Hard Drives

HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., on Tuesday said that its Ultrastar HelioSeal hard disk drives are now field-proven and rated for two and a half million hours mean time between failure (MTBF). In addition, the company said that it had begun to sample its 10TB hard drives …

Although the discerning media user likely already has a home server with wireless connectivity and remote access this kind of set up is not always ideal. In-fact, all it takes is for you to lose access to a decent internet connection and suddenly you are media free – which for some …

HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., has demonstrated its highly-anticipated 10TB hard disk drive at the Linux Foundation Vault trade-show in Boston, Massachusetts. The new drive is already in mass production and will be released commercially shortly. ZDNet has managed to picture the prototype of the 10TB SMR HelioSeal …

LaCie, a subsidiary of Seagate Technology, on Tuesday introduced one of the industry’s first external hard disk drive with reversible USB 3.1 type-C interconnection. The HDD is designed specifically for modern systems as well as the latest MacBook from Apple. The new LaCie Mobile Drive will be available in 500GB …

Hot off of the heels of breaking news on the biggest digital bank heist run in history, Kaspersky labs, the anti-malware firm, has released a new batch of information that indirectly paints the NSA and the US government as having inserted malware into the firmware of commercial hard drives. While …

HGST, a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, first announced its helium-filled hard disk drives in 2013 and started their shipments in 2014. Such drives have a number of advantages compared to traditional HDDs, but they still have not gained popularity because both WD and Seagate produce hard drives with …

Seagate Technology, one of the major makers of external storage solutions, plans to discontinue storage devices with Thunderbolt interface. The company’s subsidiary LaCie, which sells more expensive hardware, will continue to offer products with Thunderbolt. The Thunderbolt interface introduced in 2011 provides leading-edge bandwidth (10Gb/s or 20Gb/s) required by professionals. …

Showa Denko K.K., an independent producer of platters for hard disk drives, has announced its first eighth-generation perpendicular magnetic recording platters for HDDs. The first eighth-gen media is aimed at hard drives in 2.5” form-factor and has 750GB capacity. Toshiba will use such platters for its latest 3TB 2.5” HDDs. The …

Seagate Technology has issued a statement regarding consumer hard drive reliability report published by Backblaze. The company claims that the data published by the cloud-storage provider, which uses consumer-class HDDs and extensive replication mechanisms to store data for its clients, contradicts reliability reports by other customers. Moreover, Seagate notes that …

Backblaze, a cloud-storage provider that uses consumer-class hard disk drives and extensive replication mechanisms to store data for its customer, has published yet another HDD reliability report. Just like the previous issue, Backblaze found that that desktop hard drives from HGST, a division of Western Digital Corp., are generally more …

Toshiba Corp. has introduced the world’s highest-capacity 2.5” hard disk drive. The offering can hold 3TB of data and sets up a record, however, the drive may not be suitable for mainstream laptops. The Toshiba MQ03ABB300 hard disk drive with 3TB capacity is based on four perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) 750GB …

Seagate Technology on Sunday unveiled what it claims to be the world’s thinnest portable hard disk drive, the Seagate Seven. The new drive is made of stainless steel and has 500GB capacity. The manufacturer advertises its new product as the thinnest way to store half of terabyte of data. Being …

Western Digital on Friday announced that it will demonstrate its first 4TB solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD) with Serial ATA Express interface at the Storage Visions 2015 conference. The new device will hit the market later this year and will be another attempt of WD to wed SSD-like performance with HDD-like capacity. …

Seagate Technology is on track to rapidly boost capacity of hard disk drives for datacenters and will release a 10TB model in 2015. The company currently has no plans to manufacture helium-filled HDDs since such technology is too expensive. However, Seagate intends to use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology next …

PMC-Sierra has announced that it has joined the OpenPower foundation, which develops “open-source” servers based on next-generation IBM Power processors and Power architecture. PMC-Sierra will bring a host of innovative controllers for storage solutions with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and NVM Express (NVMe) interfaces to the new platform. Participation in …

