Stylish, screaming fast, and slim Samsung is kind of a big deal. In addition to manufacturing everything from tablets to televisions to turbines, the Korean giant is one of the world’s largest producers of DRAM and NAND flash memory, and it has long provided SSDs to OEMs and systems integrators. [......]
Remember when the hard drive industry tried to convince us they would never be able to pump out hard drives bigger than 100GB? Well according to Samsung the platter density war is still alive and well, and a new breakthrough has allowed them to hit 1TB per platter densities well ahead of schedule. What does this mean for us as enthusiasts[......]
We're still waiting for solid state drive (SSD) pricing to fall to pedestrian levels in terms of price-per-gigabyte, but in the meantime, those capacious mechanical hard drives just keep getting bigger. [......]
Lian Li wants to make it abundantly clear that just because its new PC-A04 chassis qualifies as a mini-tower, it still sports a big feature-set, including the ability to mount up to seven 3.5-inch hard drives. You can jam a micro-ATX or mini-ITX motherboard into the PC-A04 as well as elongated videocards up to 370mm (a little over 14.5 inches for the anti-metric folk). Getting back to the drive bays, the PC-A04 divides these between two cages, one that holds three and another that houses four[......]
We just got word from Intel that it has new Rapid Storage Technology (RST) drivers available for download, and there's a good reason why you might want to check them out. [......]
Western Digital's Caviar Blue line is the cheapest of all the Caviars (which includes Green and Black label drives), which makes the addition of a SATA 6Gbps interface a groovy addition, even if not fully utilized. "We've added a SATA 6Gbps interface to our award-winning WD Caviar Blue and WD Caviar Black desktop hard drives in capacities from 250GB to 2TB," Western Digital said . [......]
Asus a couple of weeks ago Asus slipped its Disk Unlocker utility under our radar, a piece of software designed to overcome the so-called 2.2TB barrier that, in a nutshell, prevents legacy operating systems from accessing the full storage capacity of hard drives larger than 2048GB. The way Asus explains it, Disk Unlocker "taps into hidden storage space beyond the nominal 2048GB range, helping you use large hard drives to their maximum potential." The way things currently stand, in order to fully use a storage drive larger than 2.2TB, you need an OS that supports the GUID Partition Table (GPT), which is only supported in 64-bit versions of Windows. [......]
During the "Back to Mac" event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the new MacBook Airs represent the "future of the notebook," which many took to mean he was referring to the solid state drive (SSD) inside each one. But as far as Seagate is concerned, SSDs won't be killing off traditional hard drives in the notebook sector anytime soon. [......]
LaCie has expanded its lineup of USB 3.0-enabled external hard drives (maybe because the Rugged[......]
USB 3.0 and solid state storage; two great tastes that go great together! We’ve seen a few USB 3.0 external drives here at Maximum PC, and we do appreciate the long-overdue speed boost. [......]
A much-needed refresh for WD's flagship speedy drive For years, if you wanted the speediest consumer hard drive you could get your hands on, you went with a 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor. Its first incarnation, released in 2003, was a 37GB single-platter drive using a PATA-to-SATA bridge. The next year brought a 74GB SATA 150 drive, and thereafter the drives roughly doubled in size (and went up a SATA spec) every couple of years. [......]
In what's being described as an "industry first," Seagate has partnered with Paramount to preload a selection of 500GB FreeAgent Go ultra-portable hard drives with Paramount movies. “Seagate and Paramount Pictures are delivering major motion pictures to consumers in a unique and innovative solution. [......]
Toshiba touted its new Satellite T130 notebook PC featuring fairly standard specifications: 13.3-inch LED display, up to 8GB of RAM, hard drives up to 500GB and a 6-cell battery rated up to 11 hours of operation in a package under four pounds. Oh, did I forget to mention it has an integrated 4G LTE network card capable of blistering network speeds?! The new chip, provided by Sony Ericsson, demonstrated real world download speeds of 16Mbps, while the chip itself is capable of speeds scaling to 140Mbps[......]
As the capacities and prices of hard drives drop it becomes so very tempting to replace existing hard drives with something bigger, and perhaps faster. But what to do with the old drives? External drive cases, let’s face it, are passé--and in some instances will cost you more than the drive they’ll house is worth[......]
