Have you ever wondered if mounting a hard disk drive on its side or even upside-down affects its lifespan or reliability? According to every drive manufacturer, it’s perfectly acceptable to mount a hard disk drive in any orientation as long as it’s not tilted and has sufficient cooling.
What’s In A Name? And Which Product Is Better?
Every day, I’m briefed by another company with a range of products from entry-level to high-end. And every day I try to figure out their naming scheme: It seems most IT vendors follow the naming schemes of car companies, but few use the same naming system!
Where Are They Now? A Tech Field Day Presenter Retrospective
After four years and 34 Tech Field Day events, many of our vendors have gone on to bigger and better things. After seeing today’s acquisition of Xsigo by Oracle, I decided to go back and look at how many of our companies have been acquired over the years.
Personal Storage Just Got More Interesting: Seagate Acquires LaCie
Seagate just responded to Western Digital’s acquisitions of Hitachi’s Global Storage Technologies subsidiary by acquiring LaCie. The €49 million transaction solidifies Seagate’s presence in the retail space, especially on the Apple side of things. In this way, Seagate will use LaCie to offset Western Digital’s G-Tech offerings.
NAB Show 2012: My Initial Thoughts
NAB Show remains one of my favorites, and one of the only trade shows I’d unreservedly recommend attending on one’s own dime. From Thunderbolt to post-HD video to solid state storage, NAB has it all.
What’s the Point of a Warranty, Anyway?
The idea of a product warranty is fairly simple: a company “warrants†that, should their product fail in a specified period of time and circumstances, they will repair or replace it, telling the consumer what level of reliability they should expect. In short, a warranty is all about confidence. But when does a warranty become a confidence game?
No More Green Drives from Seagate
Increasing hard disk drive density always brought better performance, and Seagate’s use of faster spindle speed will help as well. My only concern is the increased heat generated by these new drives: My GoFlex Desk drives are definitely hot to the touch when in use. But the availability of 3 TB drives is to be welcomed at this price point.
Seagate Jumps Hitachi’s Density Record With 4 TB Hard Disk Announcement
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.
What Is Paired Storage?
Paired storage is a growing trend in the laptop computer market, with many high-end machines sporting both a SSD and hard disk drive. But it remains a game for the rich, adding many hundreds of dollars to the cost of a computer, and manually placing data is inefficient. It will be interesting to see if future operating systems bring better support for paired storage, and if it will reach into the server world.
Iomega StorCenter PX Series Preview
The StorCenter PX line is a major step forward for Iomega. The BYOD option is welcome, as is SSD performance and improved specs. With official Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Windows Server, and VMware ESX support, the PX is finally up to the task of business computing. We look forward to putting these new devices through their paces in the future!