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Stories about: HDD


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HDD Market Continues to Struggle, Growth to Resume in Q3

The market for hard disk drives continues to be defined by overly high prices and insufficient supply, symptoms that aren't going to be healed until the later parts of this year (2012). People have heard or read repeatedly about how the hard disk drive unit market is in dire straits and how it will continue to ...

11 February 2012
06:10 GMT

1.5TB Buffalo DriveStation HDD Records TV

There is a new external hard drive unit in town, one that does not place as much stock on raw capacity as it does on programmability. The Buffalo DriveStation HD-LS1.5U2J, according to Hermitage Akihabara, has a capacity of 1.5TB. It connects to a PC via USB 2.0 and will start shipping in Japan this month (February...

8 February 2012
09:14 GMT

HDDs Will Suddenly Get 100 Times Faster

A method has been invented that will monumentally accelerate the transfer speeds of hard drive units.A team of physicists has discovered a new way to write data on magnetic storage units.Data on HDD platters is recorded by inverting the poles of a magnet. So far, this inversion has been achieved through the applicati...

8 February 2012
07:20 GMT

Western Digital Fully Recovers by July, HDD Prices Still Up

The hard disk drive market suffered severely from the floods that struck Thailand late last year (2011), but Western Digital, the company most seriously affected, may just recover faster than originally expected. According to the company's most recent words on the matter, full recovery is expected to happen by...

4 February 2012
03:45 GMT

Xilence Dual-Drive Dock Holds HDDs and SSDs in ODD Bay

Desktops usually end up with unused 5.25-inch bays, since few people see the point in owning more than one optical disk drive, so Xilence decided to put that empty space to good use. What the company did was create the Dual-Drive Dock, a sort of drive enclosure that goes in a 5.25-inch bays, but holds two HDDs or SS...

2 February 2012
09:18 GMT

Seagate Agrees That HDD Shortage Will Last Through All of 2012

Seagate recently published its financial results for the latest quarter and, since it was on the subject, it talked a bit about the HDD shortage and how it would go from there. People may remember that, back in January, 2012, Hitachi said it didn't expect the supply of HDD to fully recover until late this year...

2 February 2012
03:38 GMT

Ironically, HDD Shortage Boosted Seagate's Finances

In a darkly amusing turn of events, Seagate was found to have actually benefited from the hard disk drive shortage and subsequent price hike. It helped that the company didn't actually get hit directly by the Thailand floods, unlike Western Digital. Long story short, Seagate shipped 3.1% fewer drives, but saw ...

1 February 2012
10:45 GMT

Hitachi Readies 5-Platter 4TB HDD, 7200RPM Speed

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is still in the game, as evident from a certain new hard drive unit that has shown its face on the Japanese market. The new Hitachi HDD, dubbed Deskstar 7K4000 HDS724040ALE640, is a rather curious piece of work, though clearly intended for enthusiasts. Rather than relying on th...

31 January 2012
03:27 GMT

Buffalo Japan Intros LinkTheater LT-V200 Media Player

People who live in Japan and have 14,000 JPY ($182.4 / 138.20 Euro) to spare may want to take a look at the LinkTheater LT-V200 multi-format media player.Apparently, in addition to its base functions, it has two USB ports (back and front) that let it behave like a DLNA-compliant NAS server.Also, the existence of a SA...

28 January 2012
07:14 GMT

WD Readies My Book Thunderbolt Duo for Macworld/iWorld

The Thunderbolt technology from Intel has Western Digital promoting it at this year's Macworld/iWorld event, taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, between January 26 and January 28. Thunderbolt can work at up to 10 Gbps on two channels at once, in both directions, which means much higher read/wri...

26 January 2012
11:02 GMT

SSDs Won't Become Very Popular, WD Says, Ultrabooks or Not

Western Digital is not nearly as convinced as NAND Flash storage makers that the ultrabook market will greatly boost SSD sales. Western Digital reportedly stated, during the most recent conference call with financial analysts, that solid state drives sales wouldn't rise nearly as fast as some believed. One w...

25 January 2012
05:02 GMT

Western Digital Hit Hard, HDD Shipments Fall 42%

Today is shaping up to be the day when the consequences of the floods in Thailand (in the IT field) become obvious, as even Western Digital has been forced to report abysmal shipment results. Following in the footsteps of Advanced Micro Devices and NVIDIA, Western Digital has handed out some financial details of it...

