Seagate has announced a range of award-winning FreeAgent external hard drives. This new generation of the Seagate FreeAgent family includes attractive desktop and mobile options, for both Mac and Windows operated PCs that make it a breeze to back up, share and protect valuable digital content like photos, videos and music.

At a height of only 12.5mm, the new FreeAgent Go easily fits in a pocket while still including all the advanced shock and vibration protection people have come to expect from Seagate. Another industry first, the new FreeAgent Go is the first external hard drive to offer a docking option, providing a practical way to move from the desk to the road, while leaving the hassle of fumbling with cables and locating USB ports to the history books.

“With the amount of content being created and consumed today, the average broadband household will soon need close to a terabyte of storage to account for their personal media collections on PCs, portable devices, and DVRs,” said Jane Shields, research analyst, Parks Associates. “With Seagate’s coupling of high-capacity, reliable and easy-to-use solutions with attractive designs, the company is helping more people enjoy the benefits that come with backup and sharing of their digital media collections.”

The FreeAgent Go for Mac will cost $159.99 for the 250GB version and $189.99 for the 320GB version. The FreeAgent Desk for Mac starts at $169.99 for the 500GB model, going up to $269.99 for 1TB and $349.99 for 1.5TB.

The FreeAgent Go 250GB is $119.99, the 320GB comes in at $149.99 and the 500GB at $239.99 with the dock priced at $29.99.

The FreeAgent Desk will cost $129.99 USD for 500GB, $149.99 USD for 640GB, $229.99 USD for 1TB and $279.99 USD for 1.5TB (available in October 2008). The FreeAgent XTreme starts at $159.99 USD for 500GB, $179.99 USD for 640GB, $259.99 USD for 1TB and $299.99 USD for 1.5TB (available in October 2008).

Link: Seagate

Western Digital has introduced its new 500 GB capacity My Passport Portable USB Drives which are designed to make it easy to store a half a terabyte of music, videos or photos and carry them in the palm of your hand.

My Passport Elite portable drives are equipped with software to automatically back up consumers' ever-growing collection of personal media and digital files.

The new 500 GB My Passport portable drives weighs less than 7 ounces and are small enough to fit in a pocket or backpack for easy portability, according to WD.

"In our mobile society, there is an increasing desire to have your data collection at your finger tips at all times," said Jim Welsh, vice president and general manager of WD's branded products and consumer electronics groups. "The new My Passport 500 GB portable drives provide the convenience of a compact USB-powered drive with the high capacity previously only available in larger desktop drives."

MSRP for the My Passport family of portable drives with 400 GB and 500 GB capacities ranges from $179.99 USD to $219.99 USD depending on model. The My Passport Elite and My Passport Essential portable drives are offered in the following capacities: 160 GB, 250 GB, 320 GB, 400 GB and 500 GB.

Link: Western Digital

Do good things come in small packages? Most ladies would say no unless you are packing a Little Big Disk Quadra 1TB portable hard drive from the Lacie stable. Amazingly the device fits in the palm of your hand and runs off USB 2.0 so no need for a clumsy power brick on your desktop. The Quadra uses two 500GB hard drives working in a RAID 0 configuration for maximum speed with the option for Raid 1 for data security. If USB 2.0 is too slow for you, it can shift data at a rate of 110MB/s using eSATA or up to 80MB/s using FireWire 800.

Hea is taken care of by use of a LaCie d2 heat sink design. Noise levels are kept to a minimum thanks to the lack of fans and effective sound insulation. LaCie claims the unit is up to 60% lighter than traditional external HDDs. 

Here's the blurb from Arnaud Prezelin, LaCie Product Manager for Creative Pro solutions.

"Powerful yet portable, the Little Big Disk Quadra is an essential tool for meeting a professional's mobile needs. While travelling, users no longer need to carry heavy devices and power cables to operate a high-capacity 1TB external hard drive."

This is an innovative and highly desireable product for your desktop and to have a sexy little unit like this will set you back some £400 here in the UK. Not cheap as you can pick up a couple of 1TB drives now for around £100 each but then you have the hassle of installing them, setting up raid, finding space in your case. To be honest we'd rather pay for the Quadra 1TB and have the freedom to take data on the move. Nice one Lacie!

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.

Following up our recent ProXstream 1KW PSU review, we have the latest SLI ready Power Supply from the OCZ stable - the GameXStream 700W. Modular, ultra quiet with a glowing blue light. What more could anyone ask for!

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.