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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

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

Dane-Elec Hops on the USB 3.0 Bandwagon

Paul Lilly — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:42:00 -0500

Now that the spec has been finalized and controllers in mass production, we expect to see a lot of USB 3.0 devices in the coming weeks and months, particularly as companies look to brand their products as the "world's first" in their respective categories. Enter Dane-Elec, who claims its new line of external hard drives is the first to take advantage of the new spec (Freecom would disagree).

Plenty of storage options abound in the So SuperSpeed line, ranging in capacity from 500GB to 2TB. The series will also include Intel-branded USB 3.0 solid state drives (SSDs) with data transfer speeds of up to 250MB/s, Dane-Elec says. At full-bore, that's almost 10 times faster than currently available USB 2.0 devices.

Pricing for the new drives will start at $45 on the lower end and work its way up to $800. Catch a glimpse of the full lineup (with prices) here.

Image Credit: Dane-Elec via devicemag.com

Buffalo to Ship First USB 3.0 HDDs within the Month

Paul Lilly — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:00:36 -0500

Buffalo, who has offices in Japan, USA, Germany, UK, Ireland, and Taiwan, is well on its way to being the first to release a USB 3.0 hard drive. On Tuesday, the networking and storage company said its HD-HU3 series of USB 3.0 external hard drives would be the "world's first" to ship to retailers, Engadget reports.

The company also plans to offer NEC's IFC-PCIE2U3 2-port PCI-Express x1 host controller because, well, what good is a USB 3.0 drive without a controller to take advantage of it?

But before we get ahead of ourselves, it appears the drives will only be available in Japan when they ship later this month. According to Engadget, the 1TB model will run about $225 after the exchange rate, while the 1.5TB will cost $284. Later on, Buffalo plans to release a 2TB model, which will sell for around $530. Add another $60 for the controller.

Image Credit: Buffalo via Engadget

Toshiba Finalizes Takover of Fujitsu Hard Drive Business

Paul Lilly — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:56:41 -0500

After months of negotiations and ironing out the details, Toshiba and Fujitsu have put their John Hancocks on the appropriate papers to make Toshiba's take over of Fujitsu's multinational hard drive design manufacturing business a done deal, eWeek.com reports.

The two sides had hoped to seal the deal by July 1, but it took longer than expected to finalize the details. Neither side has disclosed financial terms of the buyout, but according to Toshiba, the buyout propels the company to the top of the storage heap.

"Effectively, the deal makes Toshiba the world's largest full-service data storage supplier, when taking into account hard disk drives, solid-state NAND flash disks, optical disk drives, software, and everything else the company provides," Toshiba marketing executive Scott McCabe told eWeek.

Equally important, the deal pushes Toshiba into the enterprise HDD market, a sector the company has been trying to break into for years.

Image Credit: e-recruit.co.za

A-Data's Shock Resistant Portable HDD Not Afraid of Water

Paul Lilly — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:25:35 -0500

There's always some jackass at every party who still thinks it's funny to push people into the pool while fully clothed. What if they were carrying around a portable hard drive filled with family photos, work documents, government secrets, and other data that's now drenched in water and chlorine?

Yeah, that's probably never happened to anyone in the history of portable hard drives, but there's always a first. If you're lugging around A-Data's new SH93 mobile drive, you won't have to lose any sleep at night wondering what you'd do in exactly that situation. Heck, you wouldn't even need to get out of the pool right away, because according to A-Data, it's SH93 portable HDD, wrapped in a rubber-plastic mix and special cushion materials, has passed the 1M waterproof test for 30 minutes. Go ahead and practice your backstroke!

You could even drop it out of a second story window for a quick air-dry. After all, the rugged drive also passed the military standard MIL-STD-810F drop test.

Available in 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, and 640GB capacities, you'll probably never subject your portable HDD to the above abuses, but hey, it's good to know you can fumble your beer while watching the Super Bowl and not worry about frying your portable backup.

No word yet on price or availability.

Image Credit: A-Data via Legit Reviews

Toshiba Launches 500GB 7200RPM Notebook Hard Drives

Paul Lilly — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:50:33 -0500

Toshiba last Thursday unveiled a new line of performance-oriented 2.5-inch notebook drives that purport to offer the best of both worlds: Performance and capacity.

Available in 160GB, 250GB, 320GB, and 500GB capacities, Toshiba's new MKxx56GSY series promises "significant performance improvements" over the company's previous generation of 7200RPM drives. Just how much faster are they, you ask? Toshiba claims the new series offers a 23 percent boost in data transfer speeds at 1,255MB/s, while also raising energy efficiency by 28 percent.

The gains come courtesy of improved magnetic head and disk layer technology, which paved the way for an areal density of 395Gb per square inch. Other specs include a 16MB cache buffer, 25dB noise levels during both idle and seek, and 11-12ms average seek times.

Toshiba didn't announce any pricing info, but did say it plans to start mass producing the new drives in October, 2009.

Image Credit: Toshiba

Seagate Announces World's First 6Gbps SATA Hard Drive

Paul Lilly — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:51:47 -0500

Seagate today announced it has begun shipping what it claims is the "world's fastest, largest-capacity mainstream desktop hard drive" dubbed the Barracuda XT. While the Barracuda XT isn't the first 2TB hard drive to sport a 7200RPM spindle speed, it is the first one to feature a SATA 6Gb/s interface.

"Capacity and performance remain the defining attributes of hard drives for PC gamers, digital multimedia content developers, and many other customers requiring high-end systems at home and in the office," said Dave Mosley, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing at Seagate. "Seagate is meeting these requirements with the first 7200RPM desktop drive to combine 2TB of storage capacity with the fastest Serial ATA interface to date."

Seagate shoved four platters with an areal density of 368Gb per square inch inside the new Barracuda XT along with 64MB of cache for better burst performance and data transfer speeds. But it's the 6Gb/s interface that stands out on the spec sheet. Seagate says the Barracuda XT is fully backwards compatible with SATA 3Gb/s and 1.5Gb/s interfaces, but for those who want to take advantage of the additional bandwidth, a new motherboard is in order. Both Asus (P7P55D Premium) and Gigabyte (GA-P55-Extreme) have already jumped on board with 6Gb/s-capable motherboards.

Of course the biggest question on everyone's mind is are we at a point where a 6Gb/s interface is truly necessary? We spoke with Seagate's Product Marketing Director David Burks on the phone who told us that while desktop users have yet to saturate the SATA 3Gb/s interface, he expects that to change within the next two years. So in other words, don't expect double the performance over your current high-end hard drive. In the meantime, we're told that cache efficient and intensive applications are the best candidates to see an immediate benefit.

Image Credit: Seagate