25 January 2012
03:42 GMT

Speccy Improves Detection of OCZ SSD

After releasing a new version for Defraggler yesterday, Piriform has just launched a new build for their system information tool, Speccy.Speccy 1.15.309 brings to the table a reasonable list of changes, which include both new features and improvements and fixes.Newly added in this build is simple file sharing detecti...

24 January 2012
11:38 GMT

Hitachi Says HDD Market Will Take One Year to Recover

The latest episode of the flooded HDD market saga is now in play, Hitachi being the main character this time. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) estimates that normal HDD supply will take a long time in coming. Even though all those involved are doing their best to deal with the consequences of the Thai floo...

14 January 2012
06:53 GMT

IBM Creates Storage Device from 12 Atoms

Looks like magnetic storage, whose main representative today is the HDD segment, may not be going anywhere after all, regardless of what SSD makers say or hope. No one actually knew, until now, just how many atoms are needed to build magnetic memory structures, but IBM has just discovered. Today's hard drive ...

13 January 2012
08:03 GMT

CES 2012: Seagate and Verizon Release 4G/LTE Hard Disk Drive

Verizon and Seagate have established a partnership for the promotion of an external storage solution with support for wireless connectivity. Storage products, like most other consumer electronics devices, have started to gain new features. Seagate and Verizon have just become two of the more prominent figures behin...

11 January 2012
02:35 GMT

SATA-IO Releases SATA DevSleep For More Efficient Storage

Mobile devices may already be able to go into idle states and, thus, consume less energy, but the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) didn't think it was enough. Thus it developed the SATA DevSleep, a feature that reduces the power consumption of SATA storage drives items. Basically, DevSleep allow...

6 January 2012
15:01 GMT

Seagate Did Better in December than It Expected

It appears that Seagate has successfully secured the second spot in the worldwide HDD production rankings. The company finished the proceedings for the acquisition of Samsung's HDD division on December 19. Thus, its financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2012 (ended on December 30, 2011) incl...

5 January 2012
16:51 GMT

Velocity Micro VMUltra Drive Has Both a DVD and an HDD Inside

This is one of those things that could have been invented earlier but wasn't, possibly because connectivity hubs in general are just now maturing as a market. What Velocity Micro released alongside its Cruz tablets and projector is the VMUltra Drive. Most simply it can be described as a combination of a DVD ...

4 January 2012
18:21 GMT

RaidSonic Launches Handy, PC-Free HDD Dock

Showing clearly just how far storage technology has advanced, RaidSonic has made it possible for people to access information stored on HDDs without needing a PC. This is one of those things that will enable storage products to emancipate themselves. HDDs and SSDs can't usually grant users access to the files ...

4 January 2012
10:01 GMT

5MB IBM HDD Was as Big as a Washing Machine

People know, in principle, that tech products used to be a lot bigger and weaker than PCs are today, but it might be hard to gain perspective.Fortunately, there were ways of taking photos even half a century ago, so we can see for ourselves what a hard disk drive looked like.The Next Web dug up some things on the IBM...

28 December 2011
16:41 GMT

PC Vendors Asked to Sign Long-Term HDD Contracts

Looks like PC makers and those who supply HDDs are at something of an impasse. With the shortage of hard disk drive units, the latter want to gain some sort of stability by scoring long-term contracts. This does not sit very well with PC vendors, who want to keep buying units on a quarterly basis. Their biggest co...

28 December 2011
05:52 GMT

Buffalo Finishes New 1TB USB Hard Disk Drive

USB 2.0 is already getting the old fashioned epithet, even though USB 3.0 isn't actually, truly mainstream yet, not really. In fact, Buffalo decided to try and dispel that notion, or at least stave it off for a month longer, or a week, or at least a day, with its latest product. The company updated the MiniSt...

22 December 2011
16:41 GMT

Seagate Finishes Buying Samsung's HDD Division

Seagate has finally gotten past that short period of time when it was farther behind Western Digital than the world is used to. Back when WD Bought Hitachi, it gained a share of about 50% of the whole thing, leaving the rest for Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung and others to divide amongst each other. Considering that Se...

20 December 2011
03:24 GMT

Seagate Cuts Warranties of More HDDs than WD

It appears that the myth of the decline of the hard disk drive market is not a myth at all, as Seagate has mirrored its rival company in reducing the warranties of some of its hard disk drives. Some may remember that, about a couple of days ago, we wrote about how Western Digital had dropped the warranty-purging ...

