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.
As it turns out, Western Digital – despite its name – manufactures a lot of its HDDs in the Eastern hemisphere, namely Thailand and Malaysia. Severe flooding in Thailand has led the company to close its Bangkok facilities for an undetermined amount of time in order to protect the safety of its workers and factories – which could possibly affect HDD stocks in the next quarter.
Mechanical drives might be a bit on the slow side, but the price per GB still makes them king among digital packrats. The technology behind today’s 2 & 3TB drives is currently known as perpendicular magnetic recording, but recently we seem to have hit a wall. Manufacturers are already hard at work on 4 platter-4TB drives, but were starting to reach the limitations of what’s possible. Luckily a recent collaboration by the remaining mechanical drive makers has begun to pay off, and the Storage Technology Alliance believes it has discovered a way to use 
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