No, we’re not turning into a review site for notebook hard drives, but a couple of products have launched that deserve a look after we visited the topic a few weeks ago. We then introduced Samsung’s Spinpoint M6, which was the world’s first 320-GB notebook hard drive. The hard drive still is one of the bottleneck components in every system, as it still takes a noticeable amount of time to launch complex applications, to store huge files or to start or shutdown Windows. The faster your hard drive, the quicker the entire system will run. Samsung, Toshiba and Western Digital were among the first OEMs to offer laptops with 320-GB hard drives, but it was the Samsung Spinpoint M6 that made it to our test lab first. But since the publication of our review on the Spinpoint M6, we received two other contenders: the Toshiba MK3252GSX and Western Digital’s Scorpio WD3200BEVT. (Full article ‘WD and Toshiba Join the 320 GB 2.5″ HDD Club’)
“Convenience storage” is a term that does not (yet) exist, but it hits the mark in identifying an upcoming trend: more and more users don’t really care whether they use one drive brand or another, they just want a storage product that can turn inflexible storage devices into truly convenient devices. Our digital lifestyles generate lots of data that not only has to be stored somewhere, it increasingly has to be backed up, synchronized, encrypted or treated in some special way. Clearly, conventional external or portable hard drives simply don’t cut it any longer. We looked at the latest mobile hard drive products from Buffalo, Fujitsu, Maxtor, Simple Tech and Western Digital to see who created the best solution. (Full article ‘Portable Storage: Convenience is the Key’)
It took the hard drive makers a while to exceed the maximum capacity of 160 GB at 5,400 RPM or 100 GB at a 7,200 RPM revolution speed. But ever since perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) took off, there seem to be new capacity points and new speed records almost every other month, especially in the 2.5″ notebook hard drive segment. In this article we will summarize some news and look at three of the latest models. Samsung, Toshiba and Western Digital were the first to provide 320 GB notebook hard drives. However, Samsung’s Spinpoint M6 drive was the first product to reach our storage test lab; the other two drives will follow shortly as they become available. These drives represent the crème de la crème of the high capacity notebook hard drive segment, while 7,200 RPM drives max out at 200 GB capacity. (Full article ‘2.5″ HDD Galore: Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba’)
Seagate Technology LLC today is set to unveil an updated Momentus laptop disk drive that boosts capacity from 160GB to 250GB.
The new 2.5-in. Momentus 5400.4 version includes two disk platters and 8MB of cache, and it can spin at speeds of 5,400 rpm, the company said. The new version of the storage device is currently shipping, Seagate said.
The updated hard drive uses perpendicular magnetic recording technology and offers a 3Gbit/sec. interface — a sizeable jump from the Momentus 5400.3’s transfer rate of 1.5Gbit/sec., said Joni Clark, senior product marketing manager for Seagate’s personal compute business unit.
(Full article ‘Seagate boosts Momentus laptop drive capacity to 250GB’)
Many users are quick to think about their next hardware upgrades: they often know when it’ll be time to replace the processor or the graphics card, or when it makes sense to add more RAM to the computer. More and more people know what to buy and where they want to buy it, or at least where to find the required information quickly. However, most users still don’t pay sufficient attention to storage and backup, and are caught by surprise when they run out of storage or their hard drives suddenly fail. There is a plethora of products on the market to answer storage demands, ranging from a few gigabytes up to one terabyte. USB Flash memory sticks are great for ultra-portable storage in capacities from 1 GB and 16 GB. Portable 2.5″ hard drive products are ideal to transport 40 to 320 GB of frequently used data between multiple locations. (Full article ‘Sub-Terabyte External Hard Drives’)