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All posts tagged "storage"


Thursday, June 23, 2011

Seagate Delivers Unmatched Price-Performance Storage For World's First Tablet's Featuring Hard Drives

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Laptop Thoughts News" @ 09:45 AM

http://www.seagate.com

"Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) is delivering hard disk drive storage for the world's first handheld tablet computers with hard drives. The ARCHOS G9 8- and 10-inch tablets, announced today in Paris, feature the Seagate Momentus® Thin hard drive, a speedy notebook drive with a super-slim 7mm profile. The performance and capacity of the Momentus Thin drive are the perfect complement for the cutting-edge speed of the ARCHOS G9 family of tablets that features the industry's fastest dual-core 1.5 GHz processor and, on the strength of the Momentus Thin drive, gives users 250GB of capacity, eight times more than a standard 32GB tablet but at the same cost, making the ARCHOS G9 one of the tablet industry's best cost-performance values."

A hard drive that's only 7mm thin? Now that's impressive. 250 GB of storage on a tablet really changes the game when it comes to storage; if you're a movie, photo or music enthusiast, being able to carry all your media content on your tablet would be fantastic. Myself, I'd need 60 GB for all my photos (with some videos thrown in the mix), and another 99 GB to carry all my music. It will be 2016 until I'm able to get anywhere near that with Flash storage. On the flip side, even with as good as hard drives have become with shock tolerance, I'd feel like I'd have to treat the tablet in a more gentle fashion knowing that it had a spinning hard drive in it. It's a trade off to be sure. These two Archos tablets sound pretty interesting though - an 8 inch tablet with a dual-core 1.5 Ghz CPU for $279? Hmm. The remainder of the press release is after the break. Read more...


Wednesday, December 29, 2010

The Intel SSD 310: Honey, I Shrunk The Hard Drive!

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Laptop Thoughts News" @ 11:01 AM

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4078/...ata-form-factor

"The 310 isn't about performance, rather form factor. The SSD in Apple's new MacBook Air is just the beginning - OEMs are beginning to shed the limits of traditional hard drive form factors as SSDs don't need to house a circular platter. The mSATA interface is physically a mini PCIe connector (similar to what you'd see with a WiFi card in a notebook) but electrically SATA. The result is something very compact. The full sized mSATA 310 measures 50.8mm x 29.85mm and is less than 4.85mm thick. Total weight? Less than 10 grams."

This is fantastic to see - one of the most impressive things about the Macbook Air that I was testing is that Apple managed to cram a 50 Watt Hour battery inside that incredibly slim chassis. One of the reasons they were able to do that is because they crammed basically the entire laptop other than the battery in the upper-third portion of the bottom chassis; the rest was left for the battery. And how did they accomplish that feat? By taking the SSD out of the traditional 2.5" chassis and putting the chips into a small daughterboard. It looks like other laptop vendors are going to be following in Apple's path, which is great. Bring on the choice!


Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Hey Developers, Get Your Hands Off My Documents Folder!

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 07:00 AM

See that screenshot above? That's an incredible 10.1 GB worth of file bloat that I had no idea was there. The culprit? Cyberlink PowerDirector 9, a video editing application that I've been using quite a bit over the last month. I've developed a real love/hate relationship with this software; when it works, man, does it ever work well! It leverage's my Core i7 CPU and NVIDIA 460 GTX GPU in ways I've never seen any other app do...it's SHREDS HD video, both exporting and editing it. What's not so good is the stability and corrupt output problems I've been seeing. More on that later though; back on topic... Read more...


Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Seagate Sets New Areal Density Record for Portable Hard Drives

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 05:32 PM

http://consumer.media.seagate.com/2...density-record/

"What's more significant about 1TB in this new form factor is that in order to make a drive at this capacity, Seagate reached a NEW areal density record-500GB-per platter! Areal density, which is also alternatively referred to as bit density, is the measurement of how much data can fit on an electronic storage device and is expressed in the number of bits that can be found in every square inch of space on the device. Translated into layman's terms , this essentially means that the greater the areal density, the more data can be stored in a smaller amount of physical space. Larger areal density also means faster transfer of data on a computer because the device drive doesn't have to look as far for the data."

