Items tagged with Hard drives
Spinning platters have served the storage scene well over the years, and even as faster (and pricier) solid state drives with no moving parts have gained considerable traction, the good old fashioned mechanical HDD is still a popular option for bulk storage chores. The price per gigabyte just can't be beat. That will probably be true for a long while to come, especially if new research into a graphene coating bears fruit. Researchers at the University of Cambridge claim it could enable ultra-high density HDDs that are 10 times more capacious than today's models. Such a massive increase would be an incredible development for a storage medium that first appeared around 70 years ago, in the 1950s....
Read more...
Remember when storage was measured in megabytes? Yeah, those days are (thankfully) long behind us, as we've raced past gigabytes and into the terabyte era. Maybe petabyte storage will be the norm one day. In the here and now, though, Western Digital just upped the ante by introducing two new high-capacity hard drives for enterprise and hyperscale cloud customers. One is the 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 and the other is the 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550. Both new models represent WD's first commercial implementation of energy-assisted magnetic recording technology at scale, to deliver higher area density and storage efficiency. They are also durable and reliable, according to WD (which is always a good thing...
Read more...
Seagate is flexing its mechanical hard drive line like its 1999, only with much larger capacities for the modern era. Sure, many of us have moved on to solid state drives, at least for our primary storage. But there is still a market for good old fashioned HDDs. Several markets, actually, and Seagate hopes to serve them all with several new 14 terabyte models. The storage maker updated its entire range of HDDs with new 14TB models, including its IronWolf and IronWolf Pro for network attached storage (NAS) appliances, BarraCuda Pro for consumer desktops, SkyHawk for surveillance applications, and Exos X14 for hyperscale data centers. In other words, there's a 14TB model for everyone. "Data protection,...
Read more...
In April 2013, cloud storage provider Backblaze kicked off what would immediately become a tradition. Each year, the company analyzes an incredible amount of data collected over the course of the year to give the rest of us an impression on which hard drive vendors come out ahead, and which fall behind. In other words, it's a polite way of analyzing which vendor "is more likely to lose your data". In Q4 of last year, Backblaze had 91,243 hard drives in operation, a number which excludes boot drives and a few others that couldn't meet the company's criteria of having at least 45 drives of one model in use during the period monitored (to give more accuracy to the results). As seen in the table...
Read more...
One of the worst sounds in the world is that awful grinding noise associated with a failing hard drive, followed by a series of clicks. It typically indicates HDD failure is imminent and that you better backup your important data, if it's not too late already. Hey, it happens, but is bum luck solely to blame? Maybe not—the cloud backup specialists at Backblaze just released their HDD reliability report for the second quarter of 2016, and in it are initial (and promising) stats for newly introduced 8TB models. Backblaze provides one of the few meaningful reports on HDD reliability. That's important because if you ask for advice on the web, you'll be met with anecdotal evidence about why a particular...
Read more...
There's an Apple parody that jokingly proclaims "Gold is best!" in reference to the gold colored iPhone handsets, but for Western Digital, gold really does represent the top of the line. WD Gold that is, a series of datacenter hard drives introduced in April that now boasts a brand new 10-terabyte capacity option (WD101KRYZ), Western Digital announced today. That's a 25 percent bump in capacity over the previous top option from the WD Gold line, an 8TB model (WD8002FRY2). And like that and the 6TB (WD600FRYZ) and 4TB (WD4002FYYZ) models comprising the WD Gold line, the new 10TB capacity HDD is a 3.5-inch drive with a SATA 6Gbps interface and 7,200 RPM spindle speed, along with support for Native...
Read more...
We've all misplaced things—keys, smartphone, USB flash drive—but have you ever lost half a dozen hard drives? Healthcare provider Centene Corporation did and it's currently conducting an "ongoing comprehensive internal search" for the missing HDDs, the company announced this week. Centene discovered it was six hard drives short when auditing the inventory of its information technology assets in preparation for a data project. No small thing, the HDDs contain sensitive information of around 950,000 patients, including names, addresses, dates of birth, social security numbers, member ID numbers, and health information. "Centene takes the privacy and security of our members' information seriously,"...
Read more...