Toshiba Corp. late on Thursday introduced its first 6TB enterprise-class hard disk drive with 7200rpm spindle speed. The new HDD will be a part of the MG04 family, which is specifically designed for midline and nearline business critical workloads, introduced earlier this year and features persistent write cache technology. Toshiba …

This year both Seagate Technology and Western Digital Corp. introduced hard disk drives with breakthrough capacities designed for near line storage applications. Since those hard drives are based on enterprise-class platforms, they are too expensive not only for consumers, but even for cold-storage applications. This week Seagate quietly added the …

Seagate Technology on Tuesday introduced an all-new family of hard disk drives designed for enterprise-class network area storage (NAS) storage devices. The new HDDs will provide enhanced performance and reliability for NAS applications and will compete against Western Digital’s Red Pro series HDDs. Seagate’s Enterprise NAS hard drives feature 7200rpm …

At the recent Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (MMM) conference Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC), which unites numerous makers of hard disk drives as well as developers of storage solutions, demonstrated a new HDD roadmap. Apparently, rapid increases in areal density of hard drive media will allow HDD makers to create …

Thecus, the Taiwanese NAS company, gathered a group of hacks in Berlin, Germany to announce three new models. These are the W2000, W4000 and W5000 – with the W standing for Windows. In this instance we're talking about Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Essentials so this is a series of …

HGST began to ship its 8TB helium-filled hard disk drives to partners among makers of servers and storage equipment back in September. By now the new drives with unprecedented capacity have made it to retail, but their prices are so extreme that even computer enthusiasts will hardly buy them. HGST’s Ultrastar He8 …

While the world of solid state drives is zeroing in on the traditional hard drive, the actual cost per terabyte difference is still pretty huge. One solution is to mount a small SSD on the hard drive itself. Here, Adam Ciernicki from Seagate explains the technology to Leo Waldock. Looking at …

Seagate Technology has introduced its first Kinetic-series hard disk drives for cloud storage applications. The Kinetic HDDs come with their own built-in operating system and can be plugged directly to Ethernet ports, thus, eliminating multiple layers of legacy software and hardware infrastructure. Seagate Kinetic hard drive features 4TB capacity, dual …

Toshiba Corp. has introduced the world’s first hard disk drive with 5TB capacity and 7200rpm spindle speed designed for consumer desktop computers. This year all leading manufacturers of hard disk drives unveiled HDDs of extreme 5TB or 6TB capacities for enterprise, nearline storage or NAS applications. Such hard drives feature ~5400rpm …

Seagate Technology said this week that sales of its solid-state hybrid drives started to rapidly grow in the recent months. The company expects shipments of SSHD products to remain strong in the current quarter, which may be an indicator that at least some of the company’s customers are deploying hybrid …

At the Ceatec trade-show in Japan last week TDK demonstrated its new heads for hard disk drives that support the heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. Such heads could enable next generations of hard drives with rather extreme capacities already next year. Capacities of modern hard drives are – among other …

Showa Denko (SDK), an independent producer of platters for hard disk drives, has begun to manufacture its seventh-generation 1.10TB – 1.30TB platters for high-capacity hard drives. The move will allow Seagate Technology, as well as other makers of HDDs, to introduce storage devices with up to 9TB capacity. Showa Denko’s …

In the recent couple of years solid-state drives got significantly more affordable then they were four or five years ago. Still, they are considerably more expensive than hard disk drives on cost-per-gigabyte (or the cost-per-bit) basis. According to Toshiba Corp., this is going to change by 2025, when SSDs will …

Failure rate of consumer-class hard disk drives is a point of concern for many, if not all computer enthusiasts who build PCs themselves. Apparently, failure rate of hard disk drives heavily depends on manufacturing processes of particular manufacturers. Last week a report from Backblaze, a cloud-storage provider that uses consumer-class …

Backblaze, a cloud-storage provider that uses consumer-class hard disk drives and extensive replication mechanisms to store data, has published a new hard drive reliability report. It is not a secret that many consumer-grade HDDs are not very reliable, but what is surprising and alarming is that failure rate of certain …