Seagate Technology on Wednesday announced new lines of hard drives geared toward quenching the thirst for high-capacity handhelds, digital media management and cross-platform syncing. A new line of drives made for handheld devices, the ST18 series, includes a 1.8-inch perpendicular hard drive that holds 60GB on a single platter. Seagate touts the ST18 as having the robustness of so-called solid-state memory and a long battery life.

The Mirra Sync and Share Personal Server is the next generation of Seagate's personal and small-business server from last year, the Mirra Personal Server 2.0. The new version can sync and share data among networked PCs and Macs, allows remote digital access to online accounts, and comes in 320GB for $499 or 500GB for $599. Both versions are immediately available for shipping.

Seagate is also expanding its LD25 series, geared toward gaming and media appliances, to include a 60GB and an 80GB version available in early 2007. The LD25 hard drives have fluid dynamic bearing motors (as opposed to using ball bearings), something Seagate has used since 2004 for quieter performance. The LD25 series already offers hard drives in 20GB, 30GB and 40GB.

Seagate also announced three new Momentus 2.5-inch notebook hard drives with perpendicular recording technology. The 5400 PSD is a hybrid notebook drive with rotating disk/flash memory storage. The 5400.2 FDE is an encrypting drive, and the 7200.2 is a high-performance 7200 RPM (revolutions per minute) drive for laptops, Seagate said.

For desktops, there is a new Savvio, the 10K.2, a 2.5-inch drive with 146GB capacity.

On the enterprise side, Seagate announced the Barracuda ES, a push-button (physical on-off switch for shutdown) backup hard drive with 750 GB capacity for $559, as well as the eSata push-button backup hard drives, available with 300GB for $269 and 500GB for $399. All three are available immediately.

The launch follows Seagate's $1.9 billion acquisition of Maxtor.