Computer Storage Products Reviews And News
Internal, external, hard drives or SSD -- you need somewhere to store your files, images and media. And don't forget to back-up early and often. Here we cover computer storage products of all types like Solid State Drives (SSD), good old spinning Hard Drives, external storage devices and network attached storage (NAS) devices.
While doing research for this review, we realized that we had to go back nearly three years - an eternity in the PC industry - to find the last HotHardware article on optical drives. For a comparative look at technologies, back then we were using single core Pentium 4s in Intel 865/875 boards, GeForce...
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Seagate was surprisingly late to join the small, but elite club of storage manufacturers shipping one terabyte (1TB) class hard drives. Somewhat expectedly, the first out of the gate was Hitachi, who made it to market several months beforehand with a high-density five-platter 1TB hard disk design. While Hitachi’s performance, thermals,...
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Most of you probably already know that 2.5" notebook hard drives typically aren't as big or fast as hard drives found in desktop machines. In case you aren't aware, most laptops are sold with 5400RPM hard drives that range from 60GB to 100GB. In contrast, most desktops are currently sold with 7200RPM hard drives with capacities of up to 1TB....
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End user demand for storage capacity is expanding exponentially year after year, as multimedia content, email, and document and file generation show explosive growth in this age of new media. In addition, protecting that data is becoming increasingly more critical, with investments in digital music and video collections, as well as those...
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Data. Can't live with it, can't live without it. We're sure you can all understand why we can't live without it, but you may be curious why we say we can't live with it. The problem with data is not the data itself but rather the users of that data. More accurately, we should say that the real problem (or challenge or opportunity, depending...
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For several months, the battle for the biggest consumer hard drive was only fought by Hitachi and Seagate. First, only Seagate was in it with its 750GB hard drive using perpendicular recording technology. Then, Hitachi decided to skip 750GB and go straight to 1,000GB (1TB). Seagate has announced its 1TB hard drive, but we have yet to get one...
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USB flash drives are a dime a dozen these days, right? Well, they are a little more expensive than that, but how cool is it that you can get 1GB of storage capacity that's smaller than a pack of gum for like $20-30? Pretty soon you'll see these great little gadgets in vending machines for a dollar, especially considering that everybody and...
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Home users and Small Business owners can often benefit from technologies that are normally out of reach for some general consumers. Home users may benefit from having a file server for sharing media, transferring large files between PCs, or even remote access while away. Small Office users can utilize the same features...
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Several months ago, Seagate got the PC industry's attention with the introduction of the company's first 750GB consumer hard drive. As shown within our review of the drive, the Barracuda 7200.10 combined excellent performance with unparalleled capacity and a stellar 5-yr warranty. Fast forward to today and we find ourselves...
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If we were to play a word association game with a PC enthusiast and said "Western Digital," it's likely his geek reflexes would immediately trigger and force him to reply "Raptor" before he even realized he had spoken. Western Digital makes many more storage products other than just the speed demons known as Raptors,...
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PLEXTOR ANNOUNCES BLU-RAY DISC DRIVE FOR NORTH AMERICAN MARKET Burner Records 25GB to 50GB Discs for Removable Data Storage, Computer Backup, and High-Definition Video FREMONT, Calif. - August 28, 2006 - Plextor Corp., a leading developer and manufacturer of high-performance digital media equipment, today announced...
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Seagate recently released its new Barracuda 7200.10 storage line, and with that, the company introduced the largest hard drive on the market at 750GB. While that is impressive in itself, there is more to the story. Along with bringing a new line and the highest capacity drive to the market, Seagate is also the first company to bring 3.5"...
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Although performance has been greatly enhanced over the last few years through the use of faster spindle speeds, larger caches, and newer interfaces, hard drives still tend to be a bottleneck in a typical PC. Mechanical devices, by their very nature, require time to seek the data requested, read it, and then transfer that information back...
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When most home and workstation users think of NAS (Network Attached Storage), they think of big, bulky rackmount servers packed to the brim with terabytes of hard drive space (and terabyte-style price tags to match). NAS became a buzzword in the late 90's, during the dot-com explosion, where the product was targeted at companies who were just...
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Western Digital has earned themselves quite a reputation in the Computing Enthusiast market with their line of Raptor hard drives. Originally targeted as "Enterprise class" SATA variants of what WD had historically brought to market for high-end SCSI server storage solutions, the 10K RPM Raptor...
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End user demand for increased hard drive capacity is waning somewhat, now that we can store over 200,000 typical digital photos, or 60,000 music files, for less than a $100 street price. Sixty thousand music files could play for almost six months without repeating and you'd have to stay awake for almost 70 days straight if you look...
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It used to be the case that the fastest optical drive was, by default, the best. Reducing CD burn times from 12 minutes to eight and then to six was considered significant evolutionary progress. But then a barrier was encountered, where the imperfect nature of mass-produced compact discs precluded, or at least made it much more difficult,...
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Now that the DVD format war is essentially over, thanks to the advent of Dual-Format drives, the market's next big push is towards Dual-Layer recording. One of the most noticeable differences with the next generation of DVD drives is low pricing from the start, unlike the initial DVD offerings of years past. This instant affordability...
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Choosing a recordable DVD drive has always been somewhat of a difficult task. There was a bit of initial uncertainty as some wondered which format would win out, DVD+R or DVD–R. After all, each format has its advantages. In the end, however, unlike the Beta vs VHS battles of the early 80s, this war was quelled...
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Back in mid-June we took a look at the latest offering from Plextor, the PX-712A. This drive boasted 12X DVD+R write speeds and maintained the same level of quality we've come to expect from Plextor. For years, Plextor has been in the optical drive business and for most of that time they've been the one company all others can be...
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A few years back, if you wanted the best of DVD playback and CD burning, you had to buy separate drives for each task. With the advent of combo drives hitting the mainstream market, however, users can now get top-notch CD and DVD performance from a single optical device. MSI's XA52P for example, reads DVD-ROM discs at 16x, writes...
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For years Plextor has set the standard for optical drives in both quality and features, being the first to bring major innovations to market on a number of occasions. These days, the competition fierce, with cheaper offerings available that can compete on the same performance level as slightly more expensive Plextor products. However, what...
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