Posted 11/05/09 at 01:30:52 PM by Paul Lilly

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.

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Posted 11/03/09 at 09:07:33 PM by Ryan Whitwam

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.

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Posted 10/26/09 at 08:39:46 AM by Paul Lilly

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.

Hit the jump to find out why even the study's authors were surprised at their findings.

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Posted 10/22/09 at 10:30:00 PM by Nathan Edwards

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.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

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Posted 10/22/09 at 07:26:13 PM by Bart Salisbury

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.

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Posted 10/21/09 at 04:00:47 PM by Bart Salisbury

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.

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Posted 10/13/09 at 02:35:32 PM by Bart Salisbury

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.

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Posted 10/08/09 at 01:00:36 PM by Paul Lilly

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.

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