Bangkok--Jun 24--Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology dedicates vast resources to address the needs of the quickly growing consumer market. RunOn Technology, available in the Seagate ST1 Series disc drives, compensates for the impact of motion on hard drive operations. With RunOn Technology, hard drives can continue to serve up data without interruption, even in a mobile environment with frequent shock impact.
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Seagate RunOn Technology keeps the music going and helps you compete in the mobile market
While many of us look forward to exercise and consider it important, it still can be tedious. Do you ever go walking or jogging and rely on your portable music player to help keep you going by delivering a stream of sound through headphones? If you do, it’s probably important to you that there be no unexpected interruption in the flow of audio data. Many portable, digital music players available today store audio files on a hard disc drive—an adaptation of PC technology for a completely different environment than one would find in a computer.
Hard-drive issues in mobile environments
Hard disc drives were not originally designed to facilitate reliable performance from within a moving system. The basic engineering assumption was a stationary system. When the disc actuator moves over the disc platter in order to find and serve up data; it will typically have no problem doing so when the system is stationary. However, even the steps of a person walking while wearing a portable music player can have an effect on hard drive operations comparable to an earthquake. The movements of jogging have an even stronger impact. In this setting, traditional disc drives would not perform as intended, perhaps delivering the wrong data or no data at all.
Seagate Technology has conducted extensive studies of the effect of motion on hard disc drives in order to understand exactly how the effects of motion take place. The company has made it possible for hard disc drives to sense that motion takes place, anticipate its likely effect on drive activity and compensate for it: Seagate RunOn Technology. With RunOn, walkers and runners can maintain their pace unbothered by the irritation caused by an interruption of the audio stream.
What does RunOn Technology do?
Seagate RunOn Technology consists of two main capabilities:
New State Feedback (NSFB) allows the drive to register the current state of motion of the system it is a part of.
Random Vibration Servo Compensation (RVSC) lets the drive calculate the most likely motion to be expected, based on the pattern it has observed, and adjust for it.
Both of these functions work on the basis of complex algorithms developed by Seagate. As you know, in order to facilitate an uninterrupted flow of data, disc drives in mobile devices usually burst data into a buffer, from where the system picks it up. The drives themselves operate only intermittently and for a few seconds at a time. However, as a critical feature, RunOn Technology is active at all times. It enables the drive to be in a state of perpetual readiness, so that, at the moment it must retrieve and deliver data, it can do so flawlessly.
Seagate ST1 Series drives support accelerating portable market growth
RunOn Technology is available today as a feature of the Seagate ST1 Series one-inch disc drives. ST1 Series drives are available in capacities up to 8 gigabytes. They weigh 19 grams, roughly two-thirds of an ounce, and have a buffer of 2 Mbytes to enhance the performance of streaming digital media. The 8-Gbyte ST1 drive can store approximately 4,000 tracks or 200 hours of high-quality music.
The opportunity for systems providers and OEMs is striking, as the handheld audio/video player market grows. An estimate by Gartner anticipates that the hard drive market for portable media players is going to grow to about 63 million units by the year 2009.
Seagate continues to invest heavily in research and development in order to help its distributors and OEMs satisfy the needs of the consumer electronics market. Portable music players are a very popular example of hard disc drives coming along for a run. Expect to see more and more specially designed hard drives for handheld video, PDAs, navigation systems in cars, digital video cameras and other applications. End.