WebProNews

Tag: hard drives

  • Samsung Introduces The World’s Thinnest 2TB Hard Drive

    Samsung Introduces The World’s Thinnest 2TB Hard Drive

    The 2.5-inch hard drive is the standard used by small laptops and other small computing devices. Even game consoles like the PS3 and upcoming PS4 use them. The only problem is that these devices can’t take advantage of 1.5TB and 2TB 2.5-inch drives because they’re too tall. Samsung is fixing all of that today.

    Seagate’s Samsung HDD division announced today that it’s shipping the new 2.5-inch Spinpoint M9T to OEMs and retail. The drives are only 9.5mm tall and come in 1.5TB and 2TB flavors. It’s a major win for those who want more storage in smaller devices as 2TB 2.5-inch hard drives generally come in at 15mm tall and that’s much too tall for the drive bays of laptops and game consoles.

    “The M9T combines the highest areal density shipping in a single storage device with an innovative design that fits into mainstream notebook applications. While other 2TB are solutions on the market are 15 mm thick, the vast majority of mobile devices are designed to use a 9.5 mm drive; with the M9T, those devices can now have 2TB of storage, enabling a richer computing experience,” said Dave Frankovich, senior product line manager, Samsung HDD.

    As was the case with Samsung’s Spinpoint M8 drives, the M9T features a 5400 RPM spin speed, SATA 6Gb/s interface support, SilentSeek and NoiseGuard. There’s no price available for the drives just yet, but I’d ballpark the 2TB drive around $200.

    The Spinpoint M9T is a pretty big deal for laptops, but it’s an even bigger deal for PS4 owners. Sony uses the SATA 2.5-inch HDD standard for its next home console, but the company is shipping the PS4 with a measly 500GB HDD. Many PS4 games will require upwards of 50GB to be installed to the HDD and that will take up all your space pretty quickly. With these new drives, you’ll be able to store up to four times the amount of games than what’s possible on a 500GB HDD.

    If you don’t need that kind of storage right away, you also might want to wait. Other HDD vendors will no doubt come out with their own 9.5mm 2TB HDD solutions next year to compete with Samsung, and those drives might just end up being cheaper.

    [Image: Seagate/BusinessWire]

  • Marvell To Pay $1.2 Billion In Patent Infringement Judgement

    Marvell Technology, a semiconductor business out of Santa Clara, has just been handed what could be the biggest patent infringement verdict of the year. A jury in Pennsylvania hit the company with a $1.17 billion verdict after it was found to have violated a number of patents belonging to Carnegie Mellon University.

    The Contra Costa Times reports that the $1.2 billion verdict came after the jury found that Marvell had willfully infringed upon patents belonging to Carnegie Mellon. That could be especially troubling as the finding will allow the judge to impose a fines up to three times what the jury originally awarded the university.

    So, what patents did Marvell infringe upon to warrant this kind of verdict? The company used a technology developed at Carnegie Mellon that allows chips to better read data stored on high-speed disk drives. The jury found that Marvell had used the technology in billions of its chips without licensing it from the university.

    Marvell’s record patent judgment follows another billion dollar patent judgment from earlier this year when Apple won out against Samsung in a $1.04 billion patent case. Samsung has been fighting back against it since, and Marvell vows to do the same. The company says that it will seek to overturn the verdict, and will even take the case to the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals if necessary according to the Chicago Tribune.

    Despite promising to fight the verdict, the judgment has hit Marvell’s stock pretty hard. The company’s share price dropped 10 percent to $7.40 on Wednesday, and is down another 3.18 percent today for a share price of $7.17.

  • Seagate Achieves 1 Terabit Per Square Inch Hard Drive Storage

    Seagate announced today that it became the first hard drive maker to achieve the storage density of 1 terabit per square inch. The company claims the technology will double the storage capacity of today’s hard drives upon its introduction later this decade. This means 3.5-inch hard drives may store up to 60 terabytes in the next 10 years.

    Seagate used a next-generation recording technology it calls heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) rather than the current technology, Perpendicular magnetic Recording (PMR) to achieve this feat.

    “Hard disk drive innovations like HAMR will be a key enabler of the development of even more data-intense applications in the future, extending the ways businesses and consumers worldwide use, manage and store digital content,” said Mark re, senior vice president of Heads and Media Research and Development at Seagate.

    As Seagate explains it:

    “Hard drive manufacturers increase areal density and capacity by shrinking a platter’s data bits to pack more within each square inch of disk space. They also tighten the data tracks, the concentric circles on the disk’s surface that anchor the bits. The key to areal density gains is to do both without disruptions to the bits’ magnetization, a phenomenon that can garble data. Using HAMR technology, Seagate has achieved a linear bit density of about 2 million bits per inch, once thought impossible, resulting in a data density of just over 1 trillion bits, or 1 terabit, per square inch – 55 percent higher than today’s areal density ceiling of 620 gigabits per square inch.”

    While it’s fascinating that hard drives will be improving so vastly in the near future, it’s not really unexpected, and Seagate has always been an industry leader when it comes to hard drive storage and speed. What I want to see is a hard drive large enough, durable enough, and safe enough to install as a cyber-brain.

  • The World’s Smallest USB Drive and Portable Hard Drive

    The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas wrapped up this past weekend, but the experience will be felt throughout the year as the companies that demonstrated upcoming products release those products to the world. One of the companies presenting at the event was Verbatim, and they have some new portable data devices on the way.

    WebProNews got a look at some of the company’s upcoming offerings, which can be viewed in the following clip:

    Among the Verbatim’s upcoming offerings are the "smalest USB drive in the world and the "smallest portable hard drive in the world). These are the "Tuff-‘N’-Tiny" USB drive and the Titan SX portable hard drive. The former, which is waterproof, dust proof, and shock resistant comes with password protectection software, and in 2, 4, 8, and 16GB capacities. The price points are affordable too, with the 2GB drive priced at $12.95 and the soon to be released 16GB drive retailing for $86.99. The Titan SX portable hard drive will come in 320, 500, and 640 GB capacities at the end of February, and up to a TB by Q3.

    Also on display was the upcoming InSight USB portable hard drive with always-on LCD display.  Check out the video to catch a glimpse of the products.

    Keep an eye out on WebProNews and the WebProNews Video Blog for more interviews and product demos from CES.
     

    Related Articles:

    > A Print Shop for a New Decade

    > A Close Up with Sony’s New Personal Internet Viewer

    > HP Unveils New Touch Notebook and Some New Minis at CES