Toshiba this week announced its first 2.5-inch hard drive series to offer up to 1TB of storage in the industry standard 9.5mm high form factor. The company's new MQ01ABD series uses 500GB platter technology and is available in capacities ranging from 1TB down to 250GB. This isn't the first drive to offer 1TB in a standard notebook form factor, but according to Toshiba, its flagship mobile HDD offers an industry leading areal density of 744Gb/in2, an increase in the quantity of data stored per square inch by over 37 percent compared to prior 2.5-inch models.
We've heard it before; solid state drives are the wave of the future. Spinning platters and read/write heads are so, like, 2008. In the recent weeks, we've heard about pricing woes from DRAM manufacturers that could well lead to NAND making strides in the memory market. SanDisk's beating the SSD drum, too. The company's just released the consumer-orientated Ultra SSD, which it says can replace traditional HDDs and extend the life of your poor beaten-down old PC.
It used to be that if you were looking to put together a high end rig with as few compromises as possibles, you rolled with a Western Digital Velociraptor. Today enthusiasts are more likely to opt for a solid state drive when looking to address the storage bottleneck at any cost, but this shift in power hasn't yet rendered the Velociraptor extinct (or if it has, somebody forget to tell Western Digital).
We're not going to ask for a show of hands on this one; if you own an Apple iMac, that's your business. But as a courtesy to our readers who like to play the field, even when doing so requires dancing on the dark side, we want you to be aware of a recall that affects "a very small number" of Seagate brand 1TB hard drives found in 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMac systems.
Don't let anyone fool you into thinking the hard drive market is tanking. If that were the case, Seagate's fiscal quarter and year-end 2011 financial results would look decidedly different, but as it stands, the company claims to have shipped 52 million drives. Revenue for the quarter reached $2.9 billion with net income of $119 million.
It wasn't that long ago the largest notebook hard drive you could buy was 500GB. Now here comes Western Digital with its newly announced WD Scorpio Blue 1TB hard drive for mainstream notebooks, and it isn't even the first of its kind. It is, however, one of just two 1TB hard drives built around the industry standard 9.5mm, 2.5-inch form factor (Samsung's Spinpoint M8 being the other) instead of the 12.5mm thickness standard, which means it's compatible with nearly all existing laptops.
Alas, poor Hitachi; we knew him well, Horatio. Hitachi’s Global Storage division might have been gobbled up by Western Digital, but it’s still putting out product, at least for now. Hitachi’s latest addition to the Deskstar line is a five-platter, 3TB, 7,200rpm drive with 64MB of cache and a 6Gb/s SATA interface. Yeah, we can deal with that.
The Buffalo MiniStation Plus USB 3.0 external hard drive, which the company announced last month, is now shipping. Housed inside a shockproof chassis, the USB 3.0-enabled MiniStation Plus is currently available in two capacities and three colors. Hit the jump to know more about Buffalo’s latest portable storage solution.
We're constantly preaching the importance of backing up data as a preventative measure against Murphy's Law. Hard drives fail, and while it never happens at a convenient time, having backups in place is the difference between yelling out a string of obscenities and punching a hole in the wall, or muttering a few curse words under your breath before moving on. LaCie wants to help you take the latter route with its new CloudBox, a hybrid storage system that backs up your files in two locations.
Our storage needs aren't shrinking by any means. Games are getting bigger, our music and movies collection keeps growing, we have media players, NAS boxes, and, well, you get the idea. Despite solid state drives taking over as the sexy boot option, we suspect the market for beefy and affordable hard drives will stick around for a long time yet. That said, if you're in need of more storage, you might be better served by pulling the trigger now rather than waiting until the last minute.
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