Today Seagate updated its Barracuda line with an industry first. The 2TB Barracuda XT drive uses a 6Gbps SATA interface and has twice as much theoretical bandwidth as existing SATA II drives. It gives the disk up to 600MBps in burst transfers. When it comes to actual speed, the drive is still pretty fast with a 140MBps sustained transfer rate and Seagate’s 64MB of onboard cache.

The Barracuda XT will support SATA II and 1.5Gbps SATA systems and should still reach its sustained speed on those models.

It’s important to back-up your media to an external drive. If you suffer a crash, you’ll be glad that you did. But it isn’t always convenient to do so. Well, Seagate has announced the new FreeAgent DockStar which connects the external storage drive to the Internet, so that the data on the drive is accessible from anywhere as long as you can get online.

The DockStar network adapter allows access to the data on the FreeAgent Go external hard drive from anywhere outside or inside the home. The user can choose which files are shared online. Making it even more convenient, Seagate also offers an iPhone app that allows access to the drive. Another useful feature is the Pogoplug service, which gives you the ability to place linked pictures and video on sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.

Seagate’s latest FreeAgent Theater+ HD network media player will spice up your living room increasing the maximum resolution for video to 1080p, with support for DTS and Dolby Digital audio. If you have some RJ45 cables, you can connect the FreeAgent Theater+ HD to your home network via Ethernet, where it will stream content from different computers over the local network.

The optional 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter makes it handy to go wireless, occupying one of the three available USB 2.0 ports. The remaining ports can be connected to portable hard drives if you want additional storage. A driveless kit will cost you $150, while one with the 500GB FreeeAgent Go will retail for $290.

Seagate has announced an interesting feature called Pimp My Drive. It basically lets you fully customize the exterior design of your external hard drives and storage devices. They’ve partnered up with MusicSkins to offer vinyl skins for their drives.

You can either buy a vinyl skin with your purchase of a FreeAgent Go drive or you can buy the skin from MusicSkins if you already have a drive. Want 20-percent off of a MusicSkin of your choice? Then register your FreeAgent Go online at the Seagate website, plus you’ll get 35 free songs from eMusic.

Are you worried about a massive computer crash that will wipe out all of your data? The Rebit from Seagate will backup everything automatically from your computer. All of your important data like files, photos, music, movies and e-mail will be protected, including Windows operating system, software applications, drivers, passwords, bookmarks, and preferences.

The device couldn’t be easier to use. Just plug the Rebit(How clever, it has a frog on it) external USB backup drive into your computer, activate the software and you are good to go.

Hot on the heels of their BlackArmor line upgrade, Seagate has updated their FreeAgent drives for the Mac with new features and improved performance. First there’s the FreeAgent Go Pro for Mac, a 2.5-inch external drive that features a FireWire 800 interface and FireWire 400 and USB interface. It will be available later this month in 250GB, 320GB and 500GB sizes and will cost $130, $150 and $190 each.

The other addition to the line up today is the Go Dock+, a USB hub with 3 ports, which is available now for $40.

Seagate has been pretty busy lately what with the announcement of their revamped FreeAgent drives. Now we come across this new $40 FreeAgent Go Dock+.

What’s interesting is that it doubles as a powered three-port USB hub. The device should prove convenient if you’re into the whole FreeAgent Go thing. Pretty nice. It almost looks like it was designed by apple.

Seagate has been busy lately. They’ve just updated their BlackArmor line with three new units, a 220 NAS that holds up to 4TB, a WS 100 external drive with eSATA and USB 2.0, and a PS 110 portable drive that holds up to 500GB.

The Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220 is available in late July for $449.99 for 2TB and $699.99 for 4TB. The Seagate BlackArmor WS 110 is available now at $159.99 for 1TB and $309.99 for 2TB. The Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 is also available now for $159.99 for 500GB.

Seagate’s giving its FreeAgent Go drives a new 640GB capacity. It may not be the first external to cross the 500GB threshold, but it’s certainly one of the slimmer ones, physically. Other than that, there’s nothing too special here.

It’s still the standard USB-connected with up to 480Mbps transfer with multiple color options. We don’t have any info on pricing or availability, but since Seagate’s posting promotional materials on its main site, it won’t be long.

Seagate just-announced its Barracuda LP series, which cuts down the power consumption without sacrificing very much in performance. According to Seagate, the drives will use up to 50% less electricity than typical hard drives, while giving you a speed of 5,900 RPM and an average latency of 5.5ms, and a 32MB cache.

We don’t have anything on price yet, but apparently they come in 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB sizes (all 3.5-inch).

External storage is particularly important in the business world where the loss of data can mean the loss of significant money or important records that can’t be replaced. For that reason businesses often spend lots of money on external storage solutions. Seagate has announced new NAS devices that are more affordable than the average solution.

The new products are in the BlackArmor line and include the NAS 440 and NAS 420 storage servers, which can support up to 8TB each. Both of the devices are four bay, hot swappable units that offer a centralized way to backup and secure data in a business or home. The NAS 420 ships with two drives installed with 2TB of total capacity. The NAS 440 comes with four drives installed and capacities up to 8TB.

Seagate recently introduced a new home media player designed to work with its FreeAgent Go portable hard drives. The new FreeAgent Theater HD media player will be available in March for around $130 standalone, or it can be paired with one of several Seagate FreeAgent Go drives for varying prices.

The FreeAgent Theater is designed to let one enjoy media content stored on the FreeAgent Go drive via a home entertainment system. The FreeAgent Theater media player supports MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats, and DIVX files with video resolutions for NTSC, PAL and HD up to 1080i. The audio formats supported include 5.1 channel surround sound, where available, and also plays the popular digital audio formats including: MP3, WMA, WAV and OGG.

External storage is an important part of any backup strategy. No one wants to lose all the data on their computers in the event of an accident. Backing up data like documents, photos, music, video files, and other content on your PC is often best done to an external hard drive.

Seagate is one of the biggest names in external storage and today it announced its 2008 line of FreeAgent drives. The flagship drive of the line is the FreeAgent Go, which is only 12.5mm thick. The slim profile of the drive makes it the slimmest available today. Storage capacities are up to 500GB.

One thing we always want more of for our computer is storage capacity. Hitachi was first out of the gate with its 1TB HDD back in January of 2007 and Hitachi recently announced its second generation 1TB drive with some significant power savings.

Seagate wasn’t going to be beat to market with a hard drive of over 1TB, like it was beat to market with the original 1TB drives. Today Seagate announced the world’s first 1.5TB desktop hard drive called the Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB.

I remember my first computer; it didn’t even have a hard drive. Any computer geek that started young in the 80’s will remember them too. Seagate says when it shipped its first hard drive in 1979 the thing had a paltry 5MB of storage and cost $1,500. That wouldn’t hold one of your hi-rez LOLKat pics today.

Seagate says that it is the first hard drive manufacturer to ship one billion hard drives. It took Seagate 29 years to ship 1 billion drives and it says that 500 million of the drives shipped in 2007 alone compared to only 30 million shipped in 1990.