Following their press releases issued on May 23, 2012 and June 14, 2012, Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ:STX) and LaCie S.A. (Euronext:LAC) announced today the completion of the purchase by Seagate of all of the shares of Philippe Spruch and his affiliate, representing 64.5% of the outstanding shares of LaCie for a provisional price of €4.05 per share. The price payable to Philippe Spruch and his affiliate may be increased by 3%, to €4.17 per share, in the event that within six months following today's date, Seagate holds at least 95% of the share capital and voting rights of LaCie.

The completion of the transaction follows the required clearances from the French Ministry of Finance and the US and German Antitrust Authorities. As a result of the completion of the transaction, Seagate intends to file in the coming weeks with the French Autorité des marches financiers an all-cash simplified tender offer on the remaining LaCie shares.

Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX) today announced that Gary Gentry has rejoined Seagate to lead its solid state drive (SSD) business as senior vice president, SSD. Mr. Gentry will have responsibility for driving Seagate leadership in the SSD space, with time-to-market, competitive product offerings. He will be located in Longmont, Colorado and will report directly to Rocky Pimentel, chief sales and marketing officer.

Mr. Gentry has over 25 years of experience in the storage industry, including most recently as the general manager of the Enterprise SSD Division of Micron Corporation. Prior to rejoining Seagate, he held leadership positions focusing on solid-state technologies at Spansion Corporation and Storage Genetics. He also served as chief marketing officer for Maxtor, and provided strategic consulting to Hitachi Global Storage Systems. While at Seagate he held various management positions including vice president, strategic marketing and planning.

Seagate Technology plc today reported financial results for the quarter and fiscal year ended June 29, 2012. During the fourth quarter, on a GAAP basis the company reported revenue of approximately $4.5 billion, gross margin of 33.1%, net income of $1.0 billion and diluted earnings per share of $2.37. On a non-GAAP basis, which excludes the net impact of certain items, Seagate reported gross margin of 33.6% and diluted earnings per share of $2.41.

In the June quarter, Seagate generated approximately $1.4 billion in cash from operations, paid cash dividends of $106 million and used approximately $1.2 billion to redeem approximately 45 million ordinary shares. Through the first half of the 2012 calendar year, Seagate has redeemed approximately 88 million ordinary shares, representing approximately 19% of the company's market capitalization. Cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and short-term investments totaled $2.2 billion at the end of the fourth quarter, a sequential increase of approximately $67 million.

Century Japan released a new drive dock (model: CMRK-S4) for PCs with vacant 5.25-inch drive bays, which provides four 2.5-inch SATA hot-swap drive bays, supporting drives as thick as 12.5 mm (such as WD VelociRaptor without its heatsink, or Seagate Cheetah. The four bays have lockable caddies. Since this is a passive dock, the SATA connections are relayed to the back. The four bays are cooled by a 40 mm exhaust fan on the back. The fan spins at speeds of around 4,000 RPM, with noise output around 25 dBA. Measuring 145.7 x 149.3 x 41.6 mm (WxDxH), the dock weighs 500 g, owing to its mostly metallic built. Slated for early August, it is expected to be priced at 3,980 JPY (US $50).

Seagate Technology plc the worldwide leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions, and DensBits Technologies Ltd ("DensBits") the inventor of the world's first Memory ModemTM have announced today a strategic agreement for the development of low-cost, high-performance Solid State Drives ("SSD") for the consumer and enterprise markets. In conjunction with the agreement, Seagate has made an undisclosed equity investment in DensBits.

Seagate and DensBits are joining forces, to develop future products that are intended to provide customers with significant cost savings, extremely high reliability, and unparalleled performance. Under the agreement, DensBits' Memory ModemTM controller technology will be integrated with Seagate's various storage technologies to power a wide range of consumer and enterprise applications including 3 bits/cell ("TLC") 1Xnm Flash-based consumer-grade SSD, and 2 bits/cell ("MLC") 1x nm Flash-based enterprise-grade SSD.

Following their press release issued on May 23, 2012 announcing exclusive negotiations and the receipt on June 8, 2012 of the opinion of the employee representative body of LaCie S.A., Seagate Technology plc and LaCie announced today that Seagate, Philippe Spruch, LaCie's chairman and CEO, and his affiliate, have entered into a binding share purchase agreement to purchase all of the shares of Philippe Spruch and his affiliate, representing 64.5% of the outstanding shares of LaCie for a provisional price of €4.05 per share (as may be adjusted downwards depending on the cash and debt position of LaCie at closing).

As previously announced, Ricol Lasteyrie & Associés have been appointed as independent expert by the Board of Directors of LaCie on June 23, 2012. The transaction has already received clearance from the US Antitrust Authorities but remains subject to regulatory approval in France (approval of foreign investments by the Ministry of Finance) and Germany (antitrust filing) and to other customary closing conditions.

