There’s no denying that SSDs are blazing fast and an all-around pleasure to have in your system, but for many folks, being limited to 128GB or 256GB just isn’t going to cut it. Enter Crucial: today, the memory maker announced the “Adrenaline Solid State Cache Solution,” which hopes to solve that problem (as the name implies). It could’ve been called the “SSD Band-Aid;” it’s basically an itty-bitty SSD that teams up with your HDD to deliver quick access speeds while keeping the high storage capabilities of traditional drives intact.
Hard drive makers put most of their eggs in a single basket by building the bulk of their manufacturing facilities in a flood prone section of Thailand, and that strategy came back to bite them on the backside when severe floods earlier this year dismantled their operations. As hard drive makers look to get back on track, they're coming up with various strategies to ensure no more monetary losses.
Seagate on Monday officially closed the deal to acquire the hard disk drive (HDD) business of Samsung for $1.4 billion, a transaction that was first announced in April 2011. Under terms of the agreement, Seagate gains select elements of Samsung's HDD division, including assets, infrastructure, and employees. Among the assets is Samsung's M8 product line of high-capacity, 2.5-inch HDDs.
After making waves by 
Effects of the hard drive shortage resulting from major flooding in Thailand earlier this year continue to reverberate throughout the technology industry. Even Intel, the world's largest chip maker, isn't immune to to it all, and in fact the Santa Clara outfit warned today that its fourth quarter results are expected to be below the company's previous outlook.
Now is a pretty bad time to be shopping for a mechanical hard drive. Prices are generally higher than what they were a couple of months ago, sometimes significantly so, due to the flooding in Thailand. But it's a temporary problem and eventually the storage sector will settle down. So, onward with innovation, and kudos to Hitachi for coming out with a 4TB internal HDD as part of its Deskstar line.
It seems like every time we touch on the topic of hard drives lately, it's always bad news related to the recent flooding in Thailand. Ready for a change of pace? Good, because that's what you're getting today. Instead of news of more shortages and rising prices, we've now learned that hard drive volumes in the first quarter of 2012 will increase by several million units, decreasing the supply gap "significantly."
Hard drive prices aren't about to return to pre-flood levels, but they may gravitate towards that point sooner than some analysts are expecting. Western Digital, one of the HDD makers hit hard by the recent flooding in Thailand, said it has made "substantial progress" in getting its overseas operations partially up and running again, and is now producing hard drives at one of its buildings in Bang Pa-in (BPI), Thailand a week ahead of internal schedules.
Seagate has started shipping the second generation of its Momentus XT, a solid state hybrid drive aimed at both consumer and commercial laptop applications, and the company's fastest driver ever for personal computers, Seagate says. Like the previous generation Momentus XT, this second gen drive moves frequently accessed data to a small chunk of solid state memory for faster access.
After peering into its crystal ball, the market psychics at Kingston firmly believe that by this time next year, you're likely to choose a solid state drive over a mechanical hard drive. NAND flash memory prices are coming down, and while it's been slow going, overall pricing for SSDs will finally reach the point where they're able to attract would-be HDD buyers.
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