Technology Info

Toshiba Launches 400GB 2.5-Inch HDD Introduces New Line-up Of 7,200rpm Drives

400GB Drive Cuts Acoustic Noise During Data Seek By 2dB(1) For near Silent Operation
Toshiba Corporation today announced a new line-up of high performance 2.5-inch HDDs, including a low-noise flagship model that boosts areal density to 477Mbit/mm2 (308Gbpsi) to achieve a capacity of 400GB on just two platters, plus five drives that bring new levels of performance and 7,200rpm rotational speeds to the company’s full range of storage capacities.

Mass production of the 400GB MK4058GSX will start from September, targeting notebook PC and consumer electronic applications. Mass production of the 7,200rpm drives will start in August. The line-up includes the 320GB MK3254GSY and models with 80, 120, 160 and 250GB capacities. (link)

HACKED!™ the OH! *#% flash drive

Holy crap—somebody just went and TORE MY FREAKING USB CABLE IN HALF while it was still attached to my laptop! No — wait — sorry. That’s just my USB flash drive. My bad. Nevermind. Mammoth 2-gig capacity. Peggable blistercard packaging. (link)

The second generation terabyte hard drive is here. Wondering whats different from the “first-generation”? Well, according to Hitachi, its second generation Deskstar drive is much more energy efficient than the earlier version. Touted as the “world’s most energy efficient” hard drive, the Deskstar 7K1000.B is the first product of the new “Tera Era”. It comes with 1 terabyte storage capacity and provides 7,200rpm rational speed. Hitachi said, its new three-disk design improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent over its 1TB predecessor, which was already among the industry’s most energy efficient hard drives. Also, it provides increased protection against data loss and piracy via Bulk Data Encryption.

Hitachi’s vision is that three elements – rich media content, culture, and increasing capacity – are uniting to create an entirely new landscape for enterprise and consumer data storage. It is against this exciting backdrop that Hitachi is announcing the Deskstar 7K1000.B, the world’s most energy-efficient 7,200 RPM one terabyte (1TB) hard drive. (link)

A few days ago, we published a story about how much better our Eee PC 1000H performed when we swapped the system’s 5,400rpm Seagate Momentus hard drive out for a Samsung SATA II SSD drive. Not only did the system boot faster and all apps load faster, but we got 20 more minutes of battery life with the SSD.

However, when we posted our story, we heard from users that Tom’s Hardware, a site we admire a great deal, recently published an article which claims that SSDs use more power than traditional hard drives. The Tom’s Hardware story got some major attention from sites like Engadget and even got a responses from SSD-makers Super Talent and Micron, who both claim that the drives used in the Tom’s test are “early generation” and therefore more power hungry than newer models.

Is Tom’s Hardware right? We don’t think so. (link)

The paper tells us that Japan’s military has confessed to losing a USB device that contained troop deployment maps for a joint Japan-US military exercise. Well, actually, the USB drive was stolen, recovered, then accidentally thrown away.

In February of last year, a 33-year-old captain of the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) reportedly stole the memory stick along with 2,000 yen in cash and a 10,000 yen airline coupon.

The GSDF previously announced a one month suspension for the apprehended officer for stealing the cash and coupon, but never mentioned the USB drive to the public.

According to Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba, the force withheld the information because they didn’t want people on the internet searching for the data.

Shortly after, a lieutenant colonel borrowed the USB device and lent it to a sergeant first class. The sergeant left it on his desk, where it was accidentally tossed.

All three were reprimanded according to the GSDF. The data in question is considered sensitive, but not touchy enough to pursue criminal penalties just for losing it. (link)

To address the growing consumer need for storage in the home, Seagate today announced the Maxtor Central Axis network drive, a network storage drive that can be used by the whole family. This latest drive from Seagate provides a terabyte of storage that every computer in the home can back up to. In addition to media streaming capabilities for video, photos and music, the new Maxtor Central Axis network drive also includes an easy-to-use remote access service that allows people to easily and securely retrieve content stored on their network drive through any Internet browser.

