Hot news from the boys at Toshiba if you’re looking to squeeze more storage into your laptop without resorting to external methods. They’ve just announced the MK3252GSX, a 320GB 2.5 inch HDD that spins around at 5,400 rpm and is a mere 9.5 mm tall. The reduction in height means that this little sucker will fit neatly into super-slim laptops that require a smaller 2.5 inch HDD than their more portly brothers. Other spec include a 12ms seek time, 3Gbps interface speed and 8 MB of buffer memory. There’s also an optional Free Fall Sensor function to park the heads up once ‘freefall’ is detected.

Of course the big step forward with the MK3252GSX is the added capacity, admittedly blowing away the competition by only a mere 20 GB, but it does spin faster and will slide gracefully into an ultra-slim laptop. Apparently the extra storage is available because

The MK3252GSX uses an improved read-write head and enhanced magnetic layer to boost areal density and achieves a storage capacity of 320GB.

Anyway Toshiba will start knocking this big boy out around November time, so if you are thinking of investing in a new laptop and need plenty of storage it could be worth the wait.

Source: Toshiba

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The boffins over at Fujitsu Computer Products of America have managed to cram even more zeroes and ones on to a hard drive platter. Later this week Fujitsu will announce that

it has created ideally “ordered” alumina nanohole patterns for isolated bit-by-bit recording on a large disk area

according to ComputerWorld. What this all means is that hopefully around 2010 Fujitsu will be producing a dual platter 2.5 inch drive with a massive 1.2 TB of storage for your laptop.

How have they managed to squeeze all that data in you may ask, well you can check out the more technical stuff in the article itself if you are that way inclined - I tried and my eyes started to glaze over but then again I hadn’t had my first coffee of the day.

Aside from being able to cram more movies critical business data onto your laptop the drives will consume less power and require less cooling than larger drives which means Fujitsu get a gold green star for all their effort.

I also did a quick bit of math on these suckers and came up with a figure of 31.3 GB per square inch for the Fujitsu boys. This compares very favourably with the current consumer-available figure of 6.37 GB/sq in of the Western Digital 250GB Scorpio drive.

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It looks like network hard drives are quickly becoming the way to store large amounts of data on a network especially in the home or small office environment. Hook one of these suckers up to your router and you have the storage benefits of a file server without the cost.

To reflect this demand Iomega have just launched a new lineup of StorCenter Network Hard Drives with 500 GB, 750 GB and 1 TB options available. The drives are compatible with Mac and Windows networks and according to Iomega Corporation president, Tom Kampfer

Iomega network hard drive storage products are specifically designed to make it easy and dependable for SMBs and home office users to manage their data across the network, which is increasingly the location for storage products that deliver anywhere, anytime file access.

At the guts of these units is a 3.5 inch SATA-II drive spinning around at 7200 RPM with an 8 MB cache. You can also hook up extra hard drives (just in case 1 TB is just not enough!) or a network printer with the two USB 2.0 ports on the sucker.

These units will set you back US$389 (1TB), US$359 (750GB) or US$269 (500GB), so how do these prices stack up against the competition?

Western Digital offer their My Book World Edition II 1 TB model for US$450 or another option would be to purchase the NetGear Network HD Enclosure for US$100 and slap in a couple of 500 GB Seagate Internal HDs at a cost of US$160 each to bring the grand total up to US$420. Either way Iomega appear to have undercut the competition with these new drives. So if you’re looking for a bit more networked data storage then one of these drives could be the answer.

Source: Electronista

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An article has appeared on the American Physical Society website concerning the spin precession of magnetic material. When a hard drive is written to the data is stored as a series of zeroes and ones, which is indicated by the polarity of an area of the drive’s magnetic surface, i.e. the area is either postively or negatively charged. To change the polarity and thus the data bit then the spin direction of the atoms in the magnetic area is changed. It was believed that this change in direction was straight-forward and almost instantaneous during a write process.

However a bofffin at the University of California, Joshua Deutsch, along with Andreas Berger of Hitachi have published the article on the APS website that suggests that the change in rotational direction of the atoms is not as straightforward as first believed. The guys have found that the atoms undergo spin precession for a few nanoseconds as they change direction. In densely packed magnetic surfaces this could cause an ‘avanlache’ effect where neighbouring atoms change their rotational direction as well. Thus the neighbouring data bits becomes corrupted as the magnetic areas around have their polarity changed due to this spin precession.

Fortunately in current hard drives a damping effect occurs which generally prevents this corruption from occurring. However as drive spin speeds increase (another factor in causing atom spin precession) and the magnetic areas become smaller to increase drive capacity the ‘avalanche’ effect will become more of a problem. It’s not all doom and gloom for drive manufacturers as Deutsch and Berger suggest that improving the magnetic surface of drives would increase the damping effect and therefore offset the negative influences.

On that note, Western Digtal have just announced the latest addition to their MyBook hard drive range, a ‘huge’ 2TB external storage unit to be priced at around US$750.

Source: ComputerWorld

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On Monday Western Digital announced the launch of a new range of 3.5 inch hard drives that consume up to 40% less power than a standard drive. Entitled GreenPower the new drives range in size from 320 GB to 1 TB with the first of the range to be the 1 TB Caviar GP shipping in July.

According to the blurb from WD

By WD estimates, in certain applications, the new GreenPower platform can save greater than $10 per drive per year in electricity costs. For example, a data center with 10,000 drives can save $100,000 in annual energy costs, and reduce CO2 emission by 600 metric tons - the equivalent of taking almost 400 cars off the road for a year.

However a data center may be more concerned with performance than power savings and/or the environment, but we shall see. Certainly for the individual user the GreenPower range may give them that planet-saving feel-good effect when the drive whirrs into action.

Source: Western Digital

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I must admit I’m not overly impressed with the look of the new 250GB portable hard drive from LaCie. What’s even more surprising is that it’s designed by Porsche but then I’m not a lover of their cars either. But the drive’s stats do stand up nicely and I’m a sucker for numbers!

It can transfer data at 480 Mb/s over its USB 2.0 connection or at 400 Mb/s across the FireWire interface, spins round at 5,400 and is a slimline 17 x 76 x 129 mm. But the winner for me is the 6.35 ounces that this baby weighs - nice! The drive is already pre-formatted for both Macs and PCs, so plug it in and away you go! Unfortunately it’s priced at US$270 which is a lot more than similar spec’ed externals like the Fujitsu but then it is a Porsche hard drive :)

Source: Pocket-Lint

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Fujitsu have just announced they will release a 300GB portable 2.5 inch HDD in Q3 this year. No power supply is needed as it has a USB 2.0 connection with a 480Mbps transfer rate. This little sucker measures a slimline 21.8 x 84.5 x 120 mm and uses Fujitsu’s Cryptainer Encryption Software to keep your zeroes and ones safe.

The downside? A spinning speed of only 4,200 rpm, even the 120GB version spins at 5.4k. So probably not a great external drive for lightening quick transfers of large files - a shame really as Fujitsu could have had a winner with this little puppy. The price tag rocks in at $229 which isn’t bad for 300GB of data.

Source: Fujitsu

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