It's quite staggering how much storage they can cram into a portable hard drive these days - yesterday afternoon a Seagate 1.5 TB FreeAgent GoFlex drive appeared on my doorstep, and I was amazed that 1500 GB worth of storage could be so small. I think this announcement is even more impressive though - Seagate has been able to shrink the chassis size down considerably (above is a before and after image), and even better boost speed. I've been told that the new 1 TB drive, using H2Bench as a measurement tool, cranks out 100 MB/s (not sure if that's read or write) compared to 83 MB/s from the previous 750 GB drive. Smaller? Faster? And USB 3.0 right out of the box? Sold!


Tuesday, September 21, 2010

1.5 Terabytes That You Can Slip Into Your Pocket? Seagate Says "Yes, Here You Go!"

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 05:00 AM

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/pr...able-hard-drive

"SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. - September 21, 2010 - Designed to address the explosive worldwide demand for digital storage, Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) today launched the world's first 1.5 terabyte (TB) 2.5-inch portable external drive. Available immediately, the new 1.5TB FreeAgent® GoFlexTM ultra-portable drive delivers an all-in-one, technically advanced solution to help jump-start, build, store and enjoy libraries of digital content in one's preferred medium-whether on a Mac or PC, or a television, at home or on the go. With 1.5TB of capacity people can now store and carry up to 60 HD movies, 750 video games, thousands of photos or tens of thousands hours of digital music."

There's not a lot you can do to make hard drives exciting beyond offering them with more storage, or faster speeds - but Seagate is giving it their best shot with the FreeAgent GoFlex drive, which offers both. First we have the 1.5 terabytes of storage - that's an amazing amount of storage for a drive that you can fit in your pocket! They've added speed as well with the USB 3.0 connection; I don't have a single computer with USB 3.0 yet - and realistically, USB 3.0 won't be common until Intel and AMD support it at the core chipset level - but it's important for accessory makers like Seagate to bring products like this to the market to drive adoption. The nice thing about USB 3.0 is that it's backwards compatible with USB 2.0, so you're not losing anything by purchasing products with it - and when you to get a computer with USB 3.0, products like this one will become even faster. Nice!

Like all Seagate GoFlex drives, it comes with an OS X NTFS driver, so it will work on both your Mac and PC without re-formatting. And you can swap the cable for Firewire 800 (it's an additional accessory) if you're so inclined to get a boost in speed over USB 2.0 on your Mac.

A little bit of extra icing on the cake: you'll get a free digital copy of the most recent Star Trek movie, and the option to purchase unlock codes for 20 other Paramount movies. I wonder if it's an HD copy of the movie? I suspect not. Still, not a bad little bonus!

Full press release after the break. Read more...


Monday, August 30, 2010

Juice Up Your Laptop With the Imation M-Class SSD

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Laptop Thoughts Accessories" @ 07:00 AM

Product Category: Solid State Hard Drive (SSD)
Manufacturer: Imation
Where to Buy: NewEgg
Price: $339.99 USD
System Requirements: 2.5" drive bay, SATA connector
Specifications: Sequential Read (230 MB/s), Sequential Write (170 MB/s), Sequential Write IOPS (6500), Sequential Read IOPS (22,000), Interface (SATA II 3.0 Gbps), Transmission Mode (PIO Mode 0-4, DMA Mode 0-2, Ultra DMA Mode 0-6).

Pros:

  • Complete kit allows you to easily re-use your old hard drive;
  • A great solution for thin and light laptops where hard drive vibration and heat is an issue;
  • Five year warranty.

Cons:

  • It's about $80 more expensive compared to other drives on the market of this size and speed;
  • No TRIM support yet;
  • Acronis drive cloning software can be hit or miss.

Summary: In the past couple of years, it seems like everyone is getting into the SSD game; it's like a classic gold rush, where the playing fields are levelled and new players, previously uninvolved in the storage field, can carve out territory for themselves by licensing or building the right technology. Imation is one such company; they're a brand I'd typically associate with blank discs and USB Flash drives, but after meeting with one of their representatives at CES 2010, I was intrigued by their SSD offering and wanted to see what . Read more...


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