A concept once only reserved for the small business and enterprise space, networked storage is increasingly becoming a viable option for multiple-computer homes. According to Yankee Group’s 2008 Device Survey, of those who purchased network routers for the home, 75.9% did so with the intent of providing multiple computers with access to the Internet. The challenge of these multi-computer households is the ability to share and back up files from each computer. Maxtor Central Axis network drive allows for each computer in the home to be automatically backed up, so important files and precious memories are sheltered from virus infections or disc drive failures. Sharing files from computer to computer is easy when there is one repository for any file that you would like to share. Additionally, since the storage device is connected to the router and not formatted for an individual computer, files can be accessed and stored from both Mac OS X and Windows operated PCs. (link)

One of the cool things about hard drive technology is how it has actually kept pace with computer needs. The basic mechanism for hard drive storage, however, does have some fundamental limitations, which manufacturers will have to deal with fairly soon. Bits are currently stored in the orientation of tiny magnets, called ferromagnetic domains, on a hard drive platter. The smaller the domain, the easier it is for that orientation to be scrambled by temperature or stray electromagnetic fields. At a certain size, thermal photons (e.g., heat energy from the surrounding case or the underlying disk) have enough energy to flip a domain’s orientation. Manufacturers will have to keep their domain sizes significantly bigger than that threshold size to ensure data integrity, which puts a ceiling on storage density, one we’re rapidly approaching.

An alternative is to use ferroelectric domains. Unlike ferromagnetic domains, ferroelectric domains have a natural electric field with an orientation that can be used to represent data. Until recently, these haven’t looked that attractive because they have pretty much the same limitations that ferromagnetic domains have, but they lack the cool read-out tricks. Ferroelectric materials, however, do have one big advantage over ferromagnetic materials: they can be used to make really good capacitors. This is exactly what the latest research, published in Nature Nanotechnology, is about. (link)

Teenagers and students have an average of more than 800 illegally copied songs each on their digital music players, the largest academic survey of young people’s music ownership has found.

The research also showed that half of 14 to 24-year-olds were happy to share all the music on their hard drive, enabling others to copy hundreds, or thousands, of songs at any one time.

Although illegal copying has become widespread, the scale of the problem uncovered by the University of Hertfordshire left the music industry surprised. On average every iPod or digital music player contained 842 illegally copied songs.

Fergal Sharkey, former lead singer of the Undertones and now chief executive of British Music Rights, said: “I was one of those people who went around the back of the bike shed with songs I had taped off the radio the night before. But this totally dwarfs that, and anything we expected.” (link)

According to several sources close to the hard drive industry, Western Digital is working on a 20,000 RPM Raptor hard drive to combat the increasing pressure from SSD manufacturers.

We have spoken to a lot of people out here in Taipei about this industry’s direction and one thing is becoming clear: SSDs are going to be affordable in the next 12 to 18 months.

Because of this, hard drive manufacturers are starting to get a little worried about what marketshare SSDs might eventually take away from them—especially where performance is more of a concern than storage capacity.

And that’s exactly what Western Digital’s Raptor line is all about.

The new drive will be very similar to the recently-released VelociRaptor, in that it’ll be a 2.5in drive with a custom 3.5in housing built around it. Details are incredibly light at this stage, given that the product is still in development, and we don’t even have a release timeframe at the moment. (link)

Sun will release a 32GB flash storage drive this year and make flash storage an option for nearly every server the vendor produces, Sun officials are announcing Wednesday. (Compare storage products)

Like EMC, Sun is predicting big things for flash. While flash storage is far more expensive than disk on a per-gigabyte basis, Sun argues that flash is cheaper for high-performance applications that rely on fast IOPS (I/O Operations Per Second) speeds.

“It consumes one-fifth the power and is a hundred times faster [than rotating disk drives],” John Fowler, the head of Sun’s servers and storage division, said at a press conference in Boston Tuesday. “The fact that it’s not the same dollars per gigabyte is perfectly okay.” (link)