Seagate's external hard drive wins top design award

Seagate's External Hard Drive has won a 'Good Design' Award from the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design in the museum's 'Electronics' category.

The only hard drive manufacturer selected for this honour, Seagate's External Hard Drive offers the most convenient way to safely store and backup digital video and photos, business files, computer games, music and much more.

Based on the world's highest capacity and most reliable disc drives, the External Hard Drive was developed from the ground up to deliver the highest consumer-design standards ever seen in a hard drive.

"Consumers want easy to use, plug-and-play solutions for storing and backing up their valuable personal and business data," said Brian Dexheimer, Seagate's executive vice president of Sales and Marketing. "These solutions should not require an electrical engineering degree to master. That's why Seagate designed a drive that's exceptionally easy to use, while maintaining our signature reliability and performance. We're honoured to have received this prestigious award from the Museum of Architecture and Design."

Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine, president and director of the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design said that all winning products selected were the "quintessence of today's design innovation".

The unique interlocking design allows users to stack multiple External Hard Drives horizontally, or place the drive vertically to minimize space on a desktop. The External Hard Drives can store data from a PC or Apple desktop computer or notebook. Reliability was an important design consideration for Seagate's product development team who designed the product to provide reliable and secure storage.

"Design is critical for Seagate products because it is a visual way of demonstrating our brand," said Rick Burgess, senior director of marketing communications at Seagate. "We stand for reliability and innovation and we want our products to reflect those traits to our customers. This is a great award because it shows how far we've come in developing, designing and manufacturing best-in-class products for consumers."

Seagate's External Hard Drive is currently available in capacities of up to 400GB and features pushbutton backup.

Seagate has two facilities in Northern Ireland, employing over 1,800 people. At the Springtown wafer fabrication facility, the company develops and manufactures the recording heads, which write information onto and read information from the recording disc inside a computer's hard drive.

The Limavady facility produces nickel-plated aluminium substrates, the core material on which computer hard disc drives read, write and store digital information.

(SP)