Seagate Technology plc., today introduced Backup Plus storage devices - its reinvented consumer storage product family that delivers the easiest setup, one-click backup and the ability to save and share your content on Facebook and Flickr.

Seagate Backup Plus hard drives are newly designed external storage that work interchangeably with both Windows and Apple computers and deliver new features to protect, share and save nearly every aspect of one's digital life. These products come loaded with the new hassle-free Seagate Dashboard software for one-click local backup making it easier than ever to eliminate excuses or apprehensions about backing up one's most valuable digital content. Seagate Backup Plus products are the world's first external hard drives to provide backup for content on social networks, such as Facebook and Flickr. Storing a local duplicate copy of photos from social networks is now as easy as backing up files on your computer. Seagate Backup Plus will provide the peace of mind that every aspect of one's digital life is safe from loss.

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), the industry consortium dedicated to sustaining the quality, integrity and dissemination of Serial ATA (SATA) technology, today announced it has finalized a new version of its Universal Storage Module (USM) standard that enables consumers to simply and easily increase the storage capacity of their mobile devices. The USM Slim specification defines a thinner, 9 mm dimension, making it an ideal storage solution for ultrabooks, tablets and other portable devices.

Demand for thinner, lighter mobile devices often results in decreased native storage capacities, limiting the amount of content consumers can carry with them. The USM Slim specification allows manufacturers to develop external storage offerings that seamlessly pair with these thin and light devices so that consumers can still have instant access to their music, movies, photos and other content at any time or place. The smaller form factor now makes it possible for thinner CE devices to integrate the USM host connector or slot to accept the 9 mm module.

Seagate Technology plc the worldwide leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions, and LaCie S.A., a leading manufacturer of consumer storage products, today announced an exclusive agreement with the intent for Seagate to acquire a controlling interest in LaCie.

Seagate has offered to purchase from Philippe Spruch, LaCie's chairman and CEO, and his affiliate, all of their shares, representing 64.5% of the outstanding shares of LaCie. Following receipt of governmental approvals and the close of this transaction, Seagate would commence an all-cash simplified tender offer (followed as the case may be by a squeeze-out procedure) to acquire the remaining outstanding shares in accordance with the General Regulation of the French Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF).

Seagate will demonstrate a variety of technologies at the SCSI Trade Association (STA) Technology Showcase this week aimed at improving the performance of servers, datacenters and cloud computing applications, including the first public demonstration of solid-state drives operating at 12 gigabits per second.

Seagate will show Pulsar.2 solid-state drives working with the new 12 Gb/s SAS standard at the showcase, taking place at the Hyatt Hotel in Santa Clara, Calif. on May 9, 2012. The new standard doubles the data throughput of industry-standard drives equipped with the enhanced SAS interface, enabling much faster server and storage solutions. The enhanced standard also fully maintains the rich data integrity, scalability, serviceability, and hot swappable protocol feature set that enterprises depend on to safeguard critical data, minimize costly downtime, and ensure infrastructures easily keep up with growing data storage demands.

Seagate Technology plc today announced that its Board of Directors has authorized the Company to repurchase up to $2.5 billion of its outstanding ordinary shares (the "April 2012 Authorization"). Seagate, as a result of the April 2012 Authorization and other current repurchase authorizations, currently has a total authorized unutilized capacity for repurchases of approximately $3.5 billion under these authorizations.

"The repurchase authorization reflects the confidence that the Board and the executive management team have in Seagate's ability to generate cash, while still investing in innovation and growth opportunities," said Steve Luczo, CEO of Seagate. "Importantly, it supports and is consistent with our ongoing focus on returning value to our shareholders."

Seagate Technology plc today reported financial results for the quarter ended March 30, 2012. The company reported revenue of $4.4 billion, gross margin of 37%, net income of $1.1 billion and diluted earnings per share of $2.48. On a non-GAAP basis, which excludes the net impact of certain items, Seagate reported net income of $1.2 billion and diluted earnings per share of $2.64.

The company generated approximately $938 million in cash from operations, paid cash dividends of $112 million and used approximately $1.1 billion to repurchase 43.1 million shares of common stock and for the early retirement of debt.

Seagate has become the first hard drive maker to achieve the milestone storage density of 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) per square inch, producing a demonstration of the technology that promises to double the storage capacity of today's hard drives upon its introduction later this decade and give rise to 3.5-inch hard drives with an extraordinary capacity of up to 60 terabytes over the 10 years that follow. The bits within a square inch of disk space, at the new milestone, far outnumber stars in the Milky Way, which astronomers put between 200 billion and 400 billion.

Seagate is working on a new variant of the 9 mm-thick FreeAgent portable hard drive it launched back in April 2011. The new variant features a fast 7200 RPM drive, with a capacity of 500 GB. The original model had 320 GB capacity. Measuring 124 x 78 x 9 mm, and weighing 160 g, the drives take advantage of USB 3.0 SuperSpeed interface, with a single cable handling power and connectivity. The new 500 GB variant costs about $170, which is very high compared to the launch price of the 320 GB variant, which was around $99, but then you have to take into account the escalation of HDD prices across the industry since September 2011.

PMC-Sierra, Inc., (Nasdaq:PMCS) or PMC, the semiconductor innovator transforming storage, optical and mobile networks, today announced that Adaptec by PMC is demonstrating a server that doubles storage performance, reduces power consumption and increases reliability in a smaller data center footprint to help meet the soaring demands on data centers while driving down total cost of ownership. The CeBIT demonstration features a RAID controller card prototype based on the industry's only PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 capable 24-port RAID-on-Chip (RoC) from PMC, installed in a system based on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family, and 22 Seagate Pulsar enterprise solid state drives (SSDs). Visit Adaptec in the CeBIT Storage Pavilion, Hall 2, Stand E51 to view the demonstration.

The server configuration delivers a sustained data transfer rate of 6600 MB/s in reads and 5000 MB/s in writes. This performance is made possible by the significant bandwidth advantages of the new Intel platform's PCIe 3.0 interface combined with the SRCv's 24-6Gb/s SAS interfaces and Seagate's SAS Pulsar SSDs that deliver sequential reads of 370 MB/s and sequential writes of 200 MB/s. Previous-generation systems based on PCIe 2.0 are typically capable of less than 3000 MB/s data transfer rates.

Japanese company Logitec (not to be confused with Logitech), released an ingenious new 3.5-inch external HDD enclosure, the LHD-EG, which features temperature-sensing, and a thermal-controlled fan that keeps the drive and electronics cool, making it fit for on-field (under shade) usage. The fan stays off till the ambient temperature is less than or equal to 45 °C.

Logitec is pairing this enclosure with Seagate's Barracuda 7200.14 SATA 6 Gb/s HDDs, to come up with three capacity options: 1 TB, 2 TB, and 3 TB. The enclosure provides eSATA 6 Gb/s and USB 3.0 (backwards compatible with USB 2.0) to connect to the host. When connected via eSATA, the USB cable should be plugged in to draw power, or a 12V external power brick has to be used. Measuring 120 x 199 x 35mm (WxDxH), the drives typically weigh 1.1 kg. Disc-cloning and backup software comes bundled. The 1 TB, 2 TB, and 3 TB variants are priced at 13,480 JPY (US $171); 17,980 JPY (US $228); and 29,800 (US $378).

Seagate started shipping its GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter accessory. The gadget lets you connect a SATA drive (HDD or SSD) to a host machine over 10 Gbps Thunderbolt interface, completely eliminating any bottleneck (USB 3.0 bottlenecks SATA 6 Gb/s). It works by simply sliding and locking in a SATA device to its industry-standard SATA power+data interface, and plugging the adapter to the host using a Thunderbolt cable. The Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter is priced at US $99.99.

Seagate Technology plc today reported financial results for the quarter ended December 30, 2011. The company shipped 47 million disk drives and reported revenue of $3.2 billion, gross margin of 31.6%, net income of $563 million and diluted earnings per share of $1.28. On a non-GAAP basis, which excludes the net impact of certain items, Seagate reported net income of $581 million and diluted earnings per share of $1.32 for the quarter ended December 30, 2011.

For the six months ended December 30, 2011, the company reported revenue of $6.0 billion, gross margin of 26.0%, net income of $703 million and diluted earnings per share of $1.61. On a non-GAAP basis, which excludes the net impact of certain items, Seagate reported net income of $727 million and diluted earnings per share of $1.67. Seagate returned $151 million to shareholders in the form of a dividend and repurchased $191 million of Seagate ordinary shares which equates to approximately 13 million ordinary shares.

Seagate Technology plc ("Seagate" or the "Company") (NASDAQ:STX) today announced that its Board of Directors (the "Board") has approved an increase to its quarterly cash dividend from $0.18 per share to $0.25 per share, an increase of 39%. The increase is effective with the dividend payable on March 1, 2012 to shareholders of record as of the close of business on February 15, 2012. The payment of any future quarterly dividends will be at the discretion of the Board and will be dependent upon Seagate's financial position, results of operations, available cash, cash flow, capital requirements and other factors deemed relevant by the Board.

