Category: Hard Drives

LaCie launches the LaCinema Rugged HD

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We told you last year about LaCie’s LaCinema – a rugged, portable multimedia hard-drive designed to host all of your multimedia content. Well, as the name suggests, this is the HD upgrade to that device.

As well as playing all the formats you’d expect of a multimedia player – it now plays all of the popular HD variations too, such as H.264, MKV, WMV9 and MPEG-4.

It’s got 500GB of storage and offers full HD, 1080p resolution via HDMI. It’s designed to be carried around – it has a unique varnished, scratch-protected aluminium shell and shock-resistant rubber sleeve that make it resistant to a bit of rough and tumble.

It’s £289.99 and it’s available now direct from LaCie.

Paul Lamkin Hard Drives, Home cinema

Guide: The difference between SSDs and HDDs

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This guide outlines the main differences between solid state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs).

There are two major types of SSD in current production — NAND and DRAM. This guide focuses on the more common one: NAND.

It’s worth noting that advances are being made all the time on both types of drive and that these differences are generalisations. Individual performance will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.

1. Speed

Most solid state drives, except ones made using cheaper components, are significantly faster at reading data than a hard drive.

This is because there are no moving mechanical parts on a SSD and so the “seek time” is significantly reduced. Incidentally, DRAM drives are faster still.

Writing large files is also generally quicker on a SSD, though at present there are often performance problems when trying to write a lot of small files to a SSD. It’s possible to overcome this through improved system design.

In general, though, SSDs are faster than HDDs.

(PS: SSDs are generally quieter than HDDs because they don’t have any moving parts and are usually fanless)

Andy Merrett Comparisons, Hard Drives

Solid state drives to match hard drive prices within "the next few years"

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Although solid state drives deliver incredible performance compared to their creaky, mechanical brethren, one area that SSDs have difficulty competing on is price. Opting for an SSD on a laptop, rather than a normal drive, can add hundreds of pounds to its cost, and you’ll likely end up with a smaller capacity too.

Flash marketing manager for Samsung, Brian Beard, says: “Flash memory in the last five years has come down 40, 50, 60 percent per year. Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years.”

The cost gap exists, Beard explains, because the two drives are built differently. In a traditional hard drive, the spindle, motors, PCB and cables all have a fixed price. Upgrading one of them – the motor, for example, so it spins faster – doesn’t add a massive incremental cost to the unit.

An SSD on the other hand, has a very small fixed cost – just the PCB and the enclosure. If you upgrade the memory units, increasing the speed or the capacity, the price increases linearly. A doubling of capacity will nearly double the price.

There’s plenty of pressure on SSD manufacturers to make their drives conform to the industry standard set up HDDs, but the flash memory market is notoriously unpredictable, so it could be some time things settle down. For the consumer, 256GB solid state drives are only now rolling out into mass production.

(via Cnet)

Duncan Geere Computers, Hard Drives

Toshiba Store HDDs – the kind of storage that gets me hot

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I’m not sure why I get excited about external storage solutions. I think it’s the computer equivalent of shelving and anyone out there can understand people getting pleasure out of talking about that, right?

So, that given, you can basically double my levels of manly excitement when I see that these things look as good as the latest range of external drives from Toshiba. If you like them gloss, then go for the Toshiba Store Art which come in 1.8″, 2.5″ and 3.5″ depending upon how large your collection of illegal downloads is – 160GB, 500GB or a whole fat 1TB.

Daniel Sung Computers, Hard Drives