Tag Archives: hdd

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 …

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, one of the top makers of hard disk drives, said this week that it would introduce an unprecedented amount of new products this calendar year. The company’s management naturally did not provide any details, but expect the manufacturer to release better solid-state drives as well as higher capacity hard …

For years manufacturers of hard disk drives have been saying that SSDs were too expensive for mainstream PCs. However, at present chief executive officer of Western Digital Corp. has to admit that more and more personal computers utilize solid-state drives instead of HDDs. Moreover, this trend will strengthen this year …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Solid-state drives have a lot of advantages over hard disk drives, especially when it comes to mobile devices. Unfortunately, due to relatively high prices on SSDs with adequate capacities, hard drives are used in the vast majority of notebooks nowadays. But chief executive officer of Phison Electronics, a maker of …

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 …

Easter Eggs and calling cards have been common in gaming for just about forever. They first came to light in 1979's Adventure (which should be familiar to any Ready Player One readers) that saw the developer, who was was not going to receive credit for his work, leave his name in a hidden …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Although HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., introduced its 10TB hard disk drive earlier this month, the company has never revealed when it plans to release the product commercially. This week a representative for HGST finally said that the company will start mass production of behemoth HDD in early 2015. …

Western Digital this week introduced its new WD Ae hard disk drives for “cold” data storage applications that will come in 6TB-class capacities, which will vary. The company will supply such drives to select customers, who operate datacentres or build storage devices for them. The point of variable capacities, which …

Seagate Technology on Wednesday announced that it has shipped its 10 millionth solid-state hybrid drive. While the number is rather respectable, it just proves that hybrid drives that combine rotating media and large NAND flash cache are not really popular among end-users. Seagate introduced its first SSHD in 2010 (although it …

HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., has introduced three new Ultrastar-series hard disk drives with 6TB, 8TB and 10TB capacity designed for data centre storage infrastructure. The new HDDs utilize WD’s latest technologies – including HelioSeal, new platters featuring perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology as well as all-new …