Seagate debuts 7mm thin, 500GB HD for $100; 500GB wireless drive for $130; and 3-5TB Personal Cloud drives
Seagate outs a fleet of cloud, wireless and super-thin hard drives — If getting your digital life better organized is tops on your list of New Year's resolutions, Seagate has a trio of options that cover all the bases.
Context & Ripple Effects
Seagate opened 2015 by fanning out its consumer lineup across three form factors — a 7mm-thin 500GB drive for $100, a $130 wireless drive, and 3-5TB Personal Cloud units — hedging across portable, wireless, and networked storage rather than betting on one category.
The timing frames the real contest: within days Samsung countered with its portable SSD T1 line at 450MB/s, and by midyear had pushed 2TB consumer SSDs down to $800 while Seagate answered on the enterprise side with the Dot Hill acquisition. The Personal Cloud tier shows where Seagate sees its margin going as flash compresses the portable-disk market.
First-order effects
- Consumers choosing between Seagate's $100 thin drive and Samsung's T1 face an explicit trade of capacity-per-dollar against transfer speed, since the 250GB T1 costs nearly twice as much for half the capacity.
Second-order effects
- The wireless and Personal Cloud SKUs move Seagate's pricing away from pure dollars-per-gigabyte toward bundled access and sharing features, pressuring rivals like Samsung to compete on software and connectivity rather than specs alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, disk makers concede the small-portable segment to SSDs and retreat to high-capacity territory — the direction Seagate itself confirmed a year later with its 10TB helium consumer drives.
The trend: Consumer storage is splitting into a flash-led portable market and a hard-drive-led capacity-and-cloud market, forcing vendors like Seagate and Samsung to specialize rather than fight on the same spec sheet.