17 December 2011
04:35 GMT

Western Digital Drops a Warranty-Reducing Bomb on Everyone

Looks like future owners of some Western Digital hard disk drives won't experience the bliss known as three-year-long free product support anymore. People who ever bought a Scorpio Blue, Caviar Blue or Caviar Green hard disk drive made by Western Digital probably know that they all have three-year warranties. ...

15 December 2011
10:37 GMT

Naturally, Intel Will Try to Use the HDD Shortage to Promote Its SSDs

As analysts have already predicted, the problems on the hard disk drive market will cause some rise in SSD demand, so Intel, naturally, means to benefit from this as much as possible. Indeed, since the company already said it expected $1 billion less from Q4 2012, it plans to turn everything around into an opportun...

13 December 2011
17:01 GMT

Hitachi Reveals Ultrastar C10K900 10,000 RPM HDD Series

Hitachi seems to be bringing out all the big guns in order to tackle Christmas and CES challenges as well as possible, so it just launched the Ultrastar C10K900 HDD series. This line of hard disk drive units is not at all what one may dub a conventional set of storage devices, and this is because of more than the p...

13 December 2011
04:29 GMT

HDD Shortage Makes Intel Expect $1 Billion Less Money from Q4 2011

Looks like Intel is going to feel some aftereffects from how HDDs are going to sell less, because it just announced a downward adjustment of its Q4 2011 revenue forecast. Hard drives will be short because of the floods in Thailand, which affected many factories, so PCs will sell less and, thus, so will CPUs (central...

12 December 2011
10:59 GMT

Almost 4 Million Fewer PCs Will Sell in Q1, 2012

The latest in predictions about the Thailand floods has been made, and this one is a fairly bleak forecast regarding the personal computer market. There will be much lower PC sales in the first three months of next year because of hard disk drive shortage. Had there not been any floods in Thailand to shut dow...

10 December 2011
22:01 GMT

WD and Seagate Say Q1 2012 Will Be When HDDs Recover

Though some are still pessimistic about the prospects on the HDD market, a ray of sunshine, pale though it is, has broken through the winter clouds, or is expected to do so soon enough. The hard disk drive shortage is one thing on the IT market that has been closely monitored by companies and market watchers alike....

6 December 2011
18:41 GMT

Acer Notebooks More Expensive, December Is the Start of HDD Nightmare

Companies have been playing a game of back and forth in regards to the status of the HDD market, so it was just a matter of time before the inevitable happened and optimism got replaced with pessimism. Again.  The Thai floods are old news by this point, even though the damage they caused, in terms of human lif...

29 November 2011
09:34 GMT

Seagate Momentux XT Hybrid Drive Evolves

Hybrid drives is a concept that Seagate started to play with as early as last year, and the company is doing so again, though this time it seems to be more serious business. Granted, even the first time around was serious business, but more of the experimental type than now. Hybrid drives may still not be past th...

29 November 2011
02:41 GMT

Worldwide HDD Supply 35% Short in Q4, 2011

People may or may not be getting fed up with the constant laments regarding the HDD market, but something so disruptive is bound to get media coverage, so here it is again, another report on the matter. This time, we aren't saying that HDDs got even more expensive than before. We already saw the 'official...

28 November 2011
04:59 GMT

Kingston Says SSDs Will Get Cheap Enough in 2012

Troubled times are upon the IT industry, or at least the storage segment, but Kingston thinks at least one type of storage device is in for good things starting next year, 2012. The solid state drive market could reach its green pastures, so to speak, in about nine or ten months. Though NAND Flash memory isn'...

25 November 2011
18:11 GMT

Western Digital Has to Sell an HDD Factory, EC Says So

The European Commission has finally given its stamp of approval for Western Digital's acquisition of Hitachi, but there is a catch, one that involves a production plant. It was quite a while ago that Western Digital decided to buy Hitachi, all of it. Hitachi agreed, but that didn't mean everything would ...

24 November 2011
02:58 GMT

Puget Will Use Your Own HDD If You Buy a PC from Them

Puget might just be the most uniquely-positioned company in relation to the hard disk drive crisis that came about after the floods in Thailand. Puget thinks it will get off easy and, even if it does have supply issues, it will let customers play a direct role in allowing their systems to come into being. The new...

