Way back in May of last year, OCZ announced it was rolling out a new firmware update for its Indilinx SSD controllers, the more-than-a-mouthful "Arowana Flash Translation Layer" update. Vertex Plus owners received the swanky new software in relatively short order, but it took until now -- nearly 10 months later -- for Indilinx Barefoot-controlled SSDs to garner the same attention. They say it's better late than never, though, and initial reports claim that Arowana delivers some solid results.
Seagate has become the first hard drive maker to achieve a storage density of 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) per square inch, the company said Monday. It managed this feat using a next-generation recording technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). The company foresees 3.5-inch hard drives based on this technology reaching “extraordinary” storage capacities over the next decade. Hit the jump for more.
Western Digital would like nothing more than to finalize its proposed takeover of Hitachi's hard drive business, and to facilitate the process, WD agreed to transfer an asset package to rival Toshiba to ease concerns of regulatory agencies. The package includes equipment and intellectual property (IP) that will enable Toshiba to build and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for desktops, consumer electronics (things like DVRs), and near-line (business critical) applications.
Hitachi on Wednesday announced the shipment of more than 25 million Travelstar Z-series, 7mm hard drives for notebooks, ultra-thins, Ultrabooks, and other portable form factors that support slim 2.5-inch storage devices. It's the sort of thing companies like to brag about, but rather than gloat over record shipment numbers, Hitachi spent the bulk of its press release talking about the 7mm form factor and its new 500GB Travelstar Z7K500 drive, supposedly the industry's fastest and highest capacity single-disk 7200RPM hard drive.
If you've built or upgraded a rig recently, you probably struggled with whether to spend your money on oodles of storage (mechanical hard drive) or raw speed (solid state drive). You're not alone. Ultrabook makers find themselves in the same boat, and rather than choose one over the other, hybrid hard drives may provide the compromise between cheap(er) storage and fast performance they're looking for.
Now is not the time to be dealing with a faulty hard drive needing to be replaced, nor has it been for the past several months. That's because severe floods in Thailand in late 2011 left HDD manufacturers in bad shape, ultimately leading to a shortage of hard drives and higher costs for consumers. Relief is coming, but not for at least a couple more quarters, according to IHS iSuppli.
A new year means a fresh start, and a fresh start entails putting 2011's skyrocketing HDD prices behind us, right? Not quite. Seagate released its quarterly financial results yesterday, and although the report left investors cheering -- Seagate pocketed $3.2 billion in revenue despite last year's catastrophic floods -- things are looking a bit bleaker for end users. Seagate fully expects the hard drive shortage to continue until the end of 2012 as manufacturers struggle to catch up to consumer demand.
Blaming lackluster sales on the Thailand floods is the new black. Of course, the rising waters definitely affected washed-out HDD manufacturers with facilities in the Asian country; sales forecasts for PCs in general have also been reduced thanks to skyrocketing storage costs. Now, even AMD and Nvidia have started blaming the HDD shortage for a dip in quarterly GPU revenues. In case you're new here, we'd like to point out that GPUs don't use HDDs.
Western Digital's hard drive operations in Thailand spent part of the company's second fiscal quarter ended December 30, 2011 waterlogged after severe flooding ravaged the area, but if it was time to sink or swim, WD chose the latter. Remarkably, the hard drive maker still managed to ship 28.5 million HDD units during its second fiscal quarter, pulling in $2 billion in revenue and profiting $145 million.
Don't hold your breath waiting for hard drive prices to stabilize, not unless your lungs are large enough to sustain you for up to 12 months. It's been several months since flooding in Thailand left hard drive manufacturing equipment submerged in water, and as we kick off 2012, Hitachi warns the global hard drive industry won't completely recover until the end of 2012.
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