Posts Tagged ‘Hard Drive’

Toshiba Brings Ivy Bridge to Three Notebooks and an AIO

May 21st, 2012

The Ivy Bridge-based bounty from Toshiba today is great indeed. The company announced a trio of notebooks and an all-in-one, primarily designed for audio/visual consumption.

The Qosmio T752 is a high-end A/V notebook boasting an aluminum case, 15.6-inch LCD screen, 8GB of memory, a 1TB hard drive, and an Intel Core i7-3610QM (2.3GHz) processor. Toshiba also gave it a Blu-ray drive, integrated webcam, and a TV tuner, with nice speakers and SRS 3D sound. If you’re into glasses-less 3D (and who isn’t?), you might prefer the Qosmio T852, which otherwise sports essentially the same specs and features as the T752

A step down in terms of features in the T552, which still has the Intel Core i7-3610QM (2.3GHz) chip, ODD, 15.6-inch screen, webcam, and memory, although you’ll have to settle for a 750GB hard drive instead of the 1TB deal.

Toshiba also announced the Regza D732, an all-in-one with a 23-inch (1920×1080) LCD display, i7-3610QM processor, 2TB of storage, and 8GB of system memory. It also has a Blu-ray drive, webcam, TV tuner, Onkyo speakers, and SRS sound.

If you want to take a longer look at the press release you can check it out here (translated), or here if you read Japanese.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/Toshiba-Brings-Ivy-Bridge-to-Three-Notebooks-and-an-AIO/

HGST Introduces New CinemaStar Hard Drives For A/V And CE Devices

May 17th, 2012

HGST announced a new family of CinemaStar 2.5-inch hard disk drives for the traditional and small form factor audio/video and consumer electronics markets. The new CinemaStar family includes the CinemaStar Z7K500, CinemaStar C5K1000, and CinemaStar Z5K500 families. The CinemaStar Z7K500 family is designed for high performance A/V streaming. This one-disk, 7mm, 7200 RPM, 2.5-inch drive promises speed and power-efficiency. The CinemaStar C5K1000 family offers capacities up to 1TB in a small footprint with its 2.5-inch form factor. This 5,400 RPM drive is also available in capacities of 750GB and 640GB. Finally, the CinemaStar Z5K500 family features a one-disk design and comes in 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacities. This 7mm, 5400 RPM, 2.5-inch CE hard drive is quiet, making it ideal for use in a DVR. The new 2.5-inch CinemaStar family is now shipping in limited quantities.

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NYSE: WDC) today announced a new family of CinemaStar™ 2.5-inch hard disk drives (HDDs) for the growing traditional and small form factor audio/video (A/V) and consumer electronics (CE) HDD markets. With continued technological advancements and increased capacities, 2.5-inch hard drives are satisfying the needs of both the traditional 3.5-inch CE market as well as the small form factor market, while allowing OEMs to design smaller, more compact A/V streaming devices.

From slim 7mm z-height 500GB HDDs to high-capacity, 2.5-inch, 9.5mm 1TB HDDs, HGST’s new CinemaStar family targets the vast majority of CE capacity needs, while providing the right balance of performance, low power and quiet acoustics for multi-stream digital video recorders (DVRs) and set-top-boxes (STBs). Now in its sixth generation, each CinemaStar drive is fine-tuned with advanced streaming technology to efficiently optimize the 24/7 recording and playback of A/V content.

The new CinemaStar family includes:

CinemaStar Z7K500 Family for High Performance A/V Streaming – The CinemaStar Z7K500 family is the industry’s first one-disk, 7mm, 7200 RPM, 2.5-inch drive designed for high-performance A/V streaming. It delivers blazing speed, power-efficiency and design flexibility for uninterrupted content delivery and storage. The 7mm CinemaStar Z7K500 drive can be a direct replacement for standard 9.5mm hard drives and is well suited for slim TV integration, and high-performance multi-tuner DVRs and STBs that let you stream, record and watch programming at the same time. The CinemaStar Z7K500 family comes with a 6Gb/s SATA interface and a 32MB cache buffer, and is available in 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacities.
CinemaStar C5K1000 Family Delivers Massive Capacity in a Small Footprint – The new CinemaStar C5K1000 drive delivers a generous 1TB capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor, meeting the needs of a growing number of CE OEMs who wish to offer video recording and playback features in a compact design, while still offering massive capacity and functionality as seen in much larger units in households today. The new 5,400 RPM, 9.5mm, 2.5-inch CinemaStar C5K1000 family delivers read/write power as low as 1.5 watts (W) and a quiet operation at 2.4 bels idle. The drive family is available in 1TB, 750GB and 640GB capacities.
CinemaStar™ Z5K500 Family Offers Mainstream Performance and Capacity – The CinemaStar Z5K500 offering is HGST’s second-generation, 7mm, 5400 RPM, 2.5-inch CE HDD family, featuring a one-disk design with 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacities. With its slim 7mm HDD design, power as low as 1.4W during read/write operations and a barely audible sound at 1.9 idle bels, OEMs can easily design smaller, quieter and more power-efficient DVR solutions with enough streaming performance and capacity to store 185¹ hours of HD video or television shows.

