Items tagged with hard disk drive
Severe floods in Thailand in late 2011 left the hard drive industry in a bad spot. It's the place where manufacturers and component suppliers come together, and when flooding occurred, HDD manufacturing came to a near halt. As a result, there was a subsequent shortage of hard drives, which itself led to higher prices that still linger today. Is there any relief in sight? The answer is yes, sort of. According to DigiTimes, global HDD production capacity is getting ready to increase to 140-145 million units in the first quarter of 2012, or about 80 percent of where it was prior to when the flooding hit. Choose your weapon: Price hikes for hard drives makes it easier to justify spending a premium...
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Seagate this week reported financial results for the quarter ended December 30, 2011, in which the company said it shipped 47 million disk drives and collected $3.2 billion in revenue. For the six months ended on the same day, Seagate says it collected revenue of $6 billion and returned $151 million to shareholders in the form of a dividend. Not too shabby when you consider severe floods in Thailand left the hard drive industry in shambles. Unfortunately for Joe Consumer, relief is hardly in sight. In a supplementary note (PDF) discussing its quarterly results, Seagate warned that the impact of the floods on the hard drive industry will be felt throughout the entire year. "Seagate believes that...
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Marvell is doing some magnificent things in the storage space lately. Hot on the heels of co-developing the "Kilimanjaro" native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform with OCZ (demonstrated via OCZ's new Z-Drive R5, which we covered the announcement here), Marvell on Monday unveiled its 88SE9230 6Gbps SATA controller powered by HyperDuo embedded processor technology. This new controller replaces Marvell's previous one and offers twice the performance, capacity, and scalability as before. What's neat about this controller is that it supports up to four ports for SSD and HDD connectivity, and if you hook up both kinds of drives, it will intelligently manage your data so that you receive up to...
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Well that was fast. A day after an anonymous source told The Wall Street Journal that Samsung was shopping its hard drive business in hopes of raising $1.5 billion, the electronics maker found a buyer. Seagate today announced a "broad strategic alignment" with Samsung that, among other things, will give Seagate control of Samsung's struggling hard drive business in a deal worth $1.375 billion (half in cash, the other half in stock). Under terms of the deal, Seagate agrees to supply disk drives to Samsung for PCs, notebooks, and consumer electronics. The deal extends beyond hard drives and also extends and expands the existing cross-license agreement between the two companies, as well as a new...
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The suits over at Samsung have an important decision to make. Should the company hang onto its hard disk drive (HDD) business even though it's losing money and hope for greener pastures on the horizon, or cut its losses by selling off the unit and using the cash to invest in other areas? Citing "a person familiar with the matter," this is what Samsung's decision makers are currently discussing, The Wall Street Journal reports. If Samsung decides to sell, it hopes to raise about $1.5 billion, though the un-named source says the company would consider low-ball offers under $1 billion. Samsung would then most likely shuttle those funds over to its memory chips and liquid crystal display (LCD) divisions....
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Seagate announces a monster hard drive! "We should expect to see 1TB hard disk drive products within 6 months." In a statement to DailyTech earlier today, the company claimed: Seagate's 1TB hard drive will be our second generation 3.5-inch hard drive to feature capacity-boosting perpendicular recording technology, and it will use fewer heads and discs than similar-capacity products we expect to see from our competitors. It is clear that fewer heads and discs, along with our proven perpendicular technology, can increase drive reliability, and also reduce operating temperatures, power consumption, noise, and weight. Read more here......
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In the market for a new 2.5-Inch Hard Drive? The folks over at X-Bit labs as put together a lengthy review of quite a few different drives. So who's got the best performing drive? Western Digital? Samsung maybe? Try Seagate. "Today we would like to continue testing high-capacity 2.5-inch hard disk drives and within our today's roundup we will introduce to you four new models from Samsung and Western Digital with 100GB+ storage capacities. We will not only compare them against one another but will also add up the results from our previous test session when we looked at the latest solutions from Seagate, Toshiba and Fujitsu." ...
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Fujitsu to Showcase Industry Leading Hard Disk Drive Technology at Storage Networking World Spring 2006 SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc., one of the world's leading suppliers of innovative computer products including hard disk drives, peripherals and biometric security solutions, today announced that it will showcase its leading 2.5" Serial ATA (SATA) and small form factor (SFF) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard disk drives inside market-ready storage systems at Storage Networking World, April 3-6, 2006, in San Diego, Calif. Given the constant change in system requirements, the need for flexibility and scalability is essential. At the event, Fujitsu will display...
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Other than increased speed and capacity, Hard Drive's have undergone few changes in their evolution over the years. This could be changing though. Today BTXFormFactor.com covers the technology behind perpendicular Hard Drive's, and delves into other future storage technology such holographic storage techniques. "The advantage is clearly one of capacity: when longitudinal magnetic particles are packed together, they take up much more space than if they were to stand upright, if they stood perpendicular to the platter. More than merely a matter of initial capacity gain, perpendicular recording technology avoids a problem which has been well known...
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