Storage World

Say you need portable storage with a hard drive’s capacity. It has to survive the vibration of a helicopter (which gives most hard drives dementia), not to mention the occasional fumble on concrete or rocks. Your budget? Substantial .. . but subject to oversight.

At Fortress CEO Duncan Mackay’s insistence, I dropped this 40GB drive with positively ancient specs on a concrete floor. On its corner. From 7 feet up. It not only lived but also developed no bad sectors. I couldn’t even tell which corner the drive had landed on, as its electroless nickel plating wasn’t even abraded. Unfortunately, Mackay was unable to provide shock tolerance figures for anything but the bare drive itself, although the assembled unit does surpass the military’s MIL-STD-810F standard “by a factor of three.”

Fortress CNC-machines its enclosures out of billet aluminum, fills them with a proprietary, viscoelastic material a “solid that acts like a liquid” and then installs notebook drives encased in heat-wicking aluminum cradles.

The FXHDD2540 Fortress sent me had a 40GB ATA-100 Fujitsu MHV2040AT drive inside. Oddly, its FireWire link proved write-challenged, and its USB interface couldn’t reed good.

To reduce heat buildup, Fortress uses low-rpm drives. In fact, its entire $499 to $949 range tops out at 5,400rpm drives with 8MB caches. Mackay says a 160GB model and eSATA are in the works. A SSD (solid-state disk) could be made even tougher (and faster), but only at double the price or more. Corsair’s rugged Flash Voyagers cost just $140 online, but top out at 16GB. Hence Fortress’ niche.

It’s only been a few short months since Intel’s P35 chipset arrived with DDR3, and already memory manufacturers are cranking up the heat and releasing high speed DDR3 memory kits targeted squarely at enthusiasts.

Thanks in no small part to Micron and its Z9 DDR3 chips, a number of memory manufacturers were able to quickly introduce DDR3 memory kits rated for speeds in excess of 1.33GHz. One such kit is Super Talent’s W1600UX2G7. The W1600UX2G7 is a 2GB memory kit rated for operation at 1.6GHz with a CAS latency of 7. At the time of its introduction, these specs made the W1600UX2G7 the fastest DDR3 kit available. During testing, however, Super Talent tested its own speed record by releasing a 1.87GHz kit. The modules themselves feature cast aluminum heat spreaders, but only on one side; these modules are single-sided.

The W1600UX2G7 kit was tested on an Asus Blitz Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor. Because no P35 board officially supports 1.6GHz memory speeds, it was resorted to a little overclocking to hit the kit’s rated frequency. With the memory and CPU humming along at 1.6GHz and 3.2GHz (8x 400MHz FSB), respectively, SiSoft SANDRA XI reported available bandwidth of 7.9GBps. A low-quality F.E.A.R. benchmark yielded a frame rate of 344fps. I also spent some time overclocking the memory further and hit a stable 1.9GHz by setting voltage to 2.1V.

DDR3 system memory is currently much more expensive than DDR2 and only supported on a few Intel chipsets, but Super Talent’s W1600UX2G7 kit is a
clear sign that the technology is maturing nicely. By the time DDR3 system memