By Chris Scott Barr

Man, my 1.5TB drives sitting in my storage server are starting to look smaller and smaller all the time. We’re finally starting to see 7200 RPM 2TB drives, and now TDK is talking about 2.5TB. Apparently the company is putting their new 640GB platters through the usual tests. Once those are finished, they will be able to stack four of them up in a single 3.5-inch drive. Mass production should begin in November, with drives appearing on the market early next year.

TDK is also working on 320GB platters that will allow for 640GB 2.5-inch drives. We should see these on the market late this year, or early 2010. Sure, Western Digital has 1TB drives, but these based on TDK’s technology will actually fit in your laptop.

[ TDK ] VIA [ Electronista ]

By Chris Scott Barr

Technology is always being improved upon, usually meaning faster speeds and more storage coming in smaller packages. One of the latest technological milestones comes to us from Western Digital. The hard drive manufacturer has announced that they have crafted the highest capacity 2.5-inch drives. Utilizing 333GB platter technology, they were able to birth 750GB and 1TB drives. There’s only one small problem. Specifically a 3mm problem.

When you hear about a 2.5-inch hard drive, you’ll probably think that its primary function is to sit inside a laptop. Well if you were to crack open most laptops, you’ll find a drive that measures 2.5-inches long, and 9.5mm thick. Unfortunately these new drives from Western Digital are 12.5mm thick. This means that there are going to be a lot of notebooks that don’t accept these new larger drives.

Since these aren’t going to work in a lot of laptops, Western Digital says that they will be perfect for portable storage solutions. Unfortunately, I’m not thinking that they’ll perform all that well in this area either. First, the drive only spins at a paltry 5200RPM, meaning it will be slow as molasses. The cache is also a measly 8MB. Frankly, $190 for the 750GB and $250 for the 1TB drive are too expensive for that speed. I can get a 3.5-inch 1TB drive that spins at 7200RPM with a 32MB cache for around $80. It’s a little bigger, sure, but if you’re actually storing files large enough to require that much space, you’ll really notice the difference in speed.

[ Western Digital ] VIA [ Crave ]

Back at the end of 2007 I introduced you guys to a company called Fusion-IO, which was producing hard drives that ran on your PCI-Express slots. It was a pretty cool idea then, but unfortunately their offering was really salty, and aimed primarily at enterprise customers. Well since one of the co-founders is a hardcore gamer, they decided to branch out and try to bring the same incredible performance to a new crowd.

Enter the ioXtreme. This card holds 80GB of storage (NAND Flash) which is capable of giving you a performance boost that you won’t see by just upgrading your CPU and RAM. Games, large applications like Photoshop and Final Cut will open almost instantaneously. They likened it to bringing up a program that was minimized on your start bar, which is pretty incredible. They even said that it would be possible to boot Windows in just one second. Unfortunately this feature won’t be available at launch, due to them still working out bugs with a few different BIOS, it will however be available via a driver update. The card should be launching later this year for somewhere around $800, though the price is subject to change.

By Chris Scott Barr

Having a fast hard drive is always important when you’re building your next gaming rig. It doesn’t matter how fast your CPU or graphics card is, if you’re sporting an old IDE drive it’s not going to be up to snuff. Usually when one considers the fastest drives, they tend to think of SSD drives running on SATA II. However, PCIe cards are starting to crop up these days.

Not long ago we showed you the PhotoFast G-Monster PCIe SSD drive, which boasted 700MB/s read and 750MB/s write times. When compared to other SATA II drives, this seemed like a nice improvement. However, PhotoFast has already outdone themselves in just a couple of short months. Their latest drive now hits 1000MB/s read/write speeds. That’s just crazy. Almost as crazy as the $1,600 starting price for a 128GB model.

[ G-Monster ] VIA [ SlipperyBrick ]

By Shane McGlaun

I once managed to fling my notebook computer across the room where it landed flat on its back with a thud. I just knew when I opened it up the LCD would be shattered and it would never work again. The only thing broken was the hard drive and after replacing it I was back surfing the net again.

Samsung has a new hard drive that is ruggedized to prevent just the sort of damage my notebook received. The hard drive is called the Spinpoint M7 and can withstand shock up to 400G/2ms while operating. The 2.5-inch drive is available in 250, 320, 400, and 500GB capacities.

Samsung says that the drives use a new controller that saves 25% on power in seek mode and is 18% faster than traditional 2.5-inch hard drives. The drives also feature Samsung SilentSeek and NoiseGuard technology to keep noise down. The drive spins at 5400 rpm and uses NCQ.

