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Imation's New USB Drive is Wireless, Not Wi-Fi

Ryan Whitwam — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:16:31 -0600

Imation has announced the release of the first external hard drive to use wireless USB. The Pro WX Wireless USB hard drive packs a standard 1.5TB 3.5” drive, with an SSD upgrade kit coming soon. The transfer speed are said to be a respectable, but not great, 15 MB/sec.

Per the wireless USB standard, the Pro WX supports one to one connection that should limit the possibility that someone else can connect to your hard drive. But being that this is the first wireless USB hard drive, there hasn’t yet been a real world test of security. Backups can be triggered whenever the drive is within 30 feet of the (very large) receiver.

The Pro WX Wireless USB hard drive is available for purchase now for 500 smackers. The price may be a bit steep, but think how cool you’ll look not having to plug your hard drive in to anything… wait, what? Power cord? Um, can we get on that wireless power thing? At least it eliminates one of two cables.

Toshiba Touts Largest Capacity (320GB) 1.8-Inch Hard Drive

Paul Lilly — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:30:52 -0600

The most capacious 1.8-inch hard drive on the planet now checks in at 320GB, says Toshiba, who just introduced a new line of tiny HDDs

Toshiba's targeting thin and light mobile PCs and portable external HDD contraptions with its new storage series, which also includes two other models sized at 160GB and 250GB. All three drives sport a perpendicular magnetic recording head, efficient power consumption, a high level of durability, and quiet seek operation, Toshiba says.

The new drives come equipped with a SATA interface and spin at 5400RPM. All three models also include a 16MB buffer. Combined with improvements to areal density, Toshiba claims you can expect data transfer rates to improve by 15 percent over previous drives.

Toshiba's tiny drives will start mass production in December. No word yet on price.

Image Credit: Toshiba

The "Little PC" is a Fanless Nettop Sporting a 1.6GHz Atom Processor

Ryan Whitwam — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:07:33 -0600

If you’re in the market for a completely silent PC that also happens to be tiny, this is your lucky day. The Stealth LPC-395F, or “Little PC”, is a small fanless Atom-based nettop system with a front facing 2.5-inch hard drive bay.

The entire chassis measures 6.54 x 6.18 x 1.89 inches. The system comes with the Atom N270 at 1.6Ghz, up to 2GB of RAM, dual Ethernet, a Compact Flash slot, and optional WiFi (for $50). The Little PC is able to run on 12-19V DC so it can even be used in a car. The Stealth LPC-395F is available to order now for $795. Supply your own hard drive.

Study: HDDs Headed for the Bargain Bin, Not Obsolescence

Paul Lilly — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:39:46 -0500

Maybe not next year, or even the year after, but sometime in the not too distant future, mainstream storage duties are destined to make the jump from mechanical hard drives to flash-based SSDs, right? Not according to a new study published in a recent issue of IEEE Transactions on Magnetics. Not only are hard drives in it for the long haul, but the cost to storage ratio will shrink dramatically, the study suggests.

Some would argue it already has, but study authors Professor Mark Kryder and PhD student Chang Soo Kim of Carnegie Mellon University predict that by the year 2020, a two-disk, 2.5-inch HDD with 14TB of storage capacity will run a mere $40. And if that weren't enough to keep mechanical storage media relevant into the next decade and beyond, the duo also suggest that flash memory technology will run into technical roadblocks that will halt its continued scaling before 2020.

The predictions surprised even the study's authors, who set out to examine 13 up-and-coming nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies and see if one of them had the potential to leapfrog HDDs on a cost-per-terabyte basis by 2020.

"We were surprised to find that the study indicated that, even in 2020, hard drives were likely to be considerably less expensive on a cost per terabyte basis than any of the competing technologies," Kryder told PhysOrg.com. "It was also somewhat surprising to find that the technical potential of a technology was not necessarily well-correlated with where the industry was investing the most dollars; rather, industrial firms are tending to invest where they have they most know-how. This is not necessarily the wisest decision, but is quite understandable."

Before dismissing the findings as unlikely, it should be noted that Kryder previously served as CTO for Seagate, so he's at least familiar with the storage sector. Nevertheless, do you see HDDs standing in the spotlight for another decade?

Image Credit: simbaint.com

Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB

Nathan Edwards — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:30:00 -0500

Faster than a VelociRaptor, and six times the capacity

After months of making do with 5,400rpm and 5,900rpm 2TB drives and odd-bird 1.5TB drives, it’s finally happening: 7,200rpm two-terabyte hard drives are coming to rigs near you. First out of the gate and into our greedy arms is Western Digital’s 2TB Caviar Black, the performance cousin to the 2TB Caviar Green we reviewed in May. And brother, it’s just what we’ve been waiting for.

The 2TB Caviar Black is spec’d to impress, with four 500GB platters, two processors, 64MB of cache, and a dual-stage actuator system that puts a fine-tuned piezoelectric actuator head at the end of the standard magnetic actuator, enabling fine-tuned tracking for speedy seek times. The Caviar Black also comes with WD’s standard No-Touch ramp loader, so the read/write head never comes in contact with the platters, increasing the drive’s lifespan.

