tech news and opinions
Western Digital will soon be releasing a Caviar Green Series drive that features 2TB of storage. The drive has 32MB of cach, an 8.9ms seek time, and will spin at 5400-7200RPM. The retail price is speculated to be around $230.
Western Digital to Launch 2TB Hard Drive This Week – Expreview.com.
Western Digital released a 320GB VelociRaptor a few months ago which was essentially a 10,000 RPM 2.5″ hard drive in an enclosure that was 3.5″ which left me wondering how long it would take for Western Digital to release a true 2.5″ version of it.
The day has finally come, Western Digital is soon beginning selling 10,000 RPM 2.5″ 300GB hard drives for low-power, high-performance blade server applications. The drives are specially designed to fit nicely within 1U and 2U rack servers.
Not only does this VelociRaptor consume 35% less power than previous Raptor drives but this one also has 16MB of cache and a 1.4 million mean time before failure rating.
The price is not yet announced but the drives will be available later this month.
Yesterday Seagate announced the Barracuda 7200.11, a 1.5TB hard drive. The largest 3.5″ hard drive available, the drive is 7200RPM drive. It isn’t exactly the most power effecient drive but it sure does get the job done if you need to store that much data.
The drive has 4 platters and uses a Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface and is capable of sustaining 120MB/s. The drive will be release in August 2008.
There is no word on pricing yet but hopefully they won’t be charging too much for this drive. Hard drives keep getting bigger and bigger at a pretty rapid pace, I remember when a 250GB hard drive was considered big.
Seagate
Actual hard drive not pictured
The 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor hard drive is actually a 2.5″ hard drive enclosed in a 3.5″ form factor heat sink. The VelociRaptor 300 is a 300GB hard drive with a 3.0Gbps SATA interface, Western Digital says that the drive is capable of sustaining 120MB/s which is incredibly fast for a single hard drive.
AnandTech reports that the drive averages about 98.4MB/s. This difference in speed is mostly due to the fact that reading data from the outside of the platter won’t be as fast as reading data from the inside of the platter.
The drive will be priced at $300 which is a great deal considering how fast it is. The drive will surely make a dent in the enterprise market where fast drive speeds are a must and I would imagine that this drive would also do pretty well for media professionals capturing video to hard drives.
Fujitsu has announced the world’s fastest 320GB laptop hard drive. The previously fastest 320GB laptop drive spun at 5400RPM but Fujitsu has just upped that to 7200RPMs.
The MHZ2 BJ series has a 3Gbps SATA interface and are standard size laptop drives which means they will fit in practically all notebooks out there. The drives feature 16MB of cache and 25dB idle noise. Average seek times are listed at 10.5ms for read times and 12.5ms for write times. The drives consume 2.3 watts of power and will be available in June.
It’s amazing how fast the hard drive market moves, I remember just a year or two ago when a 160GB notebook hard drive was a big deal, heck I remember when a 160GB desktop hard drive was a big deal.
Samsung announced a brand new hard drive for laptops, the Spinpoint M6 is the world’s first 2.5″ 500GB hard drive. The drive is a pretty fast performer as well with its 5400RPM spindle speed, 8MB of cache, and its 3.0Gbps SATA interface it is as fast as any other notebook drive (all of the 5400RPM ones that is). The drive also has an optional free-fall sensor.
Samsung also announced the industry’s fastest DVD burner. The WriteMaster SH-S223 will allow you to burn at up to 22x even on media that is rated 16x and at up to 12x on media that is rated at 8x. The drive will be able to write at 22x DVD+/-R, 12x DVD-RAM, 16x DVD+R Dual Layer, 12x DVD-R Dual Layer, 8x DVD+RW, and 6x DVD-RW. This drive is quite the speed demon, writing 4.7GB of data to a DVD+/-R disc can be done in approximately 4 minutes and 26 seconds.
Samsung is doing pretty well in the drive department.
This week Fujitsu announced two new 2.5 inch hard drives that push the capacity of notebook hard drives to 400GB and 500GB.
The two new models will begin shipping in May, and the companies says that it hopes to ship 20 million of them in this fiscal year.
The drives aren’t exactly the fastest drives around, they only have a 4,200RPM spindle speed while most other laptop hard drives spin at 5,400RPM and some as fast as 7,200. The hard drives do consume relatively low power, only 1.8 watts when reading or writing.
With notebook hard drive capacities moving so quickly it is going to be harder and harder for many consumers to justify purchasing a large desktop computer instead of a smaller notebook. I’ll still be a desktop guy though, I just need the money to have the luxury of two decently powered computers (a desktop and a notebook).
Western Digital has always been my favorite hard drive maker, mostly because of their 10,000RPM hard drives but also because I’ve always felt that they were smart about business. Well, Western Digital gave me another reason to love them when yesterday they announced a 320GB 2.5″ 5400RPM hard drive.
The 320GB hard drive will begin shipping immediately and should begin showing up in computers and stores in December.
“It’s looking like people are willing to trade performance for attributes that were important before, like power and acoustics,” a Western Digital rep said. “They want that small form factor in their home and the highest capacity available to store all their data.”
Western Digital shipped their first 160GB laptop drive in 2006 and their first 250GB laptop drives in May of this year, it looks like the hard drive companies are pushing capacities bigger and bigger with seemingly no end in sight (however, I do believe that for most people a 160GB hard drive is plenty for the next couple of years, just my opinion).
This is most likely going to be my next hard drive, currently I have a 160GB hard drive but I’m expecting that with my ever increasing media library I will be needing an upgrade soon (I’m not the average user, I buy a lot of TV shows through iTunes).
*sponsored post*
We have all been there, sitting down at your computer and deciding to go ahead and clean out some old files that you don’t need anymore, or maybe you are deleting some pictures off of your camera that you will never use. I’m sure if you have done that then you have accidentally deleted a file or picture that you realized you actually did need. What do you do? It’s gone. Well not exactly, you see what actually happens when you delete a file is the computer or the camera is now told that it can write over where that file was, but a lot of the time all the data is still there.
Handy Recovery is a great tool to recover deleted files. It is capable of recovering data from all the major file systems including FAT32 and NTFS. It can recover deleted files from all sorts of mediums as well such as CF card recovery, SmartMedia recovery, MultiMedia and Secure Digital.
The software is very easy to use and they even offer a trial version that is capable of recovering 1 file per day so you can try before you buy.
Mark of markandjo.com/markblog demonstrates how to boot OS X from an external hard drive without ever opening up the AppleTV. This is exactly what Leo Laporte said (if you listen to his podcasts you will remember him talking about this, twit.tv) All of the AppleTV hacks will move to going onto an external hard drive so that you can boot from that drive and have all your hacks or you can boot from the internal drive to have the AppleTV.
Here is the video and if you want more info on the hack you can check that out here at 0xfeedbeef.com.
[via TechEBlog]
The Store is still down but the apple.com homepage has changed.
Nothing very interesting here at all.
They upped the amount of memory in the standard configuration from 512MB to 1GB and in the low end configuration went from a 60GB HDD to a 80GB HDD.
They also removed the 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo option on the low end and now 2.0GHz and 2.16GHz are the only processor options.
You can also get a 200GB 4200RPM hard drive as an option now.
The new MacBooks will be available immediately. If anything else new comes out when the store is back I’ll let you all know.
Update: Apple Store is back up with MacBooks available
A tipster told Engadget that he was able to upgrade the 40GB drive in his Apple TV to a 120GB hard drive. That seems a little bit better doesn’t it. I always thought that the 40GB hard drive was a little small, my iPod has a bigger hard drive than that.
