Hard Drives

Unisplendour Corporation Limited (Unis), a government-controlled high-tech company from China, on Wednesday said that it will acquire around 15 per cent stake in Western Digital Corp., the world’s largest maker of hard disk drives. In total, Unis will invest $3.775 billion, which will be used to strengthen Western Digital’s balance …

Toshiba Corp. has finally started to sell its 2.5” hard disk drive with extreme 3TB capacity in retail. The drive is not compatible with the vast majority of mobile personal computers, but can be installed into servers and network area storage (NAS) systems. The Toshiba MQ03ABB300 hard disk drive with …

Serial Attached SCSI continues to be the interface of choice for mission-critical storage sub-systems. At a recent conference, the SCSI trade association, the organization that oversees development of the technology, said that the next-generation of SAS – the SAS-24Gb/s – remains on-track for commercial launch in 2018 or 2019. The …

Western Digital Corp. plans to unify its Green and Blue product lineups. The move will help the company to increase its profit margins. For end-users, the unification of low-cost HDD brands could mean increased performance of affordable hard disk drives. Western Digital is set to unify its Green and Blue …

Seagate Technology claims that no matter how cheap NAND flash memory will get in the coming years, it will never be able to match the per-gigabyte price of rotating magnetic media used in hard disk drives. In fact, the price of one gigabyte on a HDD will decrease to half …

Seagate Technology confirmed this week that it plans to introduce several new products based on its latest technologies later this year. Among the new hard drives set to be launched are the highly-anticipated HDDs with 10TB capacity for archive applications as well as several other new products. “As we continue …

Sales of hard disk drives have been on the decline this year because of slow demand for personal computers and tough competition from solid-state drives. While Seagate Technology and Western Digital Corp. hope that demand of HDDs will pick up in the coming quarters, a market analyst claims that it …

Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is expected to significantly increase areal density of hard disk drive media in the coming years, which will ultimately help to increase capacities of HDDs to 100TB in 2025. However, according to Seagate, the technology still has issues with reliability and is not ready to hit …

Seagate Technology has been shipping hard disk drives based on media featuring shingled magnetic recording technology for about two years now, but so far the company has not shipped a lot of such drives. Nonetheless, Seagate seems to be happy with SMR and plans to expand shipments of SMR-based hard …

Constrained amount of internal storage is one of the major limitations of Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 4 video game system, but fortunately the hard drive of PS4 is user upgradeable. Specially for those, who want not only to expand internal storage capacities of their PlayStation 4 consoles, but also to speed …

Western Digital Corp. this week introduced its all-new My Book Pro storage device with up to 12TB capacity, which is claimed to be the company’s highest-performing external storage solution based on hard disk drives. The new My Book Pro relies on Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 interfaces. The new WD …

Seagate Technology has announced a unique hard disk drive for mobile computers that can store 2TB of data and is packed with exclusive technologies. The new ultra-slim HDD features shingled magnetic recording platters with extreme areal density as well as all-new mechanics. The new 2TB HDD from Seagate comes in …

We'd expect a drive vendor like Seagate to be overly enthusiastic about its SSHD drives, but Ben's interest is solely on delivering Chillblast gaming laptop customers with the best experience possible. Here he is explaining – and demonstrating – his company's mobile storage choice. We recently had Ben in the KitGuru …

Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology is expected to enable hard disk drives with considerably larger capacities compared to HDDs available today. However, the first hard drives featuring HAMR will not offer any breakthroughs since they will largely be designed to evaluate the tech and learn about mass production of such …

Western Digital Corp. on Tuesday introduced its new WD Black hard disk drives with 5TB and 6TB capacities. The new HDDs are designed for consumers and creative professionals who require both high performance and high-capacity. In fact, the WD Black 6TB will be the company’s highest-performing consumer-class hard disk drive …

