Hard Disk Drives

Fusion-io Friday announced what it is calling the fastest server-based solid state drive on the market today, with double the slot capacity if its older PCI Express-based ioDrive.

A New York computer forensics firm found that 40 percent of the hard disk drives it recently purchased in bulk orders from eBay contained personal, private and sensitive information -- everything from corporate financial data to the Web-surfing history and downloads of a man with a foot fetish.

Toshiba and Fujitsu have signed a provisional agreement under which Toshiba will acquire Fujitsu's loss-making hard-disk drive business.

Solid-state disk (SSD) drive architecture can play a big role in how fast a computer boots up and performs. But how big a role the SSDs play -- and how much faster an operating system is -- depends as much on the operating system as on the drive. Although none of the mainstream operating systems now in use have been optimized to work better with SSDs, some do natively work more efficiently than others, according to storage experts.

The hard disk drive (HDD) market became profitable again in the third quarter of last year while consumer and enterprise purchases drove up both shipments and revenue, according to market research company iSuppli.

Storage manufacturer Seagate will release its first SSD (solid-state drive) for enterprises by the middle of next year, CEO Bill Watkins said on Tuesday.

Toshiba will ship a 256G-byte solid-state drive for laptops next month, likely beating rival Samsung Electronics to market in their race to offer high-capacity drives.

Hitachi has developed a 450GB enterprise-class hard drive with speeds of 15,000 RPM, matching Seagate for the highest-capacity hard drive at that speed level.

The statistics of mean time between failures (MTBF) and average failure rate (AFR) have gotten lots of attention lately in the storage world, especially with the release of three much-discussed studies devoted to the topic in the last year. And for good reason: Vendor-stated MTBFs have risen into the 1 million-to-1.5 million-hour range, equaling 114 to 170 years, a lifespan that no one is seeing in the real world.

Seagate Technology today is set to unveil an updated Momentus laptop disk drive that boosts capacity from 160GB to 250GB.

Seagate Technology says it's adding a self-encrypting capability to its Cheetah 15K disk drive based on a specification promulgated by the Trusted Computing Group.