Items tagged with hard-drive
We have been hearing about massive capacity hard drives in the neighborhood of 18TB (and even higher) for several months now, but they have remained elusive products. Not anymore, apparently. An online retailer in the UK is now accepting orders for Western Digital's 18TB and 16TB Gold HDDs, neither of which have actually been announced yet. The landing page on Western Digital's website for its Gold series still lists capacities ranging from 1TB to 14TB, and nothing bigger. That said, we can tell you that the new 18TB and 16TB models are aimed at enterprise customers, as these storage drives are designed to withstand the rigors of 24x7 usage. "WD Gold has sophisticated monitoring electronics that...
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Security researchers from the University of Michigan and Zhejiang University in China have published a paper on an acoustic attack vector that could crash a mechanical hard drive, leading to damage for both the hardware and software. The attack does not require fancy equipment, either—an attacker could use regular, built-in speakers or nearby emitters to cause persistent errors on the target system. "Our experiments show that audible sound causes the head stack assembly to vibrate outside of operational bounds; ultrasonic sound causes false positives in the shock sensor, which is designed to prevent a head crash. The problem poses a challenge for legacy magnetic disks that remain stubbornly...
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Western Digital (WD) has pulled the wraps off a new high capacity storage drive that is aimed directly at cloud and enterprise data centers. The new Ultrastar DC HC530 has 14TB of storage capacity, which WD says is the highest capacity conventional magnetic recording hard drive on the market today. The HC530 uses fifth-generation HelioSeal technology and is meant to be perfect for environments where storage density, watt/TB and $/TB are critical. The drive will allow enterprise users to build petabyte-scale infrastructures. WD says that the new HC530 is a follow-on to the 14TB shielded magnetic recording drive, the Ultrastar Hs14. Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing, Devices, Western...
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Back in September we heard rumors floating around that "very soon" Toshiba would be launching a massive 14TB storage solution for desktop computers. Fast-forward three months and the new Toshiba MG07ACA series HDD has landed and is heralded as the world's first 9-disk helium-sealed design. The drive brings 14TB of conventional magnetic recording (CMR) storage capacity and spins at 7,200 rpm. Since the drive uses an industry standard 3.5-inch form factor, it will easily integrate into existing cloud-scale storage infrastructures, servers, and storage arrays. This might be the ideal HDD for computer enthusiasts with lots of digital content and games they need to store. Toshiba writes, "The massive...
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Seagate has rolled out a pair of new HDDs with the first of them being a 12TB 3.5-inch unit in the IronWolf line aimed specifically at NAS environments. That drive has features specifically to make it perform inside a network attached storage (NAS) device including AgileArray and dual-plane balancing along with RAID optimizations built right in. Seagate also promises that the IronWolf drive has advanced power management integrated. IronWolf drives are offered in a range of capacities with the largest being the new 12TB drive. The drive was built to support a work rate of 180TB per year (Pro version is rated for 300TB per year) allowing multiple users to upload and download data to the...
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Toshiba is apparently getting ready to release a 14-terabyte capacity hard drive model. So say company representatives at the Huawei Connect conference in Shanghai, China, who indicated that 14TB helium-filled HDDs would hit the marketplace "very soon." When pressed for clarification on how soon they were talking about, the representatives said the large capacity HDDs would arrive by the end of 2017.The largest capacity HDD currently available is 12TB—both Seagate and Western Digital's HGST division offer 12TB models aimed at the enterprise market. These are single drive solutions and they are also filled with helium. Should Toshiba meet is goal of releasing a 14TB HDD by the end of the year,...
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You might think that storage makers are 100 percent focused on solid state drives these days, but that isn't the case. Mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) still offer the best price-per-gigabyte ratio for bulk storage duties, and to keep things going, Seagate today announced its Enterprise Performance 15K HDD v6 in 300GB, 600GB, and 900GB capacity options. This is the 6th generation of Seagate's Enterprise Performance HDD line and not only is it the fastest and best performing to date, Seagate claims you can't buy a faster HDD from any manufacturer. That translates into a sustained transfer rate of up to 315MB/s. Using an enhanced caching feature, Seagate says buyers can expect up to a 27 percent...
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If you’re still rocking a 1TB or even 2TB hard drive on your PC, you’re probably starting to feel squeezed by that capacity ceiling sneaking closer and closer. Game download sizes are swelling with the addition of ever-increasing detail and 4K textures (Star Citizen is rumored to exceed 100GB) and content producers can never have enough space to store and edit their digital creations. If you’re looking for a seriously roomy new hard drive or three, Western Digital has you covered with today’s launch of the WD Black 6TB HDD and the NAS-friendly WD Red Pro 6TB. They're also launching 5TB versions of each, but we'll take the maximum storage allowed by law, thank you very much. The newest hard...
