The mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) isn't dead even as solid state drives (SSDs) steal the limelight. That's because pricing for bulk storage still favors HDDs. But while the storage medium is far from dead, HDDs do give up the ghost, some more often than others. Which ones are the most reliable? That's a tricky...Read more...
Mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) are alive and well as a bulk storage medium with companies like Seagate paving an HAMR path to 50TB and beyond, but as with any piece of tech, not all models are created equal. Fortunately, cloud backup firm Backblaze frequently shares drive failure stats for its fleet of HDDs (and SSDs), and its latest storage Read more...
The latest storage report from Backblaze, a cloud backup firm with oodles of data and stats to share, is live with some interesting comparisons between its crop of solid-state drives (SSDs) that have been in service since late 2018 and mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) that have been in use for quite some time. While...Read more...
When it comes to mechanical hard disk drive (HDDs), you'd be very hard pressed to find any data on failure rates reported by any of the major players, such as Western Digital, Seagate, and the rest. Fortunately for us stat nerds and anyone else who is curious, the folks at cloud backup firm Backblaze frequently issue...Read more...
Seagate can officially lay claim to offering the fastest mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) in the world, as it pertains to rated throughput. These arrive a year after Seagate introduced the first NVMe HDD. That's the kind of thing manufacturers are typically inclined to shout from a mountaintop, but for whatever...Read more...
The folks at Backblaze, a cloud storage and data backup company located in San Mateo, California, published a report comparing the failure rates of solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs), and you might be surprised by the results. Or maybe not, if you were expecting SSDs to emerge as the clear winner...Read more...
Some of you showed up here with pitchforks in hand and ready to argue that even 22 terabytes of storage space isn't enough to ensure never having to send a file to the recycle bin ever again. Fair enough, but headline quibbling aside, a 22TB hard disk drive (HDD) is a whole lot of storage for the average person, and...Read more...
Remember when floppy disk drives (FDDs) ruled the day before USB flash drives rendered them obsolete? Mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) have proven more resilient in the wake of solid state drives (SSDs) making a speedy splash in the storage market, but if Microsoft has its way, OEM system builders will forget all...Read more...
The mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) has survived decades of innovation in storage and a seismic shift to solid state drives (SSDs), which offer much faster speeds and no moving parts to worry about. No end to the HDD is in sight, either. That's because HDDs still offer a superior bang-for-buck for raw storage...Read more...
It's a technical marvel that mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) don't give up the ghost way more often than they do. Some models are more prone to premature failure than others, of course, but overall these storage devices with their moving parts and platters have proven surprisingly resilient. One model in particular...Read more...
Don't bother penning an obituary for the mechanical hard disk drive (HDD), the storage medium is not going anywhere. Sure, we're all enamored by incredibly high-speed solid state drives (SSDs), and the push into PCI Express 5.0 territory will see another big jump in performance. But as far as capacity goes, HDDs still...Read more...
Solid-state storage may have all-but-replaced spinning disks in consumer hardware, but hard drives still hit a sweet spot between the speed of SSDs and the price-per-gigabyte of tape that remains extremely important for many enterprise and cloud customers. Thanks to a new joint development from Toshiba, SDK, and TDK...Read more...
At some point in time, Seagate had the grand idea of slapping an NVMe interface on a hard disk drive (HDD), and then decided to actually make such a thing a reality. Then at the OCP Global Summit this week, the storage maker showed off what it claims is the industry's first native NVMe HDD, which raises the question...Read more...
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...Read more...
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"...Read more...
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...Read more...
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...Read more...
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...Read more...
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...Read more...
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...Read more...
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...Read more...
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...Read more...