Posted 04/27/09 at 09:44:28 AM by Paul Lilly

Hold the boat, Blu-ray, a breakthrough in optical storage technology could prove to be game changing, according to General Electric. GE today announced that its researchers have successfully demonstrated a threshold microholographic storage material they say can support 500GB of storage capacity in a standard DVD-sized disc. That breaks down to about 20 times the storage capacity of a standard Blu-ray disc and is equivalent to 100 regular DVDs, the company says.

"GE’s breakthrough is a huge step toward bringing our next generation holographic storage technology to the everyday consumer," said Brian Lawrence, who leads GE’s Holographic Storage program. "Because GE’s micro-holographic discs could essentially be read and played using similar optics to those found in standard Blu-ray players, our technology will pave the way for cost-effective, robust and reliable holographic drives that could be in every home."

GE's holographic storage technology makes use of the entire volume of the disc material rather than just the surface. Three-dimensional patterns represent bits of information, a process GE has been working on for over six years but has only just now turned a corner with the latest breakthrough.

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Posted 01/20/09 at 05:24:40 PM by Mark Edward Soper

As our own Paul Lilly's been telling us recently, many Seagate hard disks have been afflicted by firmware woes. Unfortunately, Seagate's first attempt to fix the problem wound up turning working drives into high-tech bricks.

As it turns out, both Seagate and Maxtor-brand SATA drives can be affected by firmware problems. So, how can you find out exactly which models may be on the naughty list and when Seagate has a firmware fix that's ready for prime time? Join us after the jump for details.

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Posted 01/14/09 at 08:44:14 AM by Mark Edward Soper

Tom's Hardware reports that Western Digital will be first to market with a 2TB drive. The WD20EADS is a part of WD's GreenPower series, and uses four 500GB platters.  Other specs include 32MB of cache and a seek time of 8.9ms.

Although Tom's Hardware reports that the drive will run at 5400RPM or 7200RPM, you should take the claim of 7200RPM with a grain of salt until we get our hands on actual hardware for testing. As this analysis from SilentPC on the first GreenPower drive indicates, GreenPower drives normally run at the slower speed.

How much will the first 2TB drive set you back? Around $210-240, rumors say, but we'll all know for sure when the drive hits retail shelves later this week. Will you be lining up for the first 2TB drive, or would you rather have a couple of 1TB drives? Join us after the break and sound off.

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Posted 01/14/09 at 08:21:25 AM by Pulkit Chandna

The world’s largest manufacturer of hard-disk drives took everyone by surprise on Monday when it announced that it had replaced two of its topmost executives, CEO William Watkins and COO Dave Wickersham.

Chairman Stephen Luczo, who was CEO prior to Watkins’ appointment to the post, is the new CEO. As for Wickersham’s replacement, Seagate’s executive vice president and CTO Robert Whitmore will be stepping into his shoes.

The bad news doesn’t stop there: the company has announced that it is going to relieve 800 of its US-based employees from their duties. Furthermore, the company had lowered its fourth-quarter guidance sometime back.

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Posted 01/06/09 at 07:28:40 PM by Mark Edward Soper

One-Terabyte drives are no longer unusual, but until now, drive vendors have needed three or more platters to hit the magic 1TB goal. Not any more.

Seagate is now shipping the first 1TB hard disk to get the job done with just two platters: the Barracuda 7200.12. It jams 320 Gigabits of storage per square inch into each platter to achieve its 500GB per platter capacity. It uses a 3Gbps SATA interface and a 32MB cache to move your data around.

The drive is also available in 750GB (32MB cache) and 500GB (16MB cache) capacities. No word on official pricing yet on the 1TB big guy, but some websites are showing the 500GB model selling for about the same price as its predecessor, the Barracuda 7200.11 (32MB cache).

What do you think about getting the same capacity with fewer platters? Join us after the jump and sound off. 

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Posted 12/17/08 at 04:19:39 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Bare (aka "OEM") hard disk drives have always been good deals for tech-savvy shoppers (aka the typical Maximum PC reader) - buy a drive in an anti-static bag, provide your own mounting screws, download a disk management utility from the vendor's website, and you can save a lot of greenbacks, without a sacrifice in warranty coverage.

That's about to change. Channel Register reports that Seagate's bare drives for desktop and laptop computers are about to take a 2-year cut in warranty coverage. Starting January 3, 2009, bare drives will have 3-year limited warranties, compared to the current 5-year limited warranty.  Seagate says that they'll use the ship-to-dealers date of January 3, 2009 and beyond to calculate warranty terms, but I'd recommend holding on to your sales receipt, especially if you're buying a last-minute Christmas gift or grabbing an after-Christmas sale.

To find out why Seagate is reducing its bare drive warranty period, and to see how it stacks up to its competitors, join us after the jump.

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Posted 10/13/08 at 10:45:40 PM by Mark Edward Soper

SSDs are the hottest trend in storage, but how long will an SSD last? Right now,there's no industry standard for longevity or reliability. However, Cnet reports that Seagate and JEDEC are working together to establish a standards-based method for determining those factors.

Seagate isn't alone in working with JEDEC, the standards body responsible for  standards in the solid-state industry. Earlier this year, X-bit Labs reported that JEDEC's JC-64.8 committee, which is responsible for developing SSD standards for embedded and removable storage, is being co-chaired by Micron Technologies and Seagate.

Micron brings its experience in memory technologies, while Seagate brings its experience in drive reliability to the endeavor. As Cnet reports:

Seagate says it can tap into the decades of expertise it has in error correction. "Some of the skills we've picked up along the way, to deal with imperfect media, has applicability to dealing with imperfect media on NAND."

Seagate's own SSDs won't hit the market until 2009, but hopefully its work with JEDEC to set standards for reliability will help make all SSDs more reliable.

So, what do you think? Will Seagate's presence on the JEDEC committee responsible for SSD standards make this latecomer to SSDs the one to trust when product finally hits the street? Or, are you ready to use SSDs right now? Join us after the jump for your chance to sound off.

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Posted 09/22/08 at 04:58:03 PM by Mark Edward Soper

While SSDs are getting plenty of attention from us (and everyone else) these days, it's way too early to shovel the dirt over the classic spinning-disk hard disk drive technology, eWeek suggests. You already know a couple of reasons: capacity and price per GB.

While 2.5-inch drives from Western Digital and Seagate broke the 500GB barrier last week, the biggest SSDs on the portable market are the 128GB Samsung drives and the forthcoming 160GB SSDs from Intel. SSDs don't come cheap, either: expect to pay $500-600 more for a laptop with an SSD onboard compared with a standard hard disk.

However, even if you can afford to give up some storage capaciy and a lot more cash, there are other reasons to think twice before turning your existing hard disk drive into a paperweight. At last week's DiskCon 2008 storage conference, experts cited by eWeek pointed out that NAND flash memory, the most common type of flash memory in use today, drops in performance with use, and that data retention is much shorter than with traditional disk drives.

So who's really excited about SSDs? Corporate data centers. In one case study described at DiskCon, a data center replaced hard disks with SSDs. The installation used one SSD for read, the other for write, and realized a 10x improvement in read/write speed and 5x less power consumption.

So, how do you feel about SSDs? Are you ready to pony up the extra dough and trade off some capacity to give SSDs a try today, or are you waiting until SSDs' price per GB, capacity and long-term behavior more closely mirror what hard disks provide today? See us after the jump for your chance to put in your feedback.

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