Western Digital has been keeping us enthusiast PC users happy with its Raptor line of hard drives for a few years now. Though we've been satisfied with the performance of these drives, we always wished to see larger capacity drives that keep spinning at 10K rpm. And finally today, WD has officially revealed the successor to the Raptor line - the oddly named VelociRaptor. The VelociRaptor hard drive is built with enterprise-class mechanics and packs 300 GB of storage capacity with 16MB of cache and works at 10,000rpm.

WD claims that these new drives offer a 35 percent performance increase over the previous generation. The VelociRaptor drives fit in the 3.5" hard drive bay just like any other drive but the hard drive itself is of 2.5" (15mm high) form factor. What makes the VelociRaptor fit in standard 3.5" bays is the large heatsink surrounding the drive that WD calls the IcePAK. The IcePAK is what keeps the drive cool while it's spinning at 10,000rpm.

Few fellow Journos (lucky b**tards!) received early samples of the drive and have published reviews with detailed performance figures and all those reviews prove one thing - the VelociRaptor is the fastest and coolest 3.5" hard drive for your PC.

VelociRaptor hard drives will be available on Alienware's ALX gaming desktop by the end of April and will be available through WD's online store (www.shopwd.com) and at select distributors and resellers mid-May for US$300.

Reviews

HotHardware
MaximumPC
PCPerspective
The Tech Report
Tom's Hardware

Solid State Drives are getting some good press lately, and Crucial have jumped right to the front of the bandwagon with their new SSD drives and storage kits. Aimed at anybody wanting fast, reliable storage, the new 32GB solid state storage kit will be an ideal solution for storing digital images and data as they are super fast, quiet, push out very little heat and are far less susceptible to bumps and knocks than conventional hard drives. The 32GB size is just a bit too small for use as a dedicated operating system drive, but as soon as 64GB and 120GB versions become affordable, you can get ready to swap out your Western Digitial raptor drives, as these babies will be the new storage kings. 

The kit, which is sold separately from the Crucial SSD, includes a rugged 2.5-inch USB 2.0 external enclosure. It also comes with a SATA 3Gb/s interface 3.5-inch hot-swappable drive bay to allow for SSD integration into your PC. Don't have a spare 3.5-inch drive bay? Crucial provides a 5.25-inch drive bay bracket. Sweet.

For hot-swap-supported systems, get enhanced security and mobility for your critical data by easily removing the SSD from desktop drive bays and storing it in a secure location, without even turning the computer power off. For USB connections, simply disconnect the USB cable and carry the drive with you. It's that simple. At the moment, the kit from Crucial will probably appeal to Photographers with big budgets and mission critical images who want the convenience and speed that SSD offers. At $799 they aren't cheap but give it a few months and they should be dropping in price that makes them affordable for mainstream users.

Laptop road warriors will be pleased to hear that Lexar offers a comprehensive line of high-performance storage products designed with a wide variety of features, capacities, and capabilities. The Lexar ExpressCard is a solid state drive (SSD) that provides high-performance, high-capacity plug-in storage for laptop computers. The card fits easily into the ExpressCard slot of newer laptops and delivers extra memory and reliably backs up data without cables and the protrusion of other, more awkward external storage devices. The Lexar ExpressCard SSD is available in 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB capacities.

Whether you're ready or not, the Solid State Drive revolution is here and Super Talent Technology today launched the world’s slimmest 256GB solid state drive (SSD).

The FSD56GC25H uses an industry standard 2.5-inch hard drive form factor and uses an industry standard SATA-I interface, making it 100% interchangeable with conventional 2.5-inch SATA hard drives. This SSD implements Super Talent’s patented stacking technology to pack an enormous amount of solid state storage into an exceptionally small and slim case, measuring a mere 12.5mm thick – 40% thinner than any other 256GB SSD available. The signature black case is made from a durable lightweight aluminum alloy.

The FSD56GC25H drive supports 0.1ms access times, a maximum of 65MB/sec sequential read speed and 50MB/sec sequential write speed. This SSD supports up to 1600G of shock and 16G of vibration, which is about five times greater than typical hard drives. With ECC support, bad bit management firmware and patented wear leveling technology, this drive offers extreme reliability and endurance.

