Hard drive maker Seagate said it shipped 51 million disk drives in its fiscal first quarter for 2012 ended September 30, 2011. Seagate also reported revenue of $2.8 billion, up from just shy of $2.7 billion one year prior. Net income for the quarter fell to $140 million, or 32 cents per share, down from $149 million, or 31 cents per share in the same quarter one year ago, but still outpaced Wall Street's expectations, according to an AP report.
The common line on solid state drives is that you can’t beat their speed, but the itty-bitty storage space capabilities leave a lot to be desired, at least on laptops. OCZ’s new Octane series of SSDs want to put an end to that disclaimer. The Octane line claims to be the first to cram 1 TB of SSD storage into a slim and trim 2.5-inch laptop drive, and if that wasn’t enough, its advertised read-write speeds are freakin’ fast. Maybe they should have called it the High Octane series?
Need more storage space? If you don't fancy yourself a gambler, it's a good idea to shop hard drives now rather than roll the dice that prices for mechanical storage will stay dirt cheap. The flooding in Thailand hit the hard drive industry pretty hard and it's now expected that HDD prices will go up as component costs rise and inventory gets low.
StarTech specializes in hard-to-find connectivity parts and the occasional gee-whiz device, the latter of which is what the company's new USB 3.0/eSATA to SATA Standalone 1:3 Hard Drive Duplicator Dock falls under. In case it's not obvious from the product title, this is a device that performs 1:3 sector-by-sector duplication from a single SATA drive onto three others all at the same time, and you don't need to plug it into a PC.
Ultrabook players were hoping Intel would cut them a break with a juicy 50 percent discount on Core i processors to be used in the new notebook form factor. Intel, having already earmarked millions of dollars towards marketing the Ultrabook concept, scoffed at the idea of half-off CPUs, leaving notebook makers looking for other ways to cut back costs. Hello hybrid storage.
Severe flooding in Thailand forced Western Digital to temporarily 
Think the 4TB hard drives hitting the market now are impressive? You’re right. But one group of researchers say that’s nothing compared to the storage capacities that could be unlocked using a new technique they’ve discovered. Dr Joel Yang and his team from the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering in Singapore claim that simply by adding table salt to an existing lithographic process, they have come up with a way of increasing the information density of HDDs six-fold. Basically, 6TB of info could fit onto today's 1TB platters.
Got a hankering for some massive on the run file storage that Seagate’s humongous 4TB external hard drive just can’t fix? Give it time, folks, give it time. Seagate has been upping storage capacity for its drives on a pretty regular basis, and even though that 4TB drive debuted just last month, a Middle Eastern salesman for Seagate has hinted that a 5TB model will be unveiled as early as next January.
It’s a bad time to be one of the top two hard drive manufacturers in the world right now. Both Seagate and Western Digital maintain large manufacturing facilities in Thailand, which is currently battling extreme flooding that has sent people fleeing from their homes and devastated the nation’s infrastructure. Yesterday, Western Digital halted all production at its Bangkok-area facilities, and today, Seagate said that local supply chain issues caused by the flooding will probably affect its production schedule as well.
Is your smart TV too dumb to recognize a 3TB hard drive? You have three choices: Buy a smarter, um, smart TV, invest in a smaller hard drive that won't confuzzle your TV set, or flip the switch on Buffalo's new HD-ALCTU2/V external hard drive to drop from 3TB to 2TB or 1TB, depending on what your not-so-smarty pants TV can handle. It's a pretty cool concept, and one that's not marred by lost storage space should you have to drop down to a lower capacity. Hit the jump to find out why.
-
Technology
Entertainment
-
Music
-
Creative
Sport & Auto
- About Future
- Jobs
- News
- Advertising
- Digital Future
- Privacy Policy
- Cookies Policy
- Terms & Conditions
- Shop
- Investor Relations
- Contact Future
© Future US, Inc. 4000 Shoreline Court, Suite 400, South San Francisco, California, 94080. All Rights Reserved.