Seagate announced that it is now shipping its new Consumer Electronics (CE) hard disk drives to eight of the world’s leading Digital Video Recorder (DVR) device makers: Toshiba, Thomson, Sony, Pioneer, Pace, Nokia, Motorola and Echostar. Seagate claims that its new CE HDDs are the industry’s first to implement the Parallel ATA-100 standard streaming command set adopted by the T-13 committee as the new industry standard.

Seagate’s new CE hard drives are based on industry standards, rather than proprietary solutions, built from the ground up to be compatible with the new ATA/7 streaming commands standards. Seagate's ATA/7-compatible streaming commands give CE manufacturers greater flexibility in tuning the drive for best results with specific applications.

With easy-to-use stream management commands, Seagate’s CE drives are optimized for the sequential work of streaming continuous A/V files (up to 8 standard TV streams are supported). This delivers more consistent video streaming performance than PC hard drives designed for fragmented text-based documents. CE manufacturers also require that A/V streaming be a higher priority than the repetitive error-checking procedures used in PC applications, which slow down video streaming. Seagate’s CE drives are optimized for A/V streaming performance, with manufacturer-defined error-checking parameters for smoother streams.

Seagate also designed these new drives to meet CE power requirements. Seagate CE HDDs’ power management technology uses less peak power at startup – no greater than 2.3A – compared to other drives in their class, allowing DVR manufacturers to use less expensive components in their power architecture. Additionally, Seagate claims that its new CE HDDs are very quiet and also boast with high non-operating shock tolerance and low failure rates.

The new CE HDDs are available in 40, 80, 120 and 160GB. Seagate said it will continue penetrating the rapidly growing market of consumer electronics devices.