Data storage industry news

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April 2008 - Intel Jumps on the SSD Bandwagon

Processor giant Intel announces it is going to start manufacturing SSD's

Do you remember the cool kids at school? You know, the ones with the newest Transformers lunch box, or the kid who bought the first mountain bike? We all wanted to be those kids, it seems that Intel feels the same about SSD's.“Mummy, I want one of those!” - you hear them shout!
The (slightly bitter) comment above comes from the fact that Intel have just announced that they are to begin manufacture of 160GB SSD drives. Samsung currently have a maximum capacity of around 128GB, so this is a bold move by Intel. Furthermore, Intel have made some impressive claims about these new solid state drives, including: 3 x greater shock resistance compared to mechanical hard disks and near-instant boot time.

It does raise the question; are Intel actually interested in developing this new technology, or is it just an easy way to monopolise even more of the PC market?

Source: www.custompc.co.uk

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January 2008 - Small and Mighty

Hitachi unveils a laptop drive to compete with the big boys. It seems that Hitachi still have some love for the mechanical hard drive.
The company that brought us some of the highest capacity drives around, has decided to beef-up its laptop range.

Announced earlier this month, it looks like 400 and 500GB laptop drives will be available soon. These drives will be slightly thicker than conventional 2.5” models, but will only use 2 platters to store this huge amount of data.

Just remember one thing: the greater the storage the more data you could lose!

Source: www.pcadvisor.co.uk

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December 2007 - Solid State RAID

SSD RAID proves to be a success on every level. With all this talk of SSD’s, it was only a matter of time before someone used them to set up a RAID. Despite the fact that SSD’s have a much smaller storage capacity when compared to their mechanical rivals, it’s easy to see where their advantages will lie in the future.

The RAID pictured opposite was set up by the techie guys at www.nextlevelhardware.com; they used nine 16GB Mitron SSD’s in a RAID 0 configuration.
This rig was then tested against a WD Raptor 150 SATA and a Maxtor DiamondMax 300GB IDE. In addition, they also compared the results to those expected from a SCSI drive. In most of the tests, the SSD RAID performed better than any other drive tested. Some of the tests included Read/Write Speed, Random Access Time and Boot Time. The SSD RAID excelled in all these fields and it is clear that SSD’s will be a force to be reckoned with in the future.

However, in the current market SSD’s are a little too expensive to be used in this way, but it is clear that in a few years SSD RAIDs may not be such a far-fetched idea after all.

Source: www.nextlevelhardware.com

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April 2007 - In a move that has surprised many people in the industry, Hitachi released their first 1 Tera-byte (TB) drive earlier this year.

For a long time Seagate were the forerunners in developing high-capacity drives. However, it seems that this first offering from Hitachi is going to pave the way for other manufacturers to follow.
This drive comes with a number of complex new features, but essentially it has changed the internal workings and media density in order to accommodate more data per platter.

Hitachi ’s 7K1000 is constructed of five platters each containing approximately 200 GB of data.
This higher density means that any physical media damage on the surfaces will result in greater data loss as there is more information stored per sector.

Source: www.tomshardware.co.uk

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December 2006 - Samsung Unveil Solid-State Hard Drive

If you have ever bought a digital camera, you will no doubt have needed to buy a flash memory card to store your pictures. Now imagine a memory card that can store around 32Gb of data and can be used in a computer in place of a standard hard disk drive.
It seems that the boffins at Samsung have beaten us to it with this latest offering. Due in May of this year, the Solid State Disk (SSD) is primarily designed to be used in laptop applications, but there is potential for development into the desktop market.

We won’t go into the details in too much depth, but essentially this means that Samsung have developed a hard disk with no moving parts whatsoever. This is wonderful for making hard drives smaller and lighter, but what does this mean for data recovery companies such as Kroll Ontrack? Well, essentially this means that companies are going to have to learn all about the intricate workings of these new circuit boards and chips.
However, it is unlikely that the recovery process will differ greatly from current methods to recover data from SD, MMC and other digital media.

All in all, it looks like good things really do come in small packages.

If you would like to know more, please read the original article by visiting the link below:

http://www.tfot.info/content/view/100/59/

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January 2006 - It’s not the size, it’s what you do with it…

You’ve just read about Hitachi’s venture into the Terabyte drive market, now it’s time for Toshiba to throw a “little” something into the fray.

It is likely that not many of you will have seen these tiny drives, but most of you will probably posses one already, and not even realise it.
Although these cute little 1.8” drives are unusual, one of their most common uses is in the humble iPod.

 Source: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk