The relentless march of hard drive capacity is about to reach its next cantonment as 500 GB 2.5″ drives begin to arrive this month. These little half-terabyte wonders will continue the downward pressure on price and challenge flash-based drives just as they stake their claim in the main stream of the market.
Hitachi
Complying with Data Privacy Laws
I’ve been working on a new whitepaper for Hitachi focused on privacy laws in the United States and Europe, and what we mere storage folks can do to help comply with them. It’s pretty amazing stuff – the American system is totally different from the European, no surprise. Where they have sweeping top-down rights to […]
Water-Cooled Hard Drives
It seems that water-cooled storage isn’t just for IBM spinoffs anymore! NEC and Hitachi have unveiled a new water-cooled hard drive module for PCs (in Japan) to keep their drives nice and cool (and quiet, too!) Don’t expect to see this tech widely used, though. It’s way too complex for mainstream application. Once again, in […]
Specialized Server/Enterprise Hard Drives
Continuing my overview of the specialized hard drive market, we move on to the world of enterprise hard disk drives. These are performance monsters, with nearly all falling above the 10,000 RPM line that defines “exotic” in the desktop space. They also have a wide variety of interfaces, including parallel and serial SCSI, Fibre Channel, […]
Specialized Desktop Hard Drives
I will begin my overview of the specialized hard drive market with the ubiquitous desktop disk drive. While just about any drive could be used in a desktop computer, the class is generally defined by what it lacks – compact size, power efficiency, exotic interfaces, special drive features, and high performance are all generally not […]