Storage - Page 118

Lexar has been making storage cards for cameras and other devices for a long time now. The company has announced a new storage card for SDXC compatible cameras and camcorders that has the highest amount of storage in the industry. The new card is the industry's first 128GB offering. The card also comes in a 64GB SDXC version as well.

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Both the 128GB and the 64GB versions of the memory card are speed Class 10 offerings with 133x performance. That means that the cards offer a minimum of 20MB/s data speed. That should make them fast enough for HD video recording and for fast burst shooting. The pro-level cards are aimed at the professional photographer.

As you can imagine, cards with this capacity are far from cheap. When these cards land in Q1 2011 they will be priced at nearly $700 for the 128GB unit and nearly $400 for the 64GB offering. Both will come with software to help you recover deleted images.

When it comes to HDDs you can usually have a really thin drive or you can have a high-capacity drive, but not both. Hitachi has unveiled a new HDD that gives mobile devices the best of both worlds with a thin design that also packs in a lot of storage space. The new HDD is the Travelstar Z5K5000 and it is the thinnest 2.5-inch 500GB HDD in the world.

It seems like storage capacities in traditional HDDs are growing every time I look around. Hitachi has announced that it is now shipping a line of new storage products that each has 3TB of storage capacity. The new HDDs are said to be the first HDDs to pass the 2.2TB capacity limit on 32-bit Windows XP machines with no extra hardware needed.

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Hitachi is now shipping a new internal HDD kit that has all that someone wanting to upgrade either computer to 3TB of storage needs. The kit includes the 3TB 7200rpm Deskstar HDD, instructions, software to allow most OS's to see all the storage space as one big drive, and screws needed. The HDD uses a 64MB buffer and the 6Gb/s SATA interface. The 3TB HDD kit is shipping this week and will sell for $250.

Hitachi is also shipping external storage drives with 3TB of storage space. The 3TB external HDD sells for $249.99, a 2TB version is $169.99, and the 1TB version is $99.99. In addition to offering lots of storage, the new 3TB solution is also power efficient with 9% idle power savings compared to older HDDs. A 3TB 5K3000 HDD with Coolspin tech will ship next quarter.

When it comes to storage, Seagate is one of the biggest names in the storage industry with its line of offerings for computers and enterprise use. Seagate is big on green storage and has unveiled a new line of HDDs that it claims have the industry's highest performance while sipping power. The new line is called the Barracuda Green hard drive.

The typical enterprise HDD is a 2.5-inch unit. The drives in the enterprise market are smaller than what we typically see in the consumer desktop environment so more HDDs can be fit in the same space. The more drives that can be squeezed into a storage device the less space the enterprise needs for computing needs. Seagate has announced the first 2.5" 1TB HDD for enterprise markets.

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The new HDD is in the Constellation.2 line and is aimed specifically at storage applications in servers. The HDD uses the 6Gb/s interface and promises best in class power consumption. Seagate says that the new HDD is appropriate for use in direct attached storage, network attached storage, and storage area network environments.

"Data center managers continue to seek out more efficient storage technologies without sacrificing performance, while still meeting capacity growth requirements," said John Rydning, research director for IDC. "Reaching the 1TB capacity in a small form factor design gives IT managers more options to meet capacity requirements with efficient storage platforms. IDC expects the use of capacity-optimized drives like Seagate's 1TB Constellation.2™ to increase by more than 50% from 2010 to 2014."

The new 1TB drive fits into the line along with the existing 250GB and 500GB HDDs. The new HDD and the others in the line can be had with the 6Gb/s SATA or 6Gb/s SAS interfaces. Dell will ship systems using the new HDD late this month according to Seagate.

Patriot has a bunch of different flash drives in its line of offerings. The company has unveiled its latest flash drive called the Patriot Supersonic. The new drive is small and rugged and offers the superior data transfer speeds of USB 3.0 along with an impressive amount of storage inside the rugged enclosure. The drive uses a single chip inside.

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Patriot's new flash drive uses a quad-channel interface for performance and has a very lightweight form factor. The single chip design eliminates the bottlenecks common in USB 3.0 drives today by eliminating the separate USB 3.0 bridge chip and USB 3.0 flash memory controller. Not only does that single chip eliminate bottlenecks, but it also makes for a smaller footprint.

The flash drive is capable of sequential read speed of 100MB/s and a sequential write speed of 70MB/s. Patriot offers the drive in 32GB and 64GB capacity at an undisclosed price. "Patriot is one of the first companies to integrate a native single-chip USB 3.0 flash memory controller. By pairing the controller with our Quad-Channel technology, we're able to maximize performance with the Supersonic series," says Les Henry, Patriot Memory's Vice President of Engineering. "We are able to shrink the physical size of the USB 3.0 flash drives for even greater portability."

Yesterday we stopped by the A-DATA headquarters here in Taipei and one of the new products we were shown was their upcoming S501 SATA-III solid state disk drive.

If you are on the ball, you may remember Chris previewed this drive with some exclusive benchmarks back in June during Computex Taipei and he was completely blown away by the numbers he was able to produce on the show floor. Under ATTO Disk Benchmark, maximum read speeds hit around 408MB/s and maximum write speeds around 220MB/s.

Almost all of the SSDs on the market today are packed inside small 2.5" cases. That is all fine and good if you are building up a mobile machine or a SFF rig, but if you want more performance out of a desktop PC with lots of open 3.5" bays, 2.5" SSDs are not ideal. RunCore has launched a new and very awesome SSD that uses a 3.5" form factor. The reason for the 3.5" size is more space for storage.

Sharkoon reminds me a lot of Brando with all sorts of USB offerings. Rather than weird USB gadgets, Sharkoon tends to concentrate on making some really cool docking station that connect to your Pc via USB and allow you to use your old desktop and laptop hard drives as external storage. The docking stations are a great way to be able to use your old HDDs without having to buy up a bunch of external enclosures.