23 November 2011
17:01 GMT

Prices of HDDs May Start to Drop Again in December

Yet again hard disk drives are being looked at by the media, though this time it seems they are being portrayed in a more promising light than the past month or so. Not that they are in any way suffering from some degradation that reduces their marketing appeal, not in the strict sense. They continue to be the ma...

22 November 2011
11:12 GMT

HP Says HDD Makers Don't Know When They'll Be at 100% Again

Having decided to stay in the PC market, HP is subject to the same issues as all others of this cohort, namely component shortages, more precisely the troubles on the HDD market. Hard disk drives used to be runner ups for our recommendation on what to buy this Christmas, but then they went short. The flooding in T...

22 November 2011
09:08 GMT

Seagate Gets $525 Million from WD (390.18 million Euro)

Seagate and Western Digital have been in arbitration over allegations of use of trade secrets and misappropriation of confidential information, but their quarrel may finally be at an end. Then again, maybe it isn't, since Western Digital can still challenge the decision of the arbitrator who issued the 'a...

21 November 2011
11:07 GMT

Dell Says SSDs Will Sell a Lot Better but Won't Solve Storage Problem

With hard drives skyrocketing in price as their supply dropped, solid state drives are bound to start selling better, but Dell, like mostly everyone else, doesn't see them as very likely to solve the IT industry's problems. Apparently, solid state drives are still too expensive, and make up too small a pa...

18 November 2011
14:11 GMT

DSI Proposes 5mm HDDs for Tablets

This may not be the best time for a new hard drive breakthrough, but A*Star Data Storage Institute (DSI) just invented a new type of hard drive that measures a mere 5mm in thickness. In trying to develop some hard drive units for tablets, A*Star Data Storage Institute (DSI) may have solved a different problem altog...

18 November 2011
07:25 GMT

Dell Has HDD Supply Issues Like Everyone Else

Dell had to get creative when word came in about how, soon enough, there won't be many hard disk drives to go about, but it apparently didn't get away scot-free. While it was able to act quickly form the start, even before the biggest price jumps came, but the recent conference call with financial analyst...

17 November 2011
18:01 GMT

Thunderbolt HDD Cases Is What ORICO Is Making

Intel's Thunderbolt technology may not have gotten that much attention yet, but Chinese company ORICO decided to make some enclosures that could use it anyway. That's drive enclosures, not desktop cases meant to house entire systems. According to the Internet (this small part of it anyway), four SATA driv...

16 November 2011
18:21 GMT

IDC Says That PCs Will Have a Rough Time in 2012

The past month has not gone without a significant level of attention given to the crisis in Thailand and, as authorities are doing their best to curb the worst of the destruction, each level of the world economy, in this case the IT industry, is dealing with the fallout in its own way. In this case, the effects of ...

11 November 2011
04:05 GMT

HDD Shortage May Not Be as Bad with Nidec Back Up

The impending HDD shortage has already caused some disruption worldwide, but Nidec is back online, which means that motors, at least, won't be too big a problem anymore. If people don't know of Nidec very well, it's because, instead of being an HDD supplier or inventor, it makes HDD parts, which mea...

8 November 2011
16:51 GMT

PCs Will Suffer Shortages in December Because of HDDs

Since the hard drive shortage has been making the news almost constantly, it was obvious that it would start to affect other fields, in this case that of personal computers. There is a significant chance that PCs will be in short supply this December, as well as during the first three months of next year (2012). ...

7 November 2011
05:16 GMT

Western Digital Denies Stopping HDD Shipments

The whole Thailand issue may have sparked fears somewhat higher than necessary, so Western Digital stepped up to the microphone and clearly said it hadn't actually stopped shipping hard disk drives. By now, people keeping track of all the problems hammering at the hard disk drive market will know about the flo...

4 November 2011
18:01 GMT

USB 3.0-Equipped Sharkoon QuickDeck Pro Docks SSDs and HDDs

For those who want a means of using their SATA drives externally, Sharkoon built a new drive docking station called SATA QuickDeck Pro. Essentially, this is an easy way to link a drive to a PC and even have it work at high speeds, via the USB 3.0 connection. The weight of the QuickDeck pro is 240 grams and its size...

4 November 2011
05:06 GMT

HDD Get 10% More Expensive

We already mentioned, repeatedly, that the hard disk drive market was about to smash into a wall, so to speak, and now we have some actual estimates of how badly prices and sales will suffer. Though it won't be enough to make people switch to SSDs, selling prices of HDDs will go up by 10% before 2011 is over. ...

3 November 2011
05:37 GMT


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