Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, a leading designer of hard disk drives, on Thursday unveiled the world’s first hard disk drive (HDDs) for enterprises with 15000rpm spindle speed and 450GB capacity. Hitachi believes that the new Ultrastar 15K450 drive also offers unprecedented performance.

Hitachi Ultrastar 15K450 with 450GB capacity, 16MB cache and 15K rpm spindle speed is based on four 112.5GB platters and declares average seek time of 3.6ms as well as average latency time of 2ms. The new drive will ship with either 3Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces.

(Full article ‘Hitachi Unveils World’s Largest Enterprise-Class Hard Disk Drive’)

Super Talent Technology Corp., one of the leading suppliers of advanced memory products, this week announced what it claims to be the world’s tiniest USB flash drive that can store 8GB of data. A good news for consumers is that the tiny drive of record capacity is hardly expensive.

The new tiny 8GB USB flash drives belong to Super Talent Pico family of products that includes three different types of enclosures: water-resistant Pico-A with a swivel lid (38.7mm x 12.4mm x 3.9mm), retractable Pico-B (31.8mm x 18.8mm x 4.4mm) and miniature rugged water-resistant Pico-C (C: 31.3mm x 12.4mm x 3.4mm). All the drives are available in capacities of 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB.

(Full article ‘Super Talent Unveils “World’s Tiniest” 8GB Flash Drive’)

Samsung Electronics is the first hard drive manufacturer to ship a 500GB 2.5-inch drive. Samsung announced its drive was shipping in volume to OEMs and PC makers today. As you probably know, Hitachi GST and Fujitsu have also announced their upcoming new solutions already. Hitachi’s drive was supposed to ship in February, but is now expected to ship later this month. Fujitsu says its drive will ship in May.

However, both Hitachi and Fujitsu are taking a different approach to 500GB than Samsung. All three drive makers use three disk platters, but Hitachi and Fujitsu reach 500GB by expanding the height of the drive from 9.5mm – the common standard for most notebooks – to 12.5mm, a height that’s increasingly accommodated on larger, desktop-replacement laptop designs, but not necessarily on more general-use laptops.

(Full article ‘Samsung Ships Half-Terabyte Mobile Hard Drive’)

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’)

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’)