“We designed this drive for applications that need rugged and reliable storage in a very compact form factor. This is the world’s smallest and thinnest 256GB SSD”, said Super Talent Marketing Director, Joe James. “This product underscores our leadership in high density SSDs and demonstrates the technical capabilities of our Silicon Valley engineering team”, Mr. James added.

FSD56GC25H drives are designed, manufactured and tested in Super Talent’s headquarters in San Jose. Samples are available to OEMs only so don't ask us when you can expect to pick one up in your local PC World. Probably never - well at least until the prices drop a lot. Until then you'll just have to dream of superfast Vista load times without the grind of the WD Raptor in your ear.

The Taiwanese embedded data storage manufacturer InnoDisk Corp, recently announced the availability of the newest range of 2.5” SATA flash drives – the FiD 2.5” SATA 10000 SSDs. These drives are based on the Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND flash technology and are available in capacities ranging from 32GB to 128GB. The tough outer metal case, enormous capacities, high reliability, low power consumption, noise-free and anti-shock features make the InnoDisk FiD 2.5-inch SATA 10000 an ideal replacement to Hard Disk Drives.

The FiD 2.5” SATA 10000 32GB SSD delivers read and write rates of up to 110Mbps and 90Mbps respectively and burst read rates up to 300 Mbytes/sec and supports the Serial ATA 2.0-3Gbps standard.  The drives offer a random read and write rate of over 9500 and 550 inputs/outs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer. The FiD 2.5” SATA 10000 achieves performance that is approximately 20% higher than a traditional SCSI hard drive.

The drive features a write/erase endurance of approximately 8 years at 1TByte of write/erase cycles per day thanks to an exclusive controller chip design that features proprietary wear leveling and bad block management algorithms. The FiD 2.5” SATA 10000 32GB drive scored 8500 points in PCMark Vantage v1.0.0 during testing. The drive performed equally well in other PCMark Vantage tests like Vista Startup, Movie Maker Edit, Application Loading etc. Expect a full featured review from us in the coming weeks with detailed performance results.

Sampling for the FiD 2.5”SATA 10000 SSDs is expected to begin in March 2008 and will ship in volume by Q2 2008 in capacities ranging from 32GB to 128GB. These drives will set you back by $700, $1350, and $3200 respectively for the 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB models.

Photos and phone numbers lost as almost one in five lose portable devices without backup

18 December, 2007 – Britons are risking losing valuable images and data forever with almost one in five who own a portable device losing phone numbers and contact details on mislaid items and 40% admitting to not backing up photos on portable devices, according to research commissioned by Network Appliance (NetApp), a leading provider of storage and data management solutions.

The YouGov survey of 2,035 online adults, reveals that whilst 58% of those that own a portable device store up to 500 photos, only 6% are very worried about losing them. It also indicates that 60% who had lost a device with phone numbers on had to source the contact details from scratch.

Surprisingly, only 44% said this had made them think twice about backing up information in future. Not surprisingly, however, 25 to 34 year olds (33%) have mislaid more portable devices with phone numbers and contact details than any other age group, with over 55s (8%) losing the least.

Mark Stevens, UK Area Director at NetApp said: “Data backup and protection is not just a concern for businesses. Today’s ‘Digital Generation’ load an increasing amount of information onto phones, iPods and laptops everyday, and with this comes risk.

“People need to be aware that saving images and numbers without backing them up means they could be lost forever.”

The International Consumer Electronics Show has given us a lot of new products, some of which are close to being ready. Case in question: BiTMICRO Networks has a flash solid state disk up it's sleeve that will reach 832 GB, as a part of their E-Disk Altima(tm) SATA flash SSD series (in 2.5" form factor).

Taking advantage of the latest NAND Flash Technology improvements, it's now possible to achieve these capacities in very a small space. They also say it will pave the way for mass SSD deployment in the, more "price-sensitive", PC market. More specifically, they expect no less than a rise in sales by 477% annually, from 2006 to 2011.

The main progress made in memory chips, consists in the new multi-level cell (MLC) type of NAND flash, compared to the old single-level cell (SLC). With them, the number of bits stored per memory cell, gets doubled. Add to that, BiTMICRO's own propietary EDSA(tm) and LUNETA(tm) controllers, to optimize performance, and the disk should sustain transfer rates of up to 100 MB and up to 20,000 I/O operations per second.

Link: BenchmarkReviews.

Lacie have launched a new product to easily turn your TV into an entertainment center for enjoying your movies, photos and music in comfort. Simply connect the LaCinema Premier to your PC or Mac via USB to transfer your digital media files then plug it into your TV for instant playback. Designed with HDTV screens in mind, it can adapt video content up to a 1080i resolution. Enjoy surround sound thanks to its optical output capability. They are touting it as fun and simple to use with an easy-to navigate on-screen menu and convenient remote control. 

The LaCie LaCinema Premier is available in capacities of 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB. With prices starting at around $229 for the LaCie LaCinema Premier 500GB model, it's looking like a great product for film buffs. More specs over the page.

Last week, Synology released a free software update for all x07, and x06 series storage systems; users can enable SSH service on their products by applying SSH update to the system software.

The SSH function unleashes the raw power of Linux while the customers can still enjoy the rich, matured, and user-friendly functions built into Synology Products. "Accompanying with rsync functions, IT Professionals now can integrate Synology products into their backup plan," said Edward Lin, Synology's Marketing Director. "We have added to the SynologyWiki several detailed rsync backup How-To Guides. Users can follow the instructions to backup Synology Servers to another rsync server and vice-versa. The rsync server can be either a Linux or Windows platform, running the rsync service, such as DeltaCopy for Windows. Furthermore, IT professionals can now develop their own scripts files to run their own batched backup jobs with full flexibility and security."

"Instead of spending thousands of dollars on an expensive PC server and backup software to backup their servers locally or remotely, IT professionals can now achieve the same goal using inexpensive Synology products with only a fraction of the cost," said Lin.

To make backup tasks easy for SOHO or small business owners, Synology has already provided an easy-to-use remote backup for users who wish to use the Web Management Application to backup their Synology servers to another Synology server or another rsync server. With this, smaller organizations can also enjoy enterprise-class remote backup.

Synology offers a wide range of products, ranging from the single-bay model (DiskStation DS107 Series), to the dual-bay models (DiskStation 207 Series, with RAID1), to the quad-bay models (CubeStation CS407 and Rackmount RackStation RS407 with RAID5). This eclectic collection of Synology products offers many options for creating a backup solution for offices small and large or for data centers.

In addition to the SSH and rsync update, Synology products will be NFS-ready. Following the instructions in the SynologyWiki, power users will be able to enable the NFS Service and manage their Synology product in a method they are more familiar with.

Users can acquire the free software update from the Synology download site: http://www.synology.com/enu/support/download.php 

Rsync How-to's can be found in:http://www.synology.com/wiki/index.php/Index

On November 1st, Sony will release the BWU200S burner which should, not only burn Blu-ray and DVD discs, but play movies. Problems associated with this feature are supposed not to appear due to incompatibilities with HDCP (as it happened with the BWU100A). But, according to Sony, their previous model also played movies and those who had problems just lacked the appropiate hardware (graphics card).

It's burning capabilities, those that should be attracting buyers, are doubled when it comes to writing Blu-ray discs. It can complete a 50 GB disc in 45 minutes at a speed of 4X BD-R (half the time the previous model needed).

It will come with SATA connectivity, a 5,25" format and it will include both PowerDVD and CyberLink BD Solution; at $899, it should.

Link: apc mag.

"TOKYO, Oct. 15, 2007 – Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501) and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) announced today they have developed the world’s smallest read-head technology for hard disk drives, which is expected to quadruple current storage capacity limits to four terabytes (TB) on a desktop hard drive and one TB on a notebook hard drive"

This new "current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistive" (CPP-GMR) technology wants to replace existing head technology, called TMR (tunnel-magnetoresistive), between 2009 and 2011. Products shipping in 2009 will have recording heads with 50nm track widths and will reach 30nm track widths in 2011 (current ones have track widths of 70nm). Their researchers have already reduced existing recording heads to less than a half.

CPP-GMR will allow recording densities between 500 gigabits and one terabit per square inch. Compared to the 200 gigabits we see today, that's more than quadrupling density.

Link: Hitachi.