Additionally, the Board has authorized the Company to repurchase an additional $1 billion of its outstanding common shares (the "January 2012 authorization"). The January 2012 authorization extends Seagate's commitment to enhancing shareholder value by utilizing the robust cash generation ability of its business. To date, Seagate has utilized approximately $1.1 billion against the existing $2 billion share repurchase authorization approved by the Board on November 29, 2010 to repurchase 67.8 million shares. The remaining balance of the November 2010 authorization ($0.9 billion) is expected to be utilized by the end of fiscal year 2012 (June 29, 2012), market and other economic conditions permitting.

Seagate Technology plc today provided preliminary financial results for its fiscal second quarter ended December 30, 2011. The acquisition of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd's hard disk drive business closed on December 19, 2011 and these preliminary financial results include Samsung operating activity from that date.

The company shipped approximately 47 million disk drives, which included approximately 700,000 Samsung disk drives, and expects to report revenue for its fiscal second quarter 2012 of $3.1 - $3.2 billion. Before giving effect to charges related to the acquisition of Samsung's hard disk drive business that are not yet determinable, the company expects gross margin as a percent of revenue to be at least 30.5%, operating expenses (Product Development, Marketing and Administrative) to be approximately $390 million, and diluted outstanding shares to be 440 million.

Well, it seems that the flooding in Thailand has done a lot more than destroy lives, wreck a few factories and cause HDD prices to shoot up. There appears to be a lot of opportunities for changing the terms of business too - to less favourable ones for customers of hard disc drives. First, we had the severe and unwelcome warranty reductions and now we have HDD manufacturers trying to lock branded PC makers into expensive long-term contracts, according to Digitimes. Some PC makers buy hard disk drives on a quarterly basis, at a fixed price, but now that prices have shot up and supplies restricted, HDD manufacturers are trying to coerce them into signing one year contracts at current high prices. However, it looks like it might not be such a good deal for PC makers, because the recovery in supply is continuing, with a full recovery potentially not so far away, which will of course make those prices plummet again. As it is, HDD shipments are projected to be around 140 million units in the first quarter of 2012, while the same quarter last year was 170-180 million units - so the fall isn't really that hugely less than before anyway and should become less severe as 2012 wears on.

One does get the impression that the HDD manufacturers are playing up the difficulty of restoring production volumes in order to give them a better bargaining hand. There's also the fact that recovering from the disaster is hugely expensive for them, so HDD makers will want to charge more to recoup those costs faster, motivating them to use tactics like these.

Seagate Technology has today announced that it completed the acquisition of Samsung Electronics' hard drive unit. Worth $1.4 billion, this deal covers the assets, infrastructure and employees of Samsung's HDD business and is supposed to boost Seagate's production capacity, R&D strength and customer access in China, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Germany and the Russian Federation.

As part of the agreement, Seagate will be supplying HDDs for Samsung PCs, notebooks and consumer electronics devices, while the South Korean giant will provide Seagate with semiconductor products needed for enterprise solid state drives (SSDs), solid-state hybrid drives and other products. Moreover, the two companies have signed an extended patent cross-license agreement, and have agreed to collaborate on the development of enterprise storage solutions.

Way back in 2008, we reported that Seagate was lowering warranties of its hard disk drives from 5 years to 3. This trend quickly spread throughout the HDD industry and unsurprisingly, wasn't something that customers were too happy about. Now, Western Digital is lowering the warranty on some of its HDD lines from 3 years to a mere 2, with the affected lines being the Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue. Lines not affected are the Caviar Black, Scorpio Black, A/V drives and externals. Also, as the stock feeds through the channel, there will be a transition period where the same model in a store will have either a 2 or 3 year warranty, depending on its serial number, which can be checked on WD's support site. It will be interesting to see if retailers will clearly differentiate to customers which drives have which warranty, as it might be rather convenient for them not to.

Channel partners have received a letter from SelectWD about this:

Western Digital Corp. (NYSE:WDC) today is updating its financial outlook for the December quarter and the progress to date of its operations recovery effort in Thailand. The company is also providing its view of the industry conditions for the December 2011 quarter and beyond.

Seagate Technology plc., updated its financial outlook for the December 2011 and March 2012 quarters. The company continues to believe that, due to the industry impacts caused by the extensive flooding in Thailand, hard disk drive supply will be significantly constrained for several quarters. For the December 2011 quarter, the company believes the industry will ship between 110-120 million units.

The company believes the industry's ability to manufacture and ship hard disks drives will gradually improve throughout calendar 2012. While this may alleviate some of the unit demand shortfall, it is expected that some companies will optimize unit shipments by manufacturing lower component count/lower capacity hard disk drives; thereby, only modestly offsetting the growing petabyte shortage. Because demand is estimated to significantly exceed supply during this time, pricing is expected to remain stable.