Hard drive makers living high on the hog will find themselves in a bit of rut in the second half of 2010, which sources say is the result of Europe's ongoing bond crisis. Both third and fourth quarter HDD shipments are now expected to be 5-10 percent lower than originally forecast.

This is the same time period that's traditionally been considered the peak season for the IT industry, but hard drive makers are already starting to feel the pinch. Citing a research firm's figures, shipments once expected to reach 165 million units in the second quarter have now been reduced to 152-155 million.

If there's a silver lining, it's that 2010 has been particularly strong overall. Even though none of the HDD players are likely to reach their original shipment goals for the second half of 2010, shipments for the entire year should still end up seeing growth compared to 2009.

Toshiba said it has begun volume shipments of its MBF family of enterprise hard drives, the same units the company announced back in February. Though it has taken some four months to ramp up production, Toshiba's MBF drives remain the industry's highest-capacity, small form factor enterprise HDDs yet available.

"Toshiba’s MBF series enterprise-class drives possess a range of technological advancements that enable us to deliver flexible computing systems targeted to the exacting needs of our customers," said Mike Turricchi, director of product management, NCS Technologies, which designs solutions for the military, government, and commercial market sectors. "MBF series drives not only allow us to engineer systems with greater storage density to support storage consolidation, but the design characteristics of 2.5-inch drives also mean that they operate more efficiently in a broad range of demanding temperature, vibration, shock, and altitude conditions. In addition to storage systems based in branch offices and data centers, our customers rely on these drives for solutions used in field, mobile, aviation, marine, and seismic environments."

The MBF drives come in 300GB, 450GB, and 600GB capacities with each one featuring a media transfer rate of up to 216MB/s. Each drive also comes with 16MB of cache, a slightly faster than 10,000 RPM, SAS 2.0 interface, 6Gb/s interface, and weigh 220g or less, Toshiba says. 

Imagine running over a traditional hard drive with a steam roller and you have a pretty good idea of what Hitachi's new Z-Series ultra thin HDDs look like. Hitachi's billing these as the industry's highest capacity and fastest 7mm drives on the planet, and to the best of our knowledge, they're right.

Capacities are offered up to 320GB and are aimed at a variety of applications, everything from laptops and handhelds to PVRs and blade servers, Hitachi says. Hitachi wants these to replace today's standard 2.5-inch, 9.5mm drives and to help do that, each 7mm drives features common connectors and common mounting points.

"As a leading personal computing company, we are constantly evaluating and offering new designs and technologies that make computing more enjoyable and affordable for our customers," said Wentao Yang, vice president, Global Procurement, Lenovo Group. "Hitachi’s 7mm product family represents important advancements for the industry. We look forward to continuing our relationship with Hitachi and working together to innovate and take the computing landscape to newer smaller heights."

You'll find the Z-Series ported over to three product lines, including the Travelstar Z7K320 Family (7200RPM, 16MB cache, SATA 3Gb/s), Travelstar Z5K320 Family (5400RPM, 8MB cache, SATA 3Gb/s), and CinemaStar Z5K320 for A/V streaming devices (5400RPM, 8MB cache, SATA 3Gb/s).

Travelstar drives will begin shipping in volume in July, with the CinemaStar to follow suit in August.

Wouldn't it be great if you could combine the speed of a flash-based drive with the capacity of a mechanical hard drive? Why yes, it would be, but don't get your hopes up too high. It's true Seagate is preparing a new series of hybrid drives that will combine NAND flash memory with HDD platters, but these aren't taking the extremes of either technology and meshing them into a single unit.

Instead, the largest drive will check in at 500GB, according Fudzilla. The other two capacities Seagate plans to offer for its upcoming Momentus XT line will be 320GB and 250GB. All three drives will also come equipped with 4GB of fast SLC NAND flash memory, as well as a 32MB cache buffer, but they'll be limited to SATA Gbps.

It's defeintely an intriguing idea as the mainstream market waits for SSD pricing to approach pedestrian levels, but we'd like to see some hybrid models on tap with more of a performance punch and storage space.

No word yet on US pricing or availability, but after the exchange rate, it looks like these hybrid drives will sell for between $115 to $160.