With design wins in virtually all major markets, HGST’s CinemaStar hard drive family is the storage muscle behind A/V streaming devices today. HGST CinemaStar drives offer specialized advanced features and integrated technology for high-definition multi-stream DVRs, tuner-based STBs as well as IPTV set-top boxes, DVR-enabled TVs, audio systems and video surveillance systems.

All CinemaStar drives feature HGST’s patented and innovative SmoothStream™ technology, which enables the drives to perform efficiently and provide the best viewing experience possible. The HGST SmoothStream technology supports the industry-standard ATA-7 streaming command set, and SMART command transport (SCT) provides time-limited error recovery and thermal monitoring capabilities for a longer system life. Together, the SCT protocol and HGST SmoothStream technology minimize disruptions in stream delivery by adapting buffer management behavior and error recovery timing to match the characteristics of typical streaming applications.

“Increasingly, set-top-box, DVR, and game console manufacturers are leveraging smaller 2.5-inch form factor HDDs instead of traditional 3.5-inch drives in more compact CE product designs,” said John Rydning, IDC’s HDD research vice president. “With 2.5-inch HDDs able to offer the capacity sweet spot for set top boxes and DVRs, IDC expects 2.5-inch HDD shipments into these applications will grow at a worldwide 2011-2016 compound annual growth rate of 21.8%.”²

“The ever increasing appetite for on-demand entertainment is driving the adoption of high-capacity 2.5-inch hard disk drives into a growing number of CE applications,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. “Not only is there a desire to increase the storage capacity in these devices to hold more programs, but they must deliver predictable A/V streaming performance. With our broad new family of 2.5-inch CinemaStar drives, we continue to give our customers the flexibility to select a variety of reliable and robust drives to meet their cost, performance, power or capacity requirements, while helping them to deliver smaller, more aesthetically appealing designs.”

Source:HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NYSE: WDC) today announced a new family of CinemaStar™ 2.5-inch hard disk drives (HDDs) for the growing traditional and small form factor audio/video (A/V) and consumer electronics (CE) HDD markets. With continued technological advancements and increased capacities, 2.5-inch hard drives are satisfying the needs of both the traditional 3.5-inch CE market as well as the small form factor market, while allowing OEMs to design smaller, more compact A/V streaming devices.

From slim 7mm z-height 500GB HDDs to high-capacity, 2.5-inch, 9.5mm 1TB HDDs, HGST’s new CinemaStar family targets the vast majority of CE capacity needs, while providing the right balance of performance, low power and quiet acoustics for multi-stream digital video recorders (DVRs) and set-top-boxes (STBs). Now in its sixth generation, each CinemaStar drive is fine-tuned with advanced streaming technology to efficiently optimize the 24/7 recording and playback of A/V content.

The new CinemaStar family includes:

CinemaStar Z7K500 Family for High Performance A/V Streaming – The CinemaStar Z7K500 family is the industry’s first one-disk, 7mm, 7200 RPM, 2.5-inch drive designed for high-performance A/V streaming. It delivers blazing speed, power-efficiency and design flexibility for uninterrupted content delivery and storage. The 7mm CinemaStar Z7K500 drive can be a direct replacement for standard 9.5mm hard drives and is well suited for slim TV integration, and high-performance multi-tuner DVRs and STBs that let you stream, record and watch programming at the same time. The CinemaStar Z7K500 family comes with a 6Gb/s SATA interface and a 32MB cache buffer, and is available in 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacities.
CinemaStar C5K1000 Family Delivers Massive Capacity in a Small Footprint – The new CinemaStar C5K1000 drive delivers a generous 1TB capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor, meeting the needs of a growing number of CE OEMs who wish to offer video recording and playback features in a compact design, while still offering massive capacity and functionality as seen in much larger units in households today. The new 5,400 RPM, 9.5mm, 2.5-inch CinemaStar C5K1000 family delivers read/write power as low as 1.5 watts (W) and a quiet operation at 2.4 bels idle. The drive family is available in 1TB, 750GB and 640GB capacities.
CinemaStar™ Z5K500 Family Offers Mainstream Performance and Capacity – The CinemaStar Z5K500 offering is HGST’s second-generation, 7mm, 5400 RPM, 2.5-inch CE HDD family, featuring a one-disk design with 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacities. With its slim 7mm HDD design, power as low as 1.4W during read/write operations and a barely audible sound at 1.9 idle bels, OEMs can easily design smaller, quieter and more power-efficient DVR solutions with enough streaming performance and capacity to store 185¹ hours of HD video or television shows.

