Earlier this week, Hitachi GST (soon to be part of Western Digital) announced they would soon ship a 1 TB single-platter hard disk drive. But archrival Seagate rained on their parade financing immediate shipment of their own 4 TB unit. With the industry consolidating rapidly, it’s good to see healthy competition among the two remaining hard disk drive giants.
Hitachi GST
My Incomplete, Subjective List of Enterprise SSD Companies
Jean-Jacques Maleval posted a “complete list of 85 SSD manufacturers in the world†over at StorageNewsletter, and I was surprised to see so many unfamiliar names in the list. So here’s my own rundown of the enterprise SSD makers to keep an eye on in the coming year!
Forecasting Seagate’s Next-Generation Momentus 5400.8 Family
Seagate is one of the world’s most-successful hard disk drive companies, consistently ranked first in overall sales for a decade. The company is respected for their high-end products, but is aggressively moving into the world of smaller hard disks for laptops and portable storage as well. The company’s mainstream “Momentus” portable hard disk family has kept pace with the industry, but Seagate will soon break away with a major jump in areal density. Using public information, and the first product in this line, we will consider what Seagate’s eighth-generation Momentus family will look like.
Hitachi GST Joins WD On The “Advanced Format” Hard Disk Drive Bandwagon
Another limit is being pushed in computers: The 32-bit LBA addressing mode. Hard disk drives have simply become too big for the 2.1 TB allowed by 32-bit LBA and 512 K sectors. Western Digital was first to answer this challenge with “Advanced Format”, and Seagate took an alternate 48-bit LBA route. Now Hitachi GST introduced an Advanced Format drive of their own. Will the industry ever adopt 48-bit LBA?
Pillar First To Put Faith In 2 TB Enterprise Drives
That didn’t take long! Just two weeks ago, Xyratex announced that they would support Hitachi Global Storage’s 2 TB enterprise hard disk drives. We wondered at the time which OEM would be the first to ship such massive drives, and our question is answered today. Pillar Data announced today that they are now supplying 2 […]
