Storage > Hard Disk DrivesEssentials

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.