With design wins in virtually all major markets, HGST’s CinemaStar hard drive family is the storage muscle behind A/V streaming devices today. HGST CinemaStar drives offer specialized advanced features and integrated technology for high-definition multi-stream DVRs, tuner-based STBs as well as IPTV set-top boxes, DVR-enabled TVs, audio systems and video surveillance systems.

All CinemaStar drives feature HGST’s patented and innovative SmoothStream™ technology, which enables the drives to perform efficiently and provide the best viewing experience possible. The HGST SmoothStream technology supports the industry-standard ATA-7 streaming command set, and SMART command transport (SCT) provides time-limited error recovery and thermal monitoring capabilities for a longer system life. Together, the SCT protocol and HGST SmoothStream technology minimize disruptions in stream delivery by adapting buffer management behavior and error recovery timing to match the characteristics of typical streaming applications.

“Increasingly, set-top-box, DVR, and game console manufacturers are leveraging smaller 2.5-inch form factor HDDs instead of traditional 3.5-inch drives in more compact CE product designs,” said John Rydning, IDC’s HDD research vice president. “With 2.5-inch HDDs able to offer the capacity sweet spot for set top boxes and DVRs, IDC expects 2.5-inch HDD shipments into these applications will grow at a worldwide 2011-2016 compound annual growth rate of 21.8%.”²

“The ever increasing appetite for on-demand entertainment is driving the adoption of high-capacity 2.5-inch hard disk drives into a growing number of CE applications,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. “Not only is there a desire to increase the storage capacity in these devices to hold more programs, but they must deliver predictable A/V streaming performance. With our broad new family of 2.5-inch CinemaStar drives, we continue to give our customers the flexibility to select a variety of reliable and robust drives to meet their cost, performance, power or capacity requirements, while helping them to deliver smaller, more aesthetically appealing designs.”

HP Thinks Thin and Light with new Ultrabook and Sleekbook Models

May 10th, 2012

Hewlett-Packard is fully embracing the transition in the notebook market towards thin and light laptops that are all the rage these days, just don’t accuse the company of playing favorites. Sure, Intel’s Ultrabook initiative typically gets all the hype and attention, but AMD is a player too, and in addition to new Intel-based Ultrabook and Sleekbook models, HP today also introduced a new AMD-based Sleekbook that’s the cheapest of the bunch.

Let’s start with the Ultrabook form factor. First up is a new 14-inch Envy Ultrabook that starts at $750 for a Sandy Bridge foundation or $850 for Ivy Bridge. Both configurations sport 4GB of DDR3-1600 memory, 500GB hard drive + 32GB NAND flash cache, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, two USB 3.0 ports, a single USB 2.0 port, SD card reader, Beats Audio, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. The systems weigh 4 pounds and measure about 19.8mm thick. The same configurations are also available in a 15.6-inch form factor for $800 (Sandy Bridge) and $900 (Ivy Bridge).

On June 8, HP will launch its Envy Spectre XT ($1,000), a 13.3-inch Ultrabook built around Ivy Bridge. This one has 4GB of DDR3-1600 memory, 128GB SSD, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, GbE LAN, Bluetooth 3.0, HDMI, USB 3.0, Beats Audio, and various other odds and ends. It’s 14.5mm thick and weighs a scant 3 pounds.

Finally, HP introduced a pair of Envy Sleekbook models, one of which is 14 inches and ships with Sandy Bridge ($700) or Ivy Bridge ($800), and one that’s 15.6 inches with an AMD Trinity APU inside ($599). Both feature 4GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, HDMI output, USB 3.0 ports, Beats Audio, and so forth. The Intel-based system has a 500GB hard drive, and the AMD-based machine is equipped with a 320GB hard drive.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/HP-Thinks-Thin-and-Light-with-new-Ultrabook-and-Sleekbook-Models/

Syrian regime uses Skype to fire Trojan at opposition activists

May 7th, 2012

Further evidence has emerged that the Syrian Government is targeting opposition activists using a well-known remote access Trojan distributed through bogus Skype calls.

