Items tagged with HDD
Cryptocurrency mining has been a bane on gamers hoping to score a graphics card at fair market value, but just wait until the storage market dries up, too. Perhaps (hopefully) it will not happen. It depends on the long term impact of Chia, a type of cryptocurrency that is mined with unused storage space instead of GPUs and dedicated ASIC hardware. Should you be worried? The early numbers are not encouraging. Chia has been around since 2018, but on Monday (May 3, 2021), it will be available for public trading. This has led to increased interest in Chia in recent weeks—so much, in fact, that Chia's total storage capacity has grown nearly sixfold since the beginning of April, going from 190.2...
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As of late, there has been a run on graphics cards due to cryptocurrency miners looking to cash in on mining for whatever coin that is the new hotness on the market. However, the next crypto-driven shortage could very well be hard drives and SSDs with a new breed of cryptocurrencies that operate by "proof of space" and time using available drive storage space. While this is not necessarily a new idea, the technology has begun to take off and it seems will likely begin to spread worldwide. In 2014, the pioneer of proof of space, also known as proof of capacity, was Burstcoin, created by an anonymous developer and now managed by several groups. They describe proof-of-capacity as an “energy...
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2020 was a banner year for the PC industry, as the need for employees to work from home (and student to learn from home) due to COVID-19 led to a significant increase in laptop and desktop sales. The increase in activity with regards to PC sales also had a similar effect on peripherals like monitors and webcams, the latter of which is still in short supply (if you’re looking for a name brand). Not surprisingly, the increase in PC shipments -- particularly with respect to laptops -- meant that that SSD volumes also skyrocketed. StorageNewsletter posted a note this week outlining that 333 million SSDs were shipped during 2020, compared to just 260 million HDDs. This represented...
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Backblaze is one of the top-end personal and business data backup companies out there. Providing data backup to a plethora of people is no easy task, and it also a massive amount of hard drives. Quarterly, Backblaze reports on the drives they have in their systems and what they have newly deployed. This is a roundabout way of seeing what manufacturer needs to improve with regards to reliably, while also informing the consumers about off-the-shelf components that they may be putting inside their own rigs. Without further delay, let’s dive into the stats for their 142,630 spinning hard drives in Q2 2020... Looking at the hard drive failure chart, there are some interesting tidbits to...
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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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If you're in the market for a capacious external hard drive to ease the load off your blazing fast SSD for archiving files, Amazon has a deal running today that might just be right up your alley. The online retailer is discounting the Western Digital 8TB Elements external HDD by a whopping $65 (36 percent off), taking it down to a low $114.99. A quick price check shows that this is the lowest price that we've ever seen for the 8TB external hard drive. The 8TB Essentials HDD is a no-frills storage device with a USB 3.0 interface (USB 2.0 compatible) and is plug-and-play compatible with both Windows and macOS (although you’ll probably want to reformat it from the default NTFS). In the box,...
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You'd be forgiven if you simply haven't been keeping up with advancements in hard drive storage these days. After all, many PC OEMs -- especially on the laptop side -- are abandoning HDDs in favor of SSDs to give customers a better (i.e. faster) computing experience. But that isn't stopping Seagate from throwing down the gauntlet with its new lineup of 16TB helium-filled hard drives covering the Exos and IronWolf product families. When it comes to cost per gigabyte, SSDs still can't match HDDs, hence the arrival of the Exos X16, which is targeted at hyperscale computing and the datacenter markets. The 3.5-inch drives have a spindle speed of 7200rpm and consume on average 5W of power...
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Given all the hubbub concerning solid state drives (SSDs) these days, it's easy to forget that there's still a rather large market for traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). Western Digital clearly hasn't forgotten about the market, and is now claiming storage leadership with its new Ultrastar DC HC620. The Ultrastar DC HC620 is available in capacities of up to 15TB, which is just 1TB greater than the previous high watermark for currently shipping HDDs. The Ultrastar DC HC620 makes use of a 3.5-inch form-factor (SAS and SATA interface are available) and leverages second-generation shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. In addition, Western Digital says that the storage...
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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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With solid state drives (SSDs) having long ago taken the speed crown away from hard disk drives (HDDs), manufacturers of the latter storage device have primarily resorted to pushing the boundaries with regards to capacity. In recent months, we've seen HDDs reach capacities of 14TB, but that doesn't mean that there won't be advances that help increase performance along the way. That's where Seagate comes into focus with what it is calling Multi Actuator technology. Seagate explains that while today's HDDs have greater areal densities than ever before, it has handicapped overall drive performance. To combat this lull in performance, Seagate is taking aim at the drive actuator. A HDD's actuator...
