Storage - Page 120

Good ol' Super Talent is always at it tossing new and flashionable flash drives onto the market in an attempt to part geeks with their hard-earned money. Most of the flash drives that the firm makes put as much focus on looking good as they do working well. That's not a bad thing at all; our tech gear can look good and work. The latest offerings from the company are a coupe new flash drives in the USB Pico Mini line.

Kingston makes a ton of different products that are used inside computers all around the world. The company has tons of RAM for enthusiasts, flash drives, and a full line of SSDs for any user group. Kingston announced today that it has added a new family of SSDs to its line called the SSDNow V100. The new SSDs are offered in several capacities and come in OEM or retail kits.

There are some very tiny and thin profile devices on the market today like the new MacBook Air notebooks that Apple launched a few weeks ago. The thinner portable devices get, the thinner the hardware that goes inside has to be as well. Toshiba has unveiled a new type of SSD called the Blade X-Gale series. These SSDs look more like sticks of RAM than a SSD we typically think of.

I am sure that there are tons of people out there that have old 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch HDDs lying around that are doing nothing other than collecting dust. Those drives are probably still good and you just don't want to trash them. Trendnet has a couple new external HDD enclosures that will let you take those old drives and make blazing fast external storage out of them. The new enclosures include the Trendnet TU3-S35 and the TU3-S25.

InnoDisk have gone beyond our imagination (wink) by introducing their new product, the InnoDisk nanoUSB Dual, which is designed with a small footprint in mind - it is both a USB stick and a Micro SD Card reader.

Patriot has been peddling RAM to gamers and Enthusiasts for a long time and like many other memory companies, Patriot has expanded into SSDs as well. Patriot has unveiled a new line of SSDs today called the Torqx TRB line that offer nice features and performance. The new 64GB SSD uses the latest controller from JMicron called the JMF616.

The pros and cons of an SSD versus a HDD are well documented. No one will argue that the SSD offers more speed than your average HDD, but most will agree that the amount you pay for an SSD versus the storage space leaves a lot to be desired. However, users that want outright speed in their computers know that the SSD is the way to go.

Western Digital has announced today that their Caviar Green line of hard drives will now include 2.5 terabyte and 3 terabyte 5400RPM drives; the largest single internal drive in the industry. The 3TB drives will have four platters at 750GB a piece and both drives feature Western Digital's GreenPower Technology, which lowers power consumption, noise, and temperatures for increased reliability and comfort in operation.

The amount of storage space on a computer is sort of like thinking about how much money is in a bank vault for me. I can think about how cool it would be to have a billion dollars in my account, but the reality is that it's hard to fathom exactly how much money that would be. The same goes for storage capacity. I have a hard time fathoming how much data is contained in 17 petabytes of storage.

Storage needs in the enterprise and consumer spaces are not the same. Consumers tend to want more capacity and don't always care as much about power savings and all out performance as some sectors of the enterprise market does. In a large enterprise data center with lots of storage drives a small savings in power consumption can add up to big savings in an electric bill. Hitachi has shipped a new enterprise class HDD called the Ultrastar C10K600.

The new HDD comes in several capacities with 300GB, 450GB, and 600GB versions all using 2.5-inch form factors to take up less space and use less power than similar 3.5-inch offerings. The new 10K rpm HDDs are 15% faster when it comes to random performance and 18% faster for sequential performance than competing products on the market today. At the same time the performance increases, the drives also need 22% less power than competing products on the market.

The new drive has a dual port 6Gb/s SAS interface for fast data throughput. The drive is also the only one in its class that uses a 64MB cache to optimize the read/write response time. The average seek time for the drive is as low as 3.7ms with latency of 3ms. The drives are intended to be used in Tier 1 data center, Enterprise network storage arrays, blade servers, and rack-mounted servers. The drives can also be ordered with optional bulk data encryption feature. The drive needs only 5.6W of power in read/write operation and 3.1W in idle mode.