The Seagate 2TB Backup Plus Slim Portable Drive is, as you have probably figured out, a 2TB USB 3.0 external hard drive. Aimed squarely at the modern computer user, it is thin, portable and even allows users to back up their phone's storage over WiFi. Priced at a shade under £75, …

The attitude of hard disk drives makers to solid-state drives is well known: they claim that such devices can only serve certain niche markets and cannot really compete against HDDs. On Friday chief executive of Seagate went on to say that nobody uses SSDs as storage devices. Nowadays solid-state drives …

Sales of hard disk drives by Western Digital Corp. dropped to a multi-year low in the second quarter of 2015 as sales of personal computers and consumer electronics dropped. Despite of sharp decline in shipments and revenue, the company remained profitable and even maintained its average selling price. In the …

Western Digital has quietly started to sell its new WD Blue solid-state hybrid drives with ‘self-learning’ NAND flash cache. The drives are designed to offer solid-state drive-like performance in select applications, but are not expected to be too expensive since they belong to WD’s mainstream family of products. Initially Western …

Seagate Technology, the world’s second largest maker of hard disk drives, on Monday slashed its forecast of hard disk drives sales in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2015. Seagate expects shipments of its HDDs to hit a five-year low, a bad news for the whole high-tech industry. Seagate …

A web-site has published the first images of Sapphire Technology’s Tri-X R9 Fury graphics cards. The adapters will use reference printed circuit boards developed by Advance Micro Devices as well as massive cooling systems designed by Sapphire. AMD Radeon R9 Fury graphics cards will be based on a version of “Fiji” …

Seagate Technology this week demonstrated a NAS packed with hard disk drives that use heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. While the company claims that the NAS worked flawlessly, Seagate again reconsidered the launch timeframe for its HAMR HDDs and delayed them to 2017 – 2018. Nonetheless, the company is already …

Seagate Technology on Wednesday introduced Samsung Spinpoint M10P hard disk drive, which features 4TB capacity and 2.5”/15mm form-factor. The drive will initially be used inside the company’s external HDD products, but HDDs based on the same leading-edge platters will address other applications eventually. Seagate, which acquired hard disk drive manufacturing …

HGST, a maker of hard disk drives that belongs to Western Digital, on Tuesday formally introduced the world’s first hard disk drive with 10TB capacity. The HDD was developed for active archive applications and is not designed to offer leading-edge performance. Moreover, to use it, owners of datacenters will need …

While many users these days may have several terabytes of PC storage space, mobile storage is yet to catch up. Many phones come with just 16GB of internal storage, while 128GB is just about as good as it gets. This means most users simply cannot fit their media collections on …

Shipments of hard disk drives tanked significantly in the first quarter of the year due to sharp declines of sales of both PC and non-PC HDDs. Western Digital Corp. retained its position as the largest supplier of hard drives, Seagate Technology came second and Toshiba Corp. was the distant third. …

Want to have a high-performance external storage device with USB 3.1 interface, but consider commercially available products too expensive? Sharkoon, a leading maker of PC peripherals, may have a solution! Sharkoon has introduced a special DIY [do it yourself] kit for an external storage device with USB 3.1 interface. The …

Seagate Technology late last week revealed plans to introduce a 2.5” hard disk drive with over 2TB capacity. The company did not reveal any additional technical details about the product, but said that it would be released in the next couple of quarters. “Our 2TB 2.5-inch [hard disk] drive still …

Seagate Technology has clarified its position regarding bringing 5.25” form-factor hard disk drive to the market. Apparently, the company does not have any plans to reintroduce hard disk drives in the outdated form-factors. “Seagate has absolutely no plans to pursue a 5.25” drive, and does not (and has not) promoted …

Traditionally, once a technology becomes obsolete, it falls into oblivion and only a handful of people actually remember it. Today, not a lot of people recall, what is diskette, cathode-ray tube display or 5.25” hard disk drive. But while diskettes and CRTs are not coming back, 5.25” HDDs may get …