[ Samsung ]

By Chris Scott Barr

When it comes to laptops, there are only two things that you can really do to upgrade your hardware. That would be adding RAM and swapping out your hard drive. With the latest round of MacBook Pros, there have been some issues finding compatible RAM that isn’t direct from Apple (which is always on the expensive side). Luckily OCZ has your back on both RAM and a new hard drive for your Mac.

This week OCZ announced two new lines of RAM, and a new SSD specifically aimed at Mac users. First their “Qualified for Mac” RAM comes in DDR2 and DDR3 flavors. The DDR2 is 667MHZ PC2-5400 with a CL of 5-5-5-15. These can be found in single 2GB sticks either alone, or packaged in a pair. As for the DDR3 sticks, these are 8500 MHZ PC3-1066 with a CL of 7-7-7-20. They can also be found in single 2GB sticks, or in pairs.

OCZ also announced their new Vertex Seris Mac Edition SATA II 2.5-inch SSD. The drives boast sequential read/write speeds of 240MB/s and 170MB/s respectively, and 64MB of onboard cache. Not only will these boost the speed of your activities, but increase your battery life as well. The new Vertex SDD’s will come in 30, 60, 120 and 250GB capacities. No word on pricing or availability of these newly announced products.

[ OCZ Product Page ]

By Shane McGlaun

I like computers and for me and many other enthusiasts what we really want is a hard drive that has lots of storage space, fast data access times, and quiet operation. I don’t particularly care how much power the drive consumes so long as it meets my other wants.

In the enterprise computing environment, all of those things are important but at the top of the list is low power consumption. Shaving what seems like a tiny amount of power consumption from the massive amount of hard drives inside the typical data center can mean tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in power savings. Hitachi has unveiled a new enterprise 2.5-inch hard drive that is fast and sips power like a social drinker at a frat party.

The drive is a 2.5-inch form factor unit connecting to servers via the SAS interface and the drive spins at 10,000 RPM. The drive needs only 3.4 watts of power in idle mode and 6.1 watts in full seek mode. Hitachi also says that the 2.5-inch form factor needs 75% less physical space than the average 3.5-inch hard drive. The Ultrastar C10K300 is available in capacities ranging from 147GB to 300GB.

[ Hitachi ]

By Luke Anderson

My main computer is pretty fast, with a nice overclocked Core 2 Duo, speedy RAM  and a kick-ass video card. Unfortunately it does have one piece slowing it down. While my hard drive is SATA (none of that ancient IDE crap here), I’d love to switch it out for a faster SSD drive. My main issue is that the speed gain just doesn’t justify the price. But what if price was no object? Just what could you do with say, 24 top-of-the-line SSD drives? You can open the entire Microsoft Office suite in half a second. You’d have transfer speeds topping out at 2GB. You’d even be able to make the kick-ass video seen above.

VIA [ Dvice ]

By Luke Anderson

I have a fairly large music collection, enough that my 16GB can’t hold it all. For the sake of functionality, I was willing to cut out a few tracks here and there. Now if your collection is enough to fill even the largest iPods, you might consider this offering from Rapid Repair.

The company is offering a 240GB hard drive for 1st and 2nd generation iPod Videos. That’s double the size that even the current iPod classic can hold. I’m really not sure why you would need that much music and video with you at all times, but hey, if you’ve got $300 burning a hole in your pocket be my guest.

[ Rapid Repair ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

This post is syndicated with permission from Gadgetoholic.com

I am a DVR nut and record everything — even if I plan to watch it right then. I like to let the show get about 15 minutes ahead of live TV so I can skip all of the commercials. I also have kids so we tend to collect gobs of Dora episodes as well. When we start running out of space on the DVR, everyone gets nervous that their programs will be deleted.

Hitachi has announced some new hard drives that are aimed at the DVR user in its CinemaStar line. The more interesting of the two new drives is the CinemaStar 7K1000.B. This drive has a massive 1TB storage capacity and can hold 247 hours of MPEG-4 encoded HD video and support ten simultaneous data streams. My pathetic DVR drive can only hold 30 hours of HD programs.

In addition to the 1TB behemoth Hitachi also announced a CinemaStar 5K320 that uses CoolSpin technology. CoolSpin allows for a quieter and more efficient drive that Hitachi claims is one of the most power efficient and quiet hard drives available. Both of the new drives have mechanics designed to run 24/7 without failure and can operate in expanded temperature ranges to allow operation in fanless DVR designs. The CinemaStar 7K1000.B will be available in August and the 5K320 will ship in September. I would like to see Seagate bring its newly announced and sufficiently massive 1.5TB drive to the DVR market as well.

Via Gadgetoholic