A blog this week by Mikko Hypponen of antivirus company F-Secure describes receiving the hard drive image of a Syrian dissident’s PC which turned out to have been infected with the widely-available ‘Xtreme RAT’, a backdoor tool for remotely controlling and accessing PCs.

The activist had become infected after accepting a file over a Skype session from a known contact which he believed would help him to hide his PC’s hardware MAC address from Government snoopers.

In fact the file, MACAddressChanger.exe, turned out to be malicious and the contact had already been arrested before the call, raising the likelihood that the Syrian Government was behind the attack.

“We have reasons to believe this infection wasn’t just bad luck. We believe the activist’s computer was specifically targeted,” concluded Hypponen after tracing the malware’s communication channel back to an IP address controlled by the Syrian national telecoms company.

Earlier in the year anecdotal reports emerged that the Syrian authorities were using Skype to attempt to penetrate opposition communications using different backdoors, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) also reporting Xtreme RAT attacks.

The Syrian fascination with using malware has even extended to drive-by infections launched from a fake YouTube site.

The regime had previously resorted to the extreme measure of cutting off the Internet altogether but seems to have realised that surveillance offers greater intelligence possibilities.

As such the attacks depend on the PC being poorly defended or the user open to social engineering. The MACAddressChanger.exe and Xtreme RAT apps are easily detected by an antivirus programme that monitors IM. So far such tactics are aggressive rather than sophisticated.

Also this week, French researchers have gone public over a Skype security flaw that could compromise users’ IP addresses they claim was reported to the company in November 2010. This hole remains unpatched.

Source:http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/security/3355984/syrian-regime-uses-skype-fire-trojan-at-opposition-activists/

Hitachi GST Announces 4TB Ultrastar Enterprise-Class Hard Drives

April 4th, 2012

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NYSE: WDC) today introduced the world’s first 4TB enterprise-class hard drive family, the Ultrastar 7K4000. Ushering in a new generation of 512e Advanced Format drives, the Ultrastar 7K4000 family provides space-efficient, high-performance, low-power storage for traditional enterprises as well as for the explosive big data and cloud/Internet markets where storage density, watt-per-gigabyte and cost-per-GB are critical parameters. Hungry for massive storage, cloud and Internet businesses are redefining the datacenter by designing new types of servers and storage architectures to help manage explosive petabyte (PB) growth. Critical to their datacenter infrastructure is the ability to scale and efficiently manage performance, power and storage space to help reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).

The Right Formula – Capacity, Reliability, Performance and Low Power
The new Ultrastar 7K4000 family addresses enterprise datacenter needs by offering high reliability and a TCO value proposition like no other. As the only 4TB 7,200 RPM enterprise-class drive in the industry, and one with a 2.0 million hours mean time between failure¹ (MTBF) specification, the Ultrastar family is the ultimate solution for 24×7 enterprise applications such as big data, cloud computing, data warehousing, video-on-demand, disk-to-disk backup, and massive scale-out storage implementations.

The 4TB Ultrastar 7K4000 drive delivers 33 percent more capacity in the same 3.5-inch footprint at 24 percent lower watts/GB than its predecessor, the 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 drive. Now IT managers can get 2.4 PBs in the footprint of a standard 19-inch storage rack by stacking ten 4U, 60-bay enclosures. The Ultrastar 7K4000 family can also help datacenters achieve lower AC power and HVAC requirements. With five Advanced Power Management modes, the Ultrastar 7K4000 achieves a 59 percent reduction in watts from peak usage during low RPM idle mode, and uses less than 1W during standby/sleep modes, freeing up precious headroom for growing datacenter needs.

Designed for 24×7, capacity-optimized enterprise applications, HGST’s new Ultrastar 7K4000 drive family, which comes in 4TB, 3TB and 2TB capacities, is built upon technology proven for reliability, leveraging the system architecture and electronics of its predecessors. The Ultrastar 7K4000 family is the next generation of the Ultrastar 7K3000 series, which has been qualified at major enterprise storage OEMs worldwide, and is used in cloud and Internet datacenters around the world. The 7,200 RPM Ultrastar family is one of the most popular high-capacity hard drives for enterprise applications, with demonstrated field reliability. The Ultrastar 7K4000 family is set to continue this standard with a five-year limited warranty and a 2.0 million hours MTBF specification, resulting in a 40 percent lower annualized failure rate (AFR) than enterprise drives rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF.