As laptops and ultrabooks get thinner, even 9.5mm-thick mobile hard drives are starting to look bulky. Western Digital is stepping up with a new 1TB WD Blue hard drive, which comes in at a mere 7mm thick. The 2.5-inch drive supports standard 9.5mm drive bays in today’s laptops, but it’s also thin enough to accommodate future, compact notebooks. WD's Blue line has even thinner drives, albeit at lower capacities. “Users with large portfolios of content no longer need to sacrifice capacity when buying an Ultrabook or upgrading to a thin and light notebook,” said Matt Rutledge, Vice President and General Manager for client storage products at Western Digital. The 1TB WD Blue...
Read more...
Both analysts and Apple are warning that the price of hard drives, which has already been creeping upwards the past few weeks, could jump significantly in Q4 due to catastrophic floods taking place in Thailand. During Apple's conference call this week, CEO Tim Cook said: ""Like many others, we source many components from Thailand and have multiple factories that supply these components. There are several factories that are currently not operable, and the recovery timeline for these factories is not known at this point... We would say that our primary exposure is on the Mac...I'm virtually certain there will be an overall industry shortage of disk drives as a result of the disaster." Industry...
Read more...
Chalk this one up on the "Who didn't see it coming" meter. Prices for neodymiumoxide and europium oxide have dropped recently, due to falling demand in European and US markets. In response, Baotou Steel, China's largest rare earth producer (China recently consolidated the rare earth production of multiple companies in Inner Mongolia) has announced that it's suspending all operation in a bid to "balance supply and demand." Prices on the two metals have tumbled roughly 35 percent in recent months; Baotou believes a total one month shut down will apparently redress the situation. China has aggressively nationalized rare earth production in recent years; the WTO ruled in July that the country's actions,...
Read more...
Seagate on Wednesday provided an update on its operations in Thailand following severe flooding that has ravaged the region. The hard drive maker said all of its factories in Thailand are operational and there aren't any logistical issues with employees getting to work, but it's not business as usual. "The hard disk drive component supply chain is being disrupted and it is expected that certain components in the supply chain will be constrained," Seagate said in a statement. "Given the volatility of the situation it is unclear what the magnitude of the supply chain disruption will be to Seagate’s hard disk drive output from its Thailand operations. "Seagate is actively managing its supply...
Read more...
Multiple manufacturers in the IT industry have been keeping a wary eye on China's decision to cut back on rare earth exports and the impact it may have on component prices. An article from DigiTimes suggests consumers will see that decision hit the hard drive industry this year, with HDD prices trending upwards an estimated 5-10 percent depending on capacity. Although rare earth magnets are only a small part of a hard drive's total cost, China cut exports last year by 40 percent, which drove pricing for these particular components up an estimated 20-30x. At that point, a rare earth component that originally cost 25 cents is suddenly $5—and given how cheap hard drives have become, that translates...
Read more...
What's that you say, there's a weakening in demand for PCs? Blame it on the tablets! Netbook sales are slowing down too? Darn you, iPad! Slumping hard drive sales? It has to be due to slates and their oh-so-fancy solid state storage! Suffering from jock itch? TMI dude, and for the record, that's one thing you can't blame on tablets; we should have stopped at hard drives. That's right, according to market research firm IHS iSuppli, the emerging tablet market is even having an impact on hard disk drive (HDD) sales. Not that you should feel sorry for HDD makers. IHS iSuppli says revenue for computer HDDs is projected to reach $28.1 billion in 2011, which is 4.1 higher than the $27 billion in 2010,...
Read more...
Mac Davis once sang about the difficulties of being humble, but Davis never shipped out 1.5 BILLION hard drives. Seagate has, reaching the milestone on October 20, 2010, and somehow managed to keep mum about it for nearly an entire month. But what's most impressive about the feat is Seagate skyrocketed to the 1.5 billion threshold just 2 and a half years after shipping its 1 billionth drive. According to Seagate's numbers, 1.5 billion hard drives equates to about 118.5 million terabytes capable of storing 237 billion hours of digital video or 1.8 trillion hours of music. But that's enough about this milestone, what's next for Seagate? "At this rate, the 2 billion drives milestone will happen...
Read more...
Seagate this week announced what it claims are the industry's highest-capacity, 4-bay and 2-bay NAS boxes (BlackArmor NAS 440 and 220) capable of scaling up to 12TB. Naturally these are aimed at small businesses, but hey, cost considerations aside, there's nothing from stopping you, Joe Consumer, from tucking one of these bad boys in the back of the closet and storing every music file, dirty video, and all the rest of your digital bits in one central location. Both the BlackArmor NAS 440 and 220 come with a handful of standard features, including: Software management tools Support for Microsoft Active Directory 2000, 2003, and 2008 Hardware-based encryption Remote access Quick start features...
