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Seagate Barracuda hard drives plagued by failures

seagate By Chakkaradeep Chandran, 18 January 2009 - 07:49 94 Comments

Numerous complaints are being reported from customers who own the 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive at the Seagate's online support forum. The hard drive seems to just freeze during data transfers. Kabatek, Brown and Kellner LLP, a consumer law firm, is considering a lawsuit against Seagate because of the... Read More »

Seagate and Dell offer self-encrypting drives

seagate By Andrew Lyle, 10 November 2008 - 20:55 5 Comments

Seagate and Dell have announced that they will be shipping laptops with self-encrypting solutions for hard drives up to 320GB. The company said this was a move to prevent data theft on stolen laptops from being recovered. With rising thefts on notebooks, this solution would help ensure... Read More »

Mobile Hard Drives Hit 500GB

mobile By Daniel Fleshbourne, 03 January 2008 - 10:01 14 Comments

Notebook PC disk storage leaps into the stratosphere today, hitting the half-terabyte mark with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' announcement of a 500GB 2.5-inch mobile hard drive. Due out in February 2008, the $400 Travelstar 5K500 drive will dramatically expand the capacity possible in today's notebook PC designs. Hitachi's announcement makes... Read More »

Panasonic ships World's Thinnest Blu-ray Disc Drives

panasonic By Slimy, 29 December 2007 - 19:56 10 Comments

Panasonic has begun shipping samples of the world's thinnest (that’s 9.5 mm to be exact) internal Blu-ray Disc drives to personal computer manufacturers. The new sample 9.5 mm high BD drives were accomplished by combining Panasonic’s own technologies such as the low-profile, 2-lens actuator and spherical aberration compensation mechanism and... Read More »

Intel touts Tiniest Solid-State Drives in the Industry

intel By Slimy, 17 December 2007 - 17:02 4 Comments

Intel Corporation touts the Z-P140 PATA Solid-State Drive, the company’s latest product in the SSD market, as being “smaller than a penny” and weighing “less than a drop of water”. The devices are available in 2GB and 4GB flavours, and are aimed at mobile Internet devices, digital entertainment and embedded... Read More »

Market share of notebooks with Blu-ray drives to rise to 10%

market By Daniel Fleshbourne, 28 November 2007 - 10:35 3 Comments

The market share of notebook PCs with Blu-ray drives is expected to increase from 1% this year to 10% in 2008 due to notebook makers more willing to adopt cheaper Blu-ray combo optical disc drives (ODDs) and the fact that Intel's CPU technology is able to support Blu-ray based multimedia,... Read More »

Solid State Drives: Fast, Rugged, and Really Expensive

solid By chuggyhandbags, 14 November 2007 - 19:20 19 Comments

Are solid state drives becoming a reality? Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech published an article this morning concerning the current state of SSD with a comparison between a Samsung 64GB SATA and a Super Talent 32GB SATA. While they showed impressive speed rates when placed against a hard disk drive,... Read More »

Seagate warns of infected drives

seagate By Daniel Fleshbourne, 14 November 2007 - 13:20 23 Comments

Seagate is warning users to scan their systems for malware after a password-stealing Trojan was found on some of its hard drives. The vendor said that the malware was discovered on the Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 model by researchers from security firm Kaspersky. Seagate did not reveal how... Read More »

Hard Drives: Under the Hood

hard By chuggyhandbags, 09 November 2007 - 17:32 4 Comments

On November 8th, Western Digital held an editor's day event that included surprisingly in-depth details about the inner workings of hard drives. In his article, "Hard Drives: Under the Hood," Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech provides us with a good primer on this often overlooked, yet essential, piece of technology.... Read More »

Terabyte Hard Drives Show Stellar Performance

terabyte By chuggyhandbags, 02 November 2007 - 19:05 8 Comments

It's the era of the terabyte. That era really launched back in May when Hitachi delivered its 7K1000 terabyte hard drive. However, the 7K1000 was a five platter, ten head device, while Western Digital and Seagate ship four platter, four head devices. That's right: The Western Digital WD10EACS and Seagate... Read More »

Western Digital Touts 3TB Hard Drives in 2010

western By Slimy, 27 October 2007 - 18:16 13 Comments

Western Digital has achieved record areal density in its Magnetic Head Operation labs in Fremont, California, using its perpendicular magnetic recording/tunneling magneto-resistive head technology, allowing the leading maker of hard disk drives to product 3TB hard disk drives in about three years time. Following WD's growing investments in technology the... Read More »

Hitachi releasing Power Saving Green Hard Drives

hitachi By Steven Parker, 24 October 2007 - 09:13 1 Comment

Hitachi has announced it will be releasing green hard drives this quarter with up to 40% better idle power savings. The pricing will be comparable with non-green devices. Hitachi will remain at 7200rpm throughout all of its green products, which include 250 GB, 320 GB, 400 GB and 500 GB... Read More »

Universal Music Announces Singles on USB Drives

universal By Slimy, 18 October 2007 - 22:08 18 Comments

Instead of offering digital singles as downloads like Apple does with iTunes, Universal Music announced that it plans to release its singles on USB flash drives this month. One reason Universal wants to stay with a physical product rather than a digital download is that the retail margins are better... Read More »

Seagate adds encryption to all drives

seagate By Daniel Fleshbourne, 18 October 2007 - 11:10 15 Comments

Seagate is to build automatic encryption into all its enterprise hard drives, the company announced at Storage Expo 2007 in London. All enterprise drives will be fitted with Seagate's Full Disk Encryption (FDE) as standard. The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is designing a security protocol for the drives, and the... Read More »

Cram 4TB on Desktop Drives by 2009, Hitachi Says

cram By Daniel Fleshbourne, 15 October 2007 - 11:36 33 Comments

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies plans to announce Monday it has developed technology that will quadruple the storage capacity of desktop hard drives within the next two years. The new reading-head technology will allow the company to cram more data on hard drives. Desktop computers could attain a capacity of 4TB... Read More »

Tested: New Hybrid Hard Drives From Samsung and Seagate

tested: By Daniel Fleshbourne, 08 October 2007 - 13:23 13 Comments

When they were introduced a couple of years ago, hybrid hard drives seemed enticing. Pairing a standard hard drive with a flash component sounded like a good way to deliver on the theoretical performance boosts that flash can offer while still providing the long-standing price, capacity, and performance benefits of... Read More »