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The hard drive market has become a lot less sexy in the past few years thanks to SSDs. What we used to consider "fast" for a hard drive is relatively slow compared to even the cheapest of today's solid state drives. But there are two areas where hard drives still rule the roost, and that's in terms of overall capacity and cost per gigabyte. Right now you can buy a 4TB hard drive for the same cost as a 256GB SSD, so the two are in separate universes in that regard. We love SSDs and think just about everyone should run their OS on one, but most aren't large enough to hold all user data over a long period of time, so we still need hard drives for bulk storage duties, and will continue to need them...
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In the data center, every little bit that saves on cooling or power consumption helps, and to that end Western Digital’s HGST brand is shipping a new hard drive that’s designed for higher-capacity storage, higher storage density, lower power consumption, and lower cooling requirements. The HGST 6TB Ultrastar He6 features the company’s 7Stac disk design, claiming 50% higher capacity in a standard 3.5-inch form factor over competitive 5-platter, 4TB drives. As we first wrote about last year, though, the premier feature of the new HGST platform is that it’s filled with helium (helium!). The Ultrastar He6 is hermetically sealed with HGST’s HelioSeal process and filled...
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HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital) claims that its latest mobile hard drive, the Travelstar 5K1500, offers the--and we quote--“highest storage density of any hard disk drive today”. Those are strong words, but HGST may have something there. They crammed 1.5TB into a 2.5-inch, 9.5mm chassis that houses three platters. The drives also feature 32MB cache and a 6Gbps SATA interface with 5400 RPM speed. At idle, the Travelstar 5K1500 consumes just 0.5W of power and emits 2.5 bels, making it both power efficient and very quiet--both of which are features that mobile system makers cherish. Further, to protect against the...
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When it comes to hard drives, performance is important but capacity is king. Western Digital is keeping pace with growing storage trends--including several of its own lines of products--by unveiling new 4TB versions of its WD Black desktop hard drives. The 3.5-inch drives offer 7200 RPM speed, 64MB cache, and SATA 6Gbps interfaces in addition to a handful of features designed to enhance accuracy and promote longevity. These include dual actuators that use two heads for more accurate positioning over data tracks as well as dual processors which are designed to enable significant performance boosts. WD’s IntelliSeek feature delivers ideal seek speeds to cut down on power consumption, noise,...
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When considering a new storage solution, most users try to find the right balance between speed and capacity. SSDs are super fast, no doubt about it, but an HDD spinning at 7200RPM or 10,000RPM will still offer solid performance, and you have access to dramatically more storage capacity for a far lower cost per GB compared to an SSD. Western Digital’s 4TB WD RE SATA drive certainly satisfies the need for capacity. And at a 7200RPM spindle speed with a SATA 6Gbps interface,64MB of cache, and up to 171MBps sustained transfer rates, the performance balance is there as well. In the enterprise, though, there’s a third consideration that can trump the other two: reliability. WD RE 4TB Enterprise-Class...
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When considering a new storage solution, most users try to find the right balance between speed and capacity. SSDs are super fast, no doubt about it, but an HDD spinning at 7200RPM or 10,000RPM will still offer solid performance, and you have access to dramatically more storage capacity for a far lower cost per GB compared to an SSD. Western Digital’s 4TB WD RE SATA drive certainly satisfies the need for capacity. And at a 7200RPM spindle speed with a SATA 6Gbps interface, 64MB of cache, and up to 171MBps sustained transfer rates, the performance balance is there as well. In the enterprise, though, there’s a third consideration that can trump the other two:...
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When it comes to adding a performance-enhancing upgrade to your system, a good SSD can’t be beat, but storage capacity is an ever-growing need as well. There was a time when a 1TB drive seemed grossly (deliciously?) excessive for the average user, but these days anything less than 500GB seems woefully undersized. Even casual users who play a few games, shoot a little video here and there, and maintain a modest music library need lots of storage. HDDs continue to increase in capacity yet remain reasonably priced in light of solid state offerings, to the point that you can have yourself a multiple-terabyte drive for a couple hundred bucks or less. Today we’re taking a look at one such...
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When it comes to adding a performance-enhancing upgrade to your system, a good SSD can’t be beat, but storage capacity is an ever-growing need as well. There was a time when a 1TB drive seemed grossly (deliciously?) excessive for the average user, but these days anything less than 500GB seems woefully undersized. Even casual users who play a few games, shoot a little video here and there, and maintain a modest music library need lots of storage. HDDs continue to increase in capacity yet remain reasonably priced in light of solid state offerings, to the point that you can have yourself a multiple-terabyte drive for a couple hundred bucks or less. Today we’re having a look at one...
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