Posted 10/03/08 at 04:05:59 PM by Paul Lilly

Western Digital's making a plea to those who are concerned about the environment yet still need oodles of hard drive space. The company's new 1TB Caviar Green drive delivers on both fronts. WD stuffs three 333GB platters in its new drive along with a beefy 32MB of cache, the most currently available on any consumer desktop drive. The company says the platter density and large cache help reduce the power draw by up to 20 percent while increasing performance by 10 percent.

But it's the performance that will have power users feeling the wrong kind of green. The new Caviar checks in with a poky 5400RPM spindle speed, trading off raw performance for noise management and power savings. Price becomes another trade off with WD setting the MSRP to $219, a good chunk higher than what many other 1TB drives are commanding on Newegg. Whether or not the new Green Caviar falls more in line with the competition on the street remains to be seen.

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Posted 09/11/08 at 01:56:09 PM by Paul Lilly

Thanks to Toshiba, geeks will soon have reason to try and get on Santa's 'Good' list this holiday shopping season. The company's Storage Device Division  (SDD) today announced what it claims is the world's first dual-platter 240GB 1.8-inch hard drive for use in portable media players, camcorders, and other gadgets. Toshiba also introduced a single-platter 120GB model.

The two new PATA hard drives take areal density up to an impressive 344 gigabits-per-square-inch. Toshiba said the feat was made possible using its fourth-generation perpendicular magnetic recording technology, which bodes well for future devices utilizing the 1.8-inch form factor.

In addition to offering a higher capacity, Toshiba said its 240GB drive comes optimized for power performance and offers a 33 percent overall improvement in energy consumption efficiency when compared to the company's previous generation two-platter 160GB drive.

No word yet on pricing or specific availability, though Toshiba did say its "new 1.8-inch HDDs will be incorporated into CE and mobile PC products shipping this holiday season."

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storage, toshiba, Hard Drive, HDD, consumer electronics, portable media player, 240GB

Posted 09/09/08 at 02:14:55 AM by Pulkit Chandna

SSDs with a 64GB storage capacity fetched close to a grand last year. But their outrageous prices have become subdued with the passage of time. Now, if you act quickly, OCZ’s brand new Core V2 OCZSSD2-2C60G 2.5” 60GB SSD could be yours for $240 – approximately $4/GB. The SSD boasts read speeds of 170MB/sec and write speeds of 98MB/sec. It also features a built-in USB 2.0 port for firmware updates, and can serve as a replacement for your notebook’s HDD.

The OCZSSD2-2C60G SSD is only available on NewEgg at the moment. Although the actual price of this SSD is supposed to be $299, OCZ is offering a sizable rebate worth $60 under an offer that will last until 18th September, 2008. In fact, the rebate is applicable on other OCZ SSD’s as well.

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notebook, storage, HDD, ocz, hardware, Newegg, ssd, online store, cheap, discount

Posted 08/27/08 at 12:16:03 PM by Paul Lilly

Western Digital today announced the addition of 750GB and 1TB RE3 SATA hard drives to its enterprise lineup. The new drives boast a beefy 32MB cache buffer, enhanced vibration and shock tolerance, and what the company claims are "new electronics to increase performance approximately 20 percent and by as much as 60 percent in high-vibration environments."

Rounding out the feature-set are a several marketing buzzwords, including StableTrac (reduces system-induced vibration and stabilizes platters), dual processor (better processing power), RAFF technology (corrects linear and rotational vibrations), IntelliSeek technology (calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration), and several more.

Western Digital has the MSRP on the 750GB and 1TB models at $199 and $249 respectively. The drives are available now and carry a five-year limited warranty.

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Posted 08/12/08 at 09:09:31 AM by Paul Lilly

Despite falling hard drive prices, a weakened dollar, and other economic woes, Western Digital managed to post revenue of $8.1 billion and an operating income of $1.0 billion for fiscal year 2008. That represents a full-year revenue increase of 48 percent. It gets even better for the hard drive maker, who also posted a net income of $867 million, or $3.84 per share, marking a whopping 54 percent jump from one year ago.

In the report, Western Digital says that 63 percent of Q4 revenue came from non-desktop sources, while 37 percent came from hard drives configured into desktop PCs. By contrast, those numbers sat at 46 and 54 percent respectively one year ago.

"Fiscal 2008 was an outstanding year for WD, capped off with the strong fourth-quarter financial performance," said John Coyne, president and CEO. "Our outstanding financial performance demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of the business model that we have built and refined over the last several years, underpinned by our industry leading cost structure."

WD's financial performance is also indicative of of the growing mobile market, in which the company shipped 11.7 million 2.5-inch mobile drives.

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Posted 08/06/08 at 01:15:52 PM by Paul Lilly

Notebook hard drives have a ways to go before catching up to their desktop brethren in terms of storage capacity, and Samsung takes them one step closer. With the release of Samsung's new Spintpoint M6 500GB 2.5-inch hard drive, the company can lay claim to offering the world's highest capacity HDD for notebooks.

Samsung stuffed three 167GB platters into the 9.5mm high Spinpoint, and combined with the perpendicular magnetic recording technology, the company says its new drive can store 160,000 digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies, or 60 hours of high definition video images. 

With a 5400RPM spindle speed and 8MB of cache, the new drive looks to focus more on storage space and reliability than all-out performance, though it does sport a 3.0Gbps SATA interface. Other performance specifications include

• 12ms average seek
• 5.6ms average latency
• 860 Mbits/s data transfer rate (to/from buffer)
• 300 MB/s data transfer rate (to/from host)
• 600,000 controlled ramp load/unload

At standby, Samsung says its new Spinpoint will sip just .25W, and typically 2.3W during read/write operations. MSRP has been set to $299.

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mobile, notebook, laptop, samsung, Hard Drive, HDD, spinpoint m6, 500GB, 2.5

Posted 08/01/08 at 11:53:28 AM by Paul Lilly

The divide between desktop computer and home theater PCs continues to shrink, fueling the demand for both larger and quieter hard drives. With this in mind, Hitachi announces two new hard drives the company claims will "deliver low power and quiet acoustics for digital video applications."

CinemaStar 7K1000.B

The CinemaStar 7K1000.B comes in capacities ranging from 160GB on up to 1TB and utilizes Hitachi's CoolSpin technology. Drives equipped with CoolSpin use a motor speed Hitachi says makes it the "industry's quietest, most energy-efficient 3.5 inch hard drives" on the market.

Hit the jump to learn more about the new CinemaStar hard drives and see one of the trippiest videos ever!

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Posted 07/24/08 at 10:39:34 AM by Paul Lilly

While the rest of the computing world inexplicably refuses to see a market for performance hard drives spinning faster than 7,200RPM, Western Digital is finding new segments for its flagship 10,000RPM Velociraptor. The company announced today it's shrinking the stupid-fast drive down to a 2.5-inch form factor for use in blade servers and 1U and 2U servers.

"WD is bringing to enterprise customers what PC enthusiasts already appreciate about the WD Velociraptor: a combination of high performance and high capacity for hard drive storage," said John Rydning, IDC's research director for hard disk drives.

Because server environments tend to be more mission critical than the average desktop, Western Digital claims its new enterprise model will be up to the job with the "highest available reliability rating of any SATA drive at 1.4 million hours MTBF."

The shrunken Velociraptor will come in both 300GB and 150GB capacities. Will anyone else join them?

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server, Hard Drive, Western Digital, HDD, velociraptor, wd, build a pc, 10K, 10, 000, rpm, enterprise