing radially outward along one side of the arrowhead and radially inward on the other produces the tangential force. If the magnetic field were uniform, each side would generate opposing forces that would cancel each other out. Therefore the surface of the magnet is half N pole, half S pole, with the radial dividing line in the middle, causing the two sides of the coil to see opposite magnetic fields and produce forces that add instead of canceling. Currents along the top and bottom of the coil produce radial forces that do not rotate the head

HDD Formatting:

• Modern HDDs, such as SAS and SATA drives, appear at their interfaces as a contiguous set of logical blocks; typically 512 bytes long but the industry is in the process of changing to 4,096 byte logical blocks. The process of relating these logical blocks to their physical location on the HDD is called low level formatting which is usually performed at the factory and is not normally changed in the field. High level formatting then writes the file system structures into selected logical blocks to make the remaining logical blocks available to the host OS and its applications  

Package Included:

• 1 x USB 2.0 Mobile External Hard Drive Storage Device
• 1 x USB Cable
• 1 x Leather Pouch