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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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In case you have noticed, our data storage needs are growing at an exponential rate. Data centers have an increasing need to store huge amounts of information to power our digital world. Although there is an increasing shift towards solid state drive (SSDs) for their blazing fast performance and low-power profile, hard disk drive (HDDs) still carry the brunt of the load when it comes to storage currently and in the immediate future. According to Western Digital, roughly 70 percent of the thousands of exabytes of data globally will reside on HDDs, versus 30 percent for flash. When focusing solely on the data center market, 90 percent of those exabytes will reside on HDDs. Companies are looking...
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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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The need for more bulk storage isn't slowing down, and in fact continues to grow at an incredible rate. At one point, a 4TB hard drive seemed like it offered a ton of digital breathing room. Today, that's not so much the case. As we capture our photos and videos at higher resolutions (8K is right around the corner), many users will reach a point where they feel they simply can't have enough storage. And that's to say nothing of the insatiable appetite for storage in the enterprise and data center. Earlier this year, HGST blew our minds when it began shipping its first 12TB hard drive, the Ultrastar He12. Now, the WD-owned HGST division is being followed up by WD itself, with the Gold...
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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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When it comes to the global computer storage market, it appears that Toshiba is demonstrating strong gains in a sector that is dominated by the likes of bellwethers like Seagate and Western Digital, which appeared previously to be the last standing competitors in an arena with heavy consolidation. However, not only was Toshiba the fastest growing vendor for hard disk drive (HDDs), but it also showed stronger gains than its larger competitors in the solid-state drive (SSD) sector during 2016. Toshiba showed a 9-percentage point growth during Q4 2016 in the HDD sector, and increased its revenue share in all key storage product sectors. Toshiba’s unit share of the overall HDD market has increased...
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There’s no question that solid-state drives (SSDs) are all the rage today in consumer and enterprise computing. It’s hard to argue with the speed, small form-factors and energy efficiency of SSDs; but when it comes to price-per-gigabyte (especially in large capacities drives), hard disk drives (HDDs) still reign supreme. Seagate is looking to widen that pricing gap within the next few years by ramping up the capacity of its HDDs. While Seagate’s current HDDs top out at 10TB (12TB drives are currently sampling), CEO Stephen Luczo stated during his company’s most recent earnings call that 14TB and 16GB HDDs will roll off the production line within the next 18 months. And if that isn’t enough storage...
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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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We’ve seen some rather nasty ransomware making the rounds over the past few months, but a new strain is wreaking havoc on computers around the globe. Brazilian firm Morphus Labs first discovered the Windows-based ransomware, which has been given the name Mamba. So far, Mamba has been found on computers located in Brazil, India and even the United States. According to Morphus Labs researcher Renato Marinho, Mamba has been spreading as a result of people being tricked into interacting with phishing emails. Once a user has been “hooked”, Mamba gets down to business by infecting the host machine, and then proceeds to overwrite the PC’s Master Boot Record (MBR). But whereas most ransomware will encrypt...
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The lengths that researchers will go to in order to expose security weaknesses in computing technology never ceases to amaze us. The latest technological breakthrough (or security nightmare, depending on how you view it) comes to us courtesy of researchers from Cornell University, and it looks like something that could have been grabbed straight out of a James Bond flick. The researchers have targeted air-gapped computers, or computers that are completely cut off from unsecure networks (like the internet). As the researchers point out, “This measure is taken in order to prevent the leakage of sensitive data from secured networks.” However, using a method called DiskFiltration, they were able...
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Back in April, Seagate began shipping a new helium-filled 10TB hard drive for the enterprise market. The 3.5-inch form-factor HDD is available in 6Gb/s SATA and 12Gb/s SAS versions and comes backed by a 5-year warranty. Seagate is now ready to start spreading the helium love with three new product families that are available in capacities up to 10TB. The first of these drives, and the one likely to be most relevant to our readers is the 7200rpm BarraCuda Pro. This is the first HDD to use the BarraCuda moniker (albeit this time with a capitalized “C”) since the name was originally retired in 2013. The BarraCuda Pro family is available in 6GB, 8GB and 10TB capacities, which are backed with 128MB...
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