If this is the shape of 7,200rpm drives to come, we're wetting ourselves with excitement.

All these little extras add up, and the 2TB Caviar Black offers the speediest sustained reads and writes—exceeding 112MB/s each—of any consumer magnetic hard drive we’ve ever tested. That’s 15 percent faster than the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB’s read speeds. The 1.5TB Barracuda, previously our high-capacity speed champion, couldn’t keep up in sustained writes, either—here the Caviar was nearly 30 percent faster. And thanks to the greater areal density of the Caviar drive, its random-access read and write times are just 7.6ms and 5.0ms, respectively. You won’t find faster seeks short of a VelociRaptor or solid state drive. Of course, solid state drives offer the best performance—the $370 Patriot Torqx, our Best of the Best SSD, achieves sustained reads of over 200MB/s, sustained writes of over 175MB/s, and seek times measured in the tenths of milliseconds.

The 2TB Caviar Black has an MSRP of $300, the same price that low-powered 2TB drives like the Caviar Green and Barracuda LP debuted at earlier this year. Street prices, of course, will be lower, and keep falling—the first waves of 2TB drives, the “green” ones, are already selling for as low as $200. And the Caviar Black’s sustained reads and writes trump the fastest of those green drives by 20MB/s.

The 1.5TB Barracuda held a spot on our Best of the Best list for more than a year, but now it’s been firmly supplanted—the 2TB Caviar Black is officially our favorite hard drive.

Expect 7,200rpm 2TB drives from Hitachi, Seagate, and others in the next few months as well, with the aim of high performance. But if you buy a capacity hard drive today, next week, or even half a year from now, you can’t go wrong with this Caviar Black. It has the fastest sustained read and write speeds of any consumer magnetic hard drive we’ve ever tested. It’s faster in any benchmark than all standard hard drives save the WD VelociRaptor, which still holds the edge in burst speeds and random-access times—barely. Think about that for a second: You can get VelociRaptor-busting speed and six-and-a-half times the capacity for $300. We’re sold.

Toshiba's Market Share Increases After Acquisition of Fujitsu HDDs

Bart Salisbury — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:26:13 -0500

Toshiba’s $328 million acquisition of hard drive maker Fujitsu is bearing some early fruit. The deal, made earlier this year, was an effort by Toshiba to increase it’s presence in the enterprise storage market. Toshiba acquired all of Fujitsu’s hard drive related business including design, development, manufacturing, and sales.

The result: Toshiba saw it’s global hard drive market share jump to 13.2%. Toshiba’s share of the 2.5-inch drive market rose 6.5 points, from 16.1% to 24.6%, while it’s share in the sub-2.5-inch market grew even more, 8.3 points, from 18.3% to 26.5%.

Toshiba’s future plans involve the development of solid-state drives that combine Toshiba’s NAND flash memory technology with Fujitsu’s enterprise hard drive technology.

Image Credit: Toshiba

Revenue Growth Makes Seagate More Confident about SSD Offerings

Bart Salisbury — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:00:47 -0500

Seagate’s first quarter marked a reversal for the hard drive manufacturer. While overall revenues are 12 percent lower for the first quarter of 2010 than they were for the first quarter of 2009, Seagate realized a $179 million profit, up threefold from the first quarter of 2009.

Seagate shipped 46.3 million disk drives during the quarter, up 14 percent over the previous quarter, but down some four percent from the previous year. Still, Seagate CEO Steve Luczo is a happy camper: "The company has returned to its operating model well ahead of our expectations of six months ago and now expects to sustain gross margin of 22-26 per cent.”

Seagate is confident enough in it’s financial position to start a more aggressive push on its line of Solid State Drives (SSDs). These SATA-interfaced SSDs will be targeted initially to businesses, particular in the broad volume server market. Seagate is not looking at SSDs as replacements for hard drives. In fact, Seagate will be promoting it’s new single-platter 2.5-inch drive, which sits a mere 7 mm high, for upcoming ultra-thin notebooks, such as the Dell Adamo XPS.

Image Credit: überpulse

Hitachi Unleashes Two Blazing Fast Enterprise Hard Drives

Bart Salisbury — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:35:32 -0500

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced today the availability of two new 15,000 RPM Ultrastar hard drives for Tier 0/1, mission-critical, enterprise storage applications.

The first is 147 GB Ultrastar C15K147, Hitachi’s first 15,000 RPM 2.5-inch 6 Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drive. Hitachi claims the C15K147 has 11 percent higher sequential performance and 23 percent faster seek times when compared to its 10,000 RPM version. The C15K147 uses 50 percent less power than a similar 3.5-inch drive, due to Hitachi’s patented Advanced Power Management technology.

The second is a new 600 GB Ultrastar 15K600, a fourth generation 15,000 RPM 3.5-inch drive with either a 6 Gb/s SAS or 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL) interface. Hitachi claims the 15K600, which also comes in 300 GB and 450 GB versions, to be the largest capacity 15,000 RPM 3.5-inch enterprise drive available.

Both drives come with the Trusted Computing Group’s (TCG) Enterprise A Security encryption to protect data.

The drives, each with a 5-year warranty, are now shipping. No pricing information was available.

Image Credit: Hitachi