Category: Hard Drives
LaCie Rugged Safe hard drive offers 1TB of storage and military-grade protection
LaCie, veterans in the portable storage field, have today unveiled their Rugged Safe external hard drive range. Not content with shock-proofing your precious digital files with military grade exterior rubber shielding, it also offers 128-bit AES hardware encryption. That,…
Samsung to release Michael Jackson "This Is It" hard drive
The King of Pop Michael Jackson may have left this earthly realm, but that's not to say we can't have a string of baffling Jackson branded products to remember him by does it? Take for instance this Samsung Michael Jackson…
Buffalo updates its TeraStation III iSCI range
Storage giants Buffalo have today unveiled the latest version of their TeraStation III iSCSI product range. The Buffalo TeraStation III iSCSI Desktop and 1U Rackmount units offer data transfer speeds of up to 92MB/s, allowing critical business data to be…
Acer launch the Aspire easyStore H340 for all your digital data archiving needs
Computers get smaller, file sizes get bigger. Fact. But where to store all of our fancy new HD media and lossless sound files? Acer's Aspire easyStore H340 is one way to keep all your files safely stored away. The Aspire…
LaCie unveil LaCinema Classic HD media player and server
The LaCinema Classic HD is set to feature some pretty attractive functions by the looks of things. Giving change back out of £200, it's not too badly priced either.
LaCie launches the LaCinema Rugged HD
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.
Guide: The difference between SSDs and HDDs
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)
Solid state drives to match hard drive prices within "the next few years"
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)
Toshiba Store HDDs – the kind of storage that gets me hot
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.
VIDEO: See how fast SSDs can get
Most people know that the hard drive is one of the slowest bits in most modern computers, and we’re all eagerly anticipating the arrival of affordable, capacious SSD drives, but I hadn’t quite realized how fast these things were until I saw this video, from Samsung’s marketing team. Watch it above.
A set of 24 SSDs in RAID can open the entirety of Microsoft Office in half a second, the entire start menu (53 programs!) in 18 seconds, and can copy a DVD from place to place in less time than it takes to throw the aforementioned DVD out of the window. Best of all, the system can defrag in just three seconds. Impressive!
(via Gizmodo)