Seagate on Sunday announced that its recently launched service that guarantees to replace any broken hard drive and recover the data that was on it will be sold through more than 1,500 Staple stores.
The company also announced two new portable disk drives, its first 4TB drive and a 2TB drive that the company claims is the thinnest on the market.
Seagate's new 4TB Seagate Backup Plus FAST drive.
Recovery service
In September, Seagate launched its data recovery service, Seagate Rescue and Replace, through retailers. NCIX, a Canadian retailer, made the service available earlier this year. Staples is the largest retailer to roll out the service option.
The Seagate Rescue and Replace data protection plan provides a service where in the event that a disk drive is damaged or destroyed, the owner can mail in the hardware and Seagate will recover the data and send a working drive back to the customer.
Amazon was initially the only retailer offering Seagate's Rescue and Replace service, but Amazon's offer only covered data and replacement for new external storage. Now that the service is being expanded to Staples, a consumer can purchase the data protection plan for an internal drive or SSD in a laptop or desktop system.
The Seagate Rescue service retails for laptop and desktop computers starting at $49.99 for a two-year plan. External drives start at $29.99 for a two-year plan.
NCIX debuted the plan with a retail price of $69.99 (CDN) for both laptop and desktop, as well as a three-year plan for computers for $89.99. The external storage protection plan has a retail price of $39.99 (CDN) for two years and $49.99 (CDN) for three years.
In this ad, Seagate Rescue says it will recover data from and/or replace any brand of drive that has stopped working.
Seagate's highest capacity portable drive
Seagate also announced its first 4TB mobile drive, the Seagate Backup Plus FAST drive.
The Backup Plus FAST portable drive boasts twice the capacity and speed of other external portable drives and sports a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface to deliver transfer speeds of up to 220MBps.
"The performance and capacity of this new portable drive is beyond that of any other external offering to date. We believe that the Backup Plus FAST drive will be widely adopted by creative professionals as the go-to back up device for the field," Scott Horn, Seagate's vice president of global marketing, said in a statement.
The metal top-case of the Backup Plus FAST drive is resistant to scratches and fingerprints, the company said. It needs no external power supply and is compact enough to fit easily in a camera bag or backpack while delivering the same or higher capacity of other desktop drives. The drive is configured as RAID 0, which stripes the data across both internal drives increasing the volume capacity and transfer speed.
Seagate has also upgraded the Backup Plus FAST software's Dashboard to include a mobile backup application to provide protection for mobile device data.
Users need only install the free Seagate Mobile Backup app on an iOS or Android mobile device to back up all of the photos and videos from that device to a drive or a cloud service.
Backup from mobile devices can also be sent directly to the drive via a Wi-Fi connection or through cloud services such as Dropbox or Google Drive while on the road.
The 4TB Seagate Backup Plus FAST portable drive is available for $299.99. The high-capacity Seagate Backup Plus is also available in 2TB capacities for $129.99 and 3TB for $159.99.
Seagate's thinnest 2TB portable drive
Seagate also announced the second generation of its thin external storage lineup, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim. The new generation comes with up to 2TB of capacity in a half-inch (12.1mm) form factor.
The new Backup Plus Slim drives also use a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface.
Seagate Backup Plus Slim drives are available from Amazon and Seagate.com for $99.99 for 500GB; and $119.99 for a 2TB Slim drive.
This article, Seagate offers disk 'rescue' service through Staples, releases 4TB portable drive, was originally published at Computerworld.com.
Lucas Mearian covers consumer data storage, consumerization of IT, mobile device management, renewable energy, telematics/car tech and entertainment tech for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.
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