Storage - Page 125

We first heard a whisper about a week ago that Seagate have apparently been working hard at pushing the capacity barrier further with the 3.5-inch form factor and are looking to bring out a new enterprise level Constellation ES series of drives later this year with a whopping 3TB capacity.

Confirmation from Seagate themselves has now been given that the company is in fact developing 3TB drives for launch later this year. But as is the case with 2TB drives currently, being the top capacity model means a much less attractive GB per dollar ratio.

RunCore has just brought to market a new series of enterprise level SSDs that use the tried and true SandForce SF-1500 controller and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface.

RunCore calls the new series Kylin II, of which comes in both 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch form factors. There are both Single Level Cell and Multi Level Cell variants of this series available. Other attributes inlude native ECC data protection, on-board temperature sensor and a power consumption of about 2.6W.

When you think of hard drives typically, you think of computers. These are some of the most common devices to have hard drives in them. However, HDDs are in lots more places today including cable boxes and our cars.

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Toshiba has announced a new HDD specifically for the automotive market called the MK2060GSC. The drive is the highest capacity at 200GB in the market for automotive use. The HDD is aimed at telematics and entertainment systems.

The HDD has a single platter, uses the SATA interface, and spins at 4200rpm. Toshiba promises a 78% improvement in internal transfer rate compared to other solutions on the market. The drive is also very robust with a wide temperature, altitude, shock and vibration tolerance range.

Sharkoon has extended its popular QuickPort ranga of hard drive docks with the release of its QuickPort Combo eSATA HDD dock that allows for both 2.5 and 3.5-inch sized drives to be dropped into it for easy access.

We've learned in recent reviews from Chris where he checks out two of the latest and greatest SSD controllers about in the SandForce SF-1500 and SF-1200; these are seriously quick controllers that don't break a sweat in running rings around the likes of Indilinx etc. albeit it's not surprising the latest and greatest also means drives harnessing this controller come at a greater cost.

However, OCZ knows there are plenty of enthusiasts out there who want the best and have introduced new variants of its Vertex and Agility series SSDs that use the SF-1500 and SF-1200 controllers respectively.

WD are about to unleash a new generation of Velociraptor hard disks, which while a little dimmer in the market due to the now dominant SSD wave, are still an attractive option for many and offer excellent performance in comparison to other traditional platter drives of today.

The new series of Velociraptors are scheduled to be unveiled in just over 24 hrs from now and while there's a tight seal on what's allowed to be disclosed about them at this point, sources have leaked some of the main points of interest.

Today seems to be the day for world records to be broken in the performance area and probably loads of LN2 to be consumed around the world.

Corsair just sent out an announcement that using no less than eleven new Force F200 SSD drives with an Areca 1680i RAID controller (the same one I personally use - it's impressive!) were able to smash the PCMark Vantage world record by almost 2,000 points.

We first heard about OCZ's plans to bring a SandForce based SSD to market late last month but weren't exactly sure when it would arrive.

We recently reported about a new version of WD's 1TB Caviar Black series hard disk that first showed up in Japan which makes full use of SATA 3.0 (6Gbps).

The folks at PC Perspective have obtained a sample in which they compare the drive's performance to a stack of other WD drives currently on the market. They test with Intel's ICH10R as well as making full use of SATA 3.0 in conjunction with a couple controllers from Marvell; one with caching and one without.

SilverStone has come up with an interesting device that works differently to anything else we've seen on the market up until now. The newly release HDDBOOST is designed to give a 'best of both worlds' setup using a traditional mechanical HDD and an SSD.