ITE221 - Fall 2011 - Chapter 5

Website: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/

For Chapter 5’s website review, I’m looking at the manufacturer’s website for Seagate, one of the major manufacturers of consumer- and business-grade hard-disk drives. As with any manufacturer’s website, it is an excellent resource for technical details on their own products, but exposes the reader to the possibility of bias in favor of their own products. There are promotional links to various flagship products made by Seagate, touting the speed and reliability of their drives; there is a support section for contacting Customer Service with a problem, reading through the Knowledge Base to fix a problem yourself, directions for installation of a drive or other Seagate product and registering a newly-purchased drive, or acquiring up-to-date firmware for one’s own drive; and sections for each of Seagate’s various product families (internal desktop or laptop drives, network attached storage units, servers, etc.), as well as a promotion for a webinar covering “Enterprise vs. Client SSDs’, taking place next week on October 18^th. With Seagate drives being found in numerous major manufacturers’ computers, and their drives populating rows of shelves in computer-parts stores like Micro Center, an easy-to-navigate site like Seagate’s is a pleasure and arguably a necessity.