Read more...
The original Drobo direct-attached-storage (DAS) device hit the scene in summer of 2007 and took the tech world by storm. It represented a new paradigm in how you could implement external, redundant back-up storage with much of the same goodness that RAID offers, but without a number of the headaches and the complexity that also comes with traditional RAID solutions. The Drobo still used RAID to redundantly store data across multiple hard drives, but did so using Data Robotics’ own version of it, which it calls BeyondRAID (see the table below). The primary advantages that Data Robotics’ BeyondRAID has over traditional RAID is that with BeyondRAID you can add and remove hard drives...
Read more...
Many companies are taking advantage of Earth Day to call attention to the green products they offer. Today, Seagate is capitalizing on the Earth Day buzz by announcing shipment of a power-thrifty desktop hard drive family that combines large storage capacity with the best power efficiency and performance in its class. According to Seagate, the new line of Seagate Barracuda LP (Low Power) hard drives uses as much as 50% less electricity than standard desktop hard drives. Seagate also claims the Barracuda LP hard drives use as much as 25% less electricity than competitors’ green hard drives. These hard drives help organizations cut power costs and provide a more eco-friendly footprint. In addition,...
Read more...
Today, Western Digital entered the Solid State Disk (SSD) market through the acquisition of SiliconSystems. Now that the $65 million cash deal is complete, integration into Western Digital begins immediately. SiliconSystems will now be known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit. SiliconSystems sells its SiliconDrive products to the embedded systems market for use in servers and storage devices. The drives are also used in areas such as network-communications, industrial, medical, military, and aerospace markets. Western Digital is hoping to exploit this product base as well as SiliconSystems’ cross-licensing agreement with SanDisk. SiliconSystems accounted for a third of worldwide...
Read more...
OWC ANNOUNCES VOYAGER HARD DRIVE DOCKING BUNDLES WITH FIREWIRE 800/400, USB 2.0, & ESATA INTERFACESIncludes NewerTech Voyager Q “Quad Interface” or Voyager S2 “Dual Interface” Hard Drive Dock, Highest Capacity, Most Energy Efficient SATA Hard Drive Options up to 2.0TB,& Intech/Prosoft/NovaStor Disk Utility Software February 26, 2009, Woodstock, IL -- Other World Computing (OWC) https://www.macsales.com, a leading Mac and PC technology company, announced today nine new OWC Voyager Hard Drive Docking Bundles that come complete with the NewerTech Voyager hard drive dock; a high performance, SATA hard drive with options including the most energy efficient operation and/or highest capacity...
Read more...
Seagate Technology is now the second hard drive manufacturer to announce a 3.5-inch hard drive with a 2TB capacity. Western Digital got the honor of being the first to announce its 2TB drive last week, the WD Caviar Green (WD20EADS) SATA drive. Seagate's 2TB drive is actually part of a new family of enterprise-class hard drives called Constellation. The new hard drive family consists of 2.5-inch Constellation drives in 160GB and 500GB capacities, and 3.5-inch Constellation ES drives in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities. All of the new drives, except for the 2.5-inch 160GB model, will be available in both SATA and SAS 2.0 interface versions. (The 2.5-inch 160GB drive will only be available with a...
Read more...
Today Seagate has announced two new models of its award winning and industry mainstay Cheetah enterprise class hard drives, the Cheetah 15K.7 and Cheetah NS.2. What’s really significant about these models is that they are 3.5” form factor drives in larger than previously available (SAS) capacities. This means that companies with server and storage arrays that already have backplanes and rack sleds for 3.5” drives can be upgraded in capacity without having to be replaced thus increasing the equipments lifecycle. This fits especially well in this economic climate where IT budgets have been slashed while storage needs continue to rise. The new Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 and Cheetah NS.2 drives provide...
Read more...
USB 2.0 might be the present undisputed king of peripheral interfaces, but it certainly is not the only option available, nor is it even the fastest. FireWire 400 (400Mbps), FireWire 800 (800Mbps), and eSATA (300Gbps) are also viable peripheral interfaces found on many desktops and even some laptops--and two of them are even significantly faster than USB 2.0 (480Mbps); which explains why Verbatim has decided to produce a series of external hard drives that include all four interfaces.Not only is Verbatim's goal with its Quad Interface Desktop Hard Drives to cover as many possible user scenarios as possible, but it is also promoting the drives as a simple means of guaranteeing that the drives...
Read more...
