With the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD war remaining quiet for the moment, which is surprising as the season of goodwill to all manufacturers is not that far away, the hard drive boys have picked up their swords and are preparing to do battle. Not long after Hitachi announced their intention to be producing 4 TB 3.5 inch hard drives by 2011, Western Digital have picked up the challenge and announced they’ll be producing 3 TB models by 2010. Here’s the techie blurb from WD

Following WD’s growing investments in technology the past five years, the company achieved 520 Gb/in2 using its own perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR)/tunneling magneto-resistive (TuMR) head technology. This level of density produces a 3.5-inch hard drive storing 640 GB-per-platter and single hard drive capacities as large as 3 TB. Based on the industry’s current density growth rate of more than 40 percent per year, those capacities are expected to be available in the 2010 timeframe.

The WD announcement was made at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo after it was demoed earlier in California and whilst it does smack of a ‘mine’s bigger than yours’ mentality or more accurately ‘mine’s earlier than yours’ it has to be good news for the consumer, doesn’t it?

At least it’s good to see a couple of hardware manufacturers squaring off in the storage arena, whilst all is quiet on the hi-def front.

Source: Western Digital PR

The boffins over at Hitachi have knocked together a quad layer Blu-Ray disc capable of holding up to 100 GB of glorious movie action. Whilst 100 GB Blu-Ray discs are nothing new, the good news about the Hitachi version is that it is the first 100 GB BR disc to only require a firmware update to existing Blu-Ray players to handle the extra capacity sported by these discs.

There’s still one glitch in the system to sort out regarding stabilising signal quality, but once the boffins have figured that out look for a commercial rollout not long after and of course the deal-clinching price tag on these suckers.

Hitachi are also currently researching an eight layer (octo layer?) disc which boosts the capacity up to a massive 200 GB. So it looks like the boffins won’t be unemployed any time soon.

Anyway the game continues with no end in sight, as disc capacity increases, at a rate possibly surpassing demand judging by the sales or lack of sales of hi def movies, however the increase in media capacity drives the storage manufacturers to squeeze more zeros and ones into their boxes. Also the processor guys have to ramp up the grunt at their end to handle larger files and of course memory sticks have to increase their size appropriately too.

Do we really need all this extra media capacity, processor power etc? Are we becoming more savvy in our entertainment and data needs and these advances are only keeping up with an existing consumer demand or are the manufacturers trying to strip every single hard-earned penny from wallets? Let me know what you think.

Source: Electronista

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

With TDK announcing its 200GB Blu-ray disc last August, Maxell (owned by Hitachi) have now announced the development of their own 200GB mutha disc (NOT pictured on the right). These big boys have eight layers of data instead of the standard one increasing a Blu-ray’s capacity from a mere 50GB to 200.

With such storage capacity hard drive backups will become a breeze and they’ll be enough video on one disc to keep a hardened couch potato happy for quite a while! Maxell are estimating that the discs will be commercially available sometime in 2009.

Source: i4u

Hitachi announced on Thursday their latest addition to the Travelstar range of laptop hard drives. This new puppy gives you 200GB of storage space with Hitachi’s “Bulk Data Encryption”. According to Hitachi the encryption process uses a key to encrypt your files, so if you need to dispose of the hard drive securely, simply deleting the encryption key renders files unreadable. Check out the full skinny from Hitachi.

These new drives are already being used in Dell XPS and Alienware notebooks.

Source: engadget