“Our cost-effective, high-density, and scalable enterprise-class storage solutions are designed for a broad range of market applications including cloud, digital video storage, and backup, and HGST’s high-capacity 7,200 RPM enterprise-class hard drives play a crucial role in our value proposition,” said Gary Watson, CTO, Nexsan. “We all know that the need for more storage is expanding in multiple directions and dimensions, and Hitachi’s highly reliable, high-capacity HDDs allow us to deliver solutions where large capacities, density, and power efficiency are highly valued. We have been using Hitachi Ultrastar drives for years and look forward to qualifying their new 4TB enterprise-class drives.”

“We are humbled by the fact that our enterprise customers continue to appreciate and value our broad portfolio of enterprise HDDs and SDDs, which gives them multiple choices to satisfy a wide range of tiered storage requirements in the enterprise,“ said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. “With our new Advanced Format Ultrastar 7K4000 drives, we are providing enormous capacity earlier than otherwise possible for environments optimized for this technology, while delivering yet another offering that takes advantage of the Ultrastar family’s long-standing tradition of delivering high-reliability and low power for high-density cloud and big data applications.”

The Ultrastar 7K4000 family features a 6Gb/s SATA interface and a 64MB cache buffer. It is an Advanced Format drive, using 4096-byte sector size, and is backward compatible with legacy 512-byte sector size by offering built-in 512-byte emulation through the SATA interface.

The new Ultrastar 7K4000 family is now shipping in limited quantities. Customer samples are now available.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/Hitachi-GST-Announces-4TB-Ultrastar-EnterpriseClass-Hard-Drives/

Hard Drive Prices Reportedly Set to Drop Next Month

March 31st, 2012

Are you starting to run low on storage space? Before you bite the bullet and pay an inflated price for another hard drive to store your expanding collection of lolcats or whatever else it is that’s hogging your HDD, you might want to consider hanging tight for another month. If you can, you could end up saving as much as 10 percent on your HDD purchase.

According to news and rumor site DigiTimes, the Taiwan market is getting ready to drop the price of hard drives by around 10 percent at the end of April. It’s a move that, in part, is intended to promote sales, as buyers have been hesitant to stock up on storage ever since severe flooding in Thailand disrupted the HDD manufacturing business and ultimately drove prices up.

In the third quarter of 2011, HDD makers supplied the market with between 170 million and 180 million units. But after the floods hit, that number went down and has been slowly recovering. When the second quarter of 2012 comes to a close, HDD makers are expected to have shipped up to 150 million units before returning to 170 million to 180 million units in the third quarter.

However, don’t expect prices to suddenly return to pre-flood levels, even as the supply of hard drives returns to normal. According to DigiTimes, increasing production costs will keep pricing higher than what they were last year.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/Need-More-Storage-Hard-Drive-Prices-Reportedly-Set-to-Drop-Next-Month/

Portable hard drive sports 2-terabytes

March 26th, 2012

Available in five colours: white, black, silver, blue, and red, with a range of capacities beginning from 500 GB, the new sleeker My Passport portable drives offer digital consumers an array of storage options that reflect their personal style. Additionally, the new My Passport drives offer WD SmartWare automatic backup software and WD Security for password protection and hardware encryption.

With the addition of premium finishes, especially engineered to make the outer shell more resistant to scratches and fingerprints, the new My Passport external drives feature ultra-fast USB 3.0 connectivity; USB 2.0 compatibility; continuous, automatic backup software; and password protection with hardware encryption. The included software offers the flexibility to customise the drive to a user’s storage preferences: installing all features, just the components needed, or using the drive without the software.

Says Anamika Budree, WD Country Manager for South Africa, “The new 2 TB model offers massive capacity in an amazing pocket-sized enclosure, affording plenty of secure storage for all of one’s photos, video, music and other important files. Whether for business or personal use, the latest iteration of WD’s My Passport is a ‘must have’, ensuring your documents and multi-media are safely stored and protected.”
Given the small form factor and easy portability of My Passport drives, the built-in security features of password protection and hardware encryption help protect files from unauthorised use, making the drives safe data repositories for data while offering peace of mind to busy consumers on the go.

“More than money, jewelry and other valuables, the item most missed if ever lost or stolen is ones computer – and everything on it – so our goal in launching the next-generation of the popular My Passport drives is to encourage more consumers to protect their data before something happens,” says Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager of WD’s branded products and consumer electronics groups. “The new My Passport makes backing up and preserving one’s digital life easier, reliable and more secure than ever – it’s the perfect blend of monstrous capacity, reliability and user-friendly technology in a sleek form factor, now in five colors.”

Source:http://www.gadget.co.za/pebble.asp?relid=4482

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