Small enough for you?

Before you go out and buy a 3000$ notebook, be aware that capacity is not everything and that, due to space constraints and a desire to limit power requirements, it will lose every benchmark compared to bigger drives. The MK1011GAH in particular, with a 4200 RPM speed and 8 Mb of cache, will not make it to a 30 Mb/s tranfer rate. More details can be found at Tom's Hardware, for expamle: it still uses the UltraATA/100 interface (less energy), has two platters and weights only 59 grams.

But if you are happy with such a slow drive, it may be a good choice. 3.5" drives require 20W on average, 2.5" ones need only 5W and this one beats them hands down: 1.8 watts. And is actually not so slow compared to older drives in this segment; after all, it uses perpendicular recording technology, which helps making faster and larger hard drives.

In the end, if you can wait, I would hope for the second generation solid-state/flash hard drives to focus on the 1.8" form factor instead of the 2.5" one.

If you know anything about your computer you're familiar with the fact that the design of hard disk drives are the true dinasours of personal computer systems. Oh sure there has been some evolution of the hard drive over the years, but nothing really significant. Even the Western Digital 10,000 RPM wonder, appropriately named the Raptor, and currently the top dinasour, can create a significant bottle-neck when it comes to your computers' ability to process data. After all, your CPU,GPU and RAM, no matter how fast they are, can only process the data that is feed to them as quickly as it's feed to them. The hard drive, simply due to it's design, is limited to how much data it can cough up. However data storage as we now know it is about to become extinct!

One of the products of this evolution is hybrid magnetic drives. These drive use solid-state flash memory for faster speeds. Two of the key advantages of this type of drive is the magnetic drives do not spin as often and the flash memory data is moved even faster then the magnetic platters alone. Samsung has already released the MH80 series and Segate and Hitachi plan to release there own versions of the hybrid magnetci drive later on this year.

Full Story

Deskstar 7K100

The Anandtech article shows it's fast, quiet and runs cool. If we believe the suggested street price of 40 cents per Giga, it's not even expensive (or it won't be, once it stops being invisible).

Paper launches have been usual in the GPU arena, but I think this is a first for the storage market. I guess they could always find two retail custumers who supposedly bought one unit before the 31st (let's assume they get along and share it), but that's not the question. What we're asking here today is simple: Terabyte, where are you?

If you love sports and the great outdoors, A-DATA have the perfect flash drive for rugged lifestyles. The A-DATA RB19 USB flash drive has been designed to withstand water, dust and shock to keep your data safe under extreme conditions. The small USB 2.0 flash drive has all the normal features you'd expect to find including LED indication and hot plug and play. It's also got a few more tricks up it's sleeve and takes advantage of Windows Vista Readyboost to offer outstanding read / write speeds.

The design is certainly eye catching and will no doubt be lapped up by adventurous people and street smart geeks. Available in 1GB to 8GB capacities with choice of colours.

Solid State and Yummy

Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of DRAM memory modules and flash products, recently announced a full range of Solid State Disk (SSD) drives with an industry standard Serial ATA interface.

This new line of SATA drives is offered in industry standard 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch form factors, making these drives 100% compatible with conventional hard disk drives. However, these products are built with only solid state Flash components. Since they contain no moving parts, SSD drives have the advantage of being far more rugged and reliable than regular hard drives, while using 85% less power. Moreover, because SSD drives are built using Flash technology, they offer sequential transfer speed comparable to magnetic drives and dramatically faster access speed. Super Talent’s 1.8-inch SATA drives are offered in up to 32GigaByte capacities; 2.5-inch drives are available in up to 64GigaBytes; and for high capacity requirements Super Talent offers a 128GigaByte 3.5-inch drive.

 “This new generation of SSD drives delivers all the benefits of Flash based storage – rugged reliability, low power consumption and fast access speed. But we’ve engineered these drives to offer twice the data throughput at half the cost per gigabyte compared to the first SSD drives we introduced a year-ago.” stated Joe James, Marketing Director at Super Talent Technology.

The groundbreaking 2.5 inch Momentus 5400 FDE.2 (full disk encryption) has had a long and winding gestation, but is now set to be put on sale at the end of March in a real laptop, ASI’s C8015+, costing $2,150 (£1,100).

As well as on-the-fly encryption integrated into the drive itself using chip acceleration, the laptop also features a trusted platform module (TPM), and fingerprint reader, security add-ons that have added roughly 20 percent to the cost of what is otherwise a mainstream Intel Core 2 Duo laptop.

The drive to ship in the ASI machine will be the 80GB version, but 100Gb, 120Gb and 160Gb versions are also waiting in the wings, all based on a 3Gb/sec SATA interface and spinning at 5400 RPM.

Full Story