Tag archive: hard drives

Announced over the past week, both Western Digital and Seagate plan to decrease the length of warranty periods on consumer-grade hard drives in order to reduce costs and push more money back into product development. Beginning January 2, 2012, the three year warranty on Western Digital Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue hard drives will be reduced to 2 years. This will only affect purchases of these drives made after January 1 2012 as… Read More

As of this week, Western Digital has reopened an important production factory in Bang Pa-in, Thailand according to an official statement from the company. Production facilities within Thailand makes up 60 percent of Western Digital products and the company employs approximately 37,000 workers in the country. The heavy flooding that occurred in mid-October devastated the region and companies such as Western Digital and Sony were forced to close… Read More

As predicted, the price of hard drives has soared a staggering 180 percent, in some cases, due to widespread, long-term flooding in Thailand. According to computer engineer Marc Bevand, who has observed the soaring price tags, 1TB drives have experienced the most notable jump. The literal breaking point, writes Bevand on his blog, Zorinaq, came after the flood waters seeped into the Bang Pa-In Industrial Park, the Navanakorn Industrial Park and… Read More

There are a few truisms in the technology world, and one of them is that storage always gets faster and cheaper. Over the long term, that will undoubtedly stay true, but in the near and medium term traditional hard drive storage is facing a major problem: Record flooding in Thailand. The deluge has forced Western Digital and Toshiba to shut down their hard drive manufacturing facilities in Pathum Thani province, near Bangkok, and hard drive… Read More

Table salt helps preserve food, flavor food, and keep snowy streets driveable, but now it may help push hard drive capacity to the next level. In Singapore, researchers have discovered that salt is key to multiplying hard drive capacity by six times what it is today. Wired.co.uk reports that Joel Yang, of the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), is using sodium chloride (salt) to increase hard drive capacity from 1.9 tarabits… Read More

It's doubtless that one day flash storage, like SSDs, will replace hard disks for data centers and enterprise storage. SSDs are generally faster, more reliable and use less power than hard disks. As usual in the tech world, the question is who's going to make the first leap, and when's it going to happen? There have already been a bunch of start-ups looking to cash in with all-flash storage solutions, but one in particular… Read More

Hard drive and storage developer Seagate has closed a whopper of a deal: Seagate will be buying Samsung's hard drive manufacturing business for some $1.38 billion dollars in a deal that will see Samsung claiming a 10 percent stake in Seagate. The deal will see Samsung manufacturing controllers for use in Seagate hard drives, and Seagate will in turn supply hard drives for Samsung-manufacturers business consumer electronics and computers.… Read More

In the age of flash-based storage and solid-state drives, storage developer Seagate is continuing to make the case that there's a lot of life left in traditional hard drive storage: the company has just announced the GoFlex Slim, which it claims is the world's thinnest external drive with a total thickness of just 9mm. But inside that tiny case, the drive also packs some punch: it spins at 7200 rpm, offers 320 GB of storage, and… Read More

Intel has announced its third generation of Solid-State Drives (SSD), the 320 Series, which double the capacity of last years models to 600GB. Still, for many models, prices have dropped as much as 20 percent from last year, despite the increases in capacity (consumer prices may vary). It seems that Moore's Law can't be beat. The 320 series will replace Intel's current X25-M SSDs and utilize the new 25nm NAND Flash memory… Read More

It's common knowledge that video editors chew through storage space like chainsaws through styrofoam, and storage developer Western Digital is looking to feed that need with a new 6 TB version of its My Book Studio Edition II external hard drive. Aimed primarily at Macintosh users—because, let's face it, a lot of high-end video editing gets done on Macs—the drive features eSATA and FireWire 800 interfaces, with the… Read More

South Korean electronics giant Samsung has announced that it has finished development of the industry's first DDR DRAM memory module, new RAM technology for computer and other devices that the aims to offer twice the performance of existing DDR3 RAM while consuming 40 percent less power—a boon for mobile devices and notebook computers. But, realizing the promise of faster memory in tomorrow's computers is something of a… Read More

Last month, storage manufacturer Seagate revealed it was talking with unnamed parties about potentially taking the company off the stock market and going private as a way to pump money to shareholders, who would each get a portion of any purchase price. Now, the company says it has ended those talks, and will be launching an additional $2 billion buyback of its own stock to increase the stock's value to shareholders. “Management… Read More

The world’s largest SATA hard drive is now available from Western Digital. On Tuesday, the company announced both 2.5TB and 3TB versions of its Caviar Green drives. The newest members of the WD family offers 3 or 2.5 terabytes of storage while minimizing the issues PCs tend to have with larger drives – namely, known driver issues with drives over 2.19TB. Both drives use an Advanced Host Controller Interface-compliant Host Bus Adapter to skirt… Read More

Storage and disk drive manufacturer Seagate has revealed that it's in discussions with an unnamed party about taking the company private, which would mean de-listing the company from the stock market and converting to a privately-held entity. Seagate hasn't named its suitor, but says it has hired Morgan Stanley and Perella Weinberg Partners to provide financial advice, as well as retained legal counsel. Seagate says there is no… Read More