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

Featured tags: hard drive lacie porsche

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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

Featured tags: fujitsu hard drive

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As hard drives grow in capacity, our ability to transfer data from the device is still limited by the power of the magnet to transfer those zeroes and ones. However the boffins at Radboud University Nijmegen in Holland have used polarised laser light to read and write data from a magnetic drive. In the past the issue has been the inability of the laser to actually write to the surface of the drive, however reasearchers at the university have developed a gadolinium, iron, and cobalt alloy surface for their drives which the laser beam just loves to read and write on.

Using polarised laser light the researchers were able to transfer data at about 100 times the speed of conventional magnetic drives - at intervals of 40 femtaseconds - we’re not sure what a femtasecond is but it sounds pretty cool!

The downside? Well there’s two things really, the footprint of the technology is 5 microns which is considerably larger than current magnetic data transfer tech - this is the next nut to crack for the team at Radboud - and the first prototype is about ten years away. However this is still a giant step forward in data transfer technology so I say ‘Proost’ to the researchers at Radboud!

Source: Science Magazine

Featured tags: hard drive laser

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More hard drive news today with Seagate announcing its very own 1TB internal desktop drives, the Barracuda 7200.11 and ES.2. Both boast a SATA rate of 3GB/s with the ES.2 offering an SAS interface option, and have transfer rates of 105 MB/s with a 32MB cache, 4.16 msec latency and they’ll spin you right around at 7200 rpm.

The 7200.11 (aimed at desktop users) will retail for US$400 and will be available in the third quarter of the year. The price and the spec practically match the 7200.11’s main competitor the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000. This launch smacks of ‘if they’ve got one out there we have to have one too’ kind of mentality as the drive really offers nothing new. But competition is always good in the computer hardware arena.

Featured tags: 7200.11 barracuda hard drive seagate

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Hitachi have unleashed a new range of external USB hard drives, with a 250GB portable and a massive 1TB, err, non-portable version. Smaller versions are also available with the 160GB portable rocking in at US$140. All the drives feature USB 2.0 connectivity with the portable versions sucking their power from your PC.

I decided to do a little head to head comparison of the 160GB portable against cheaper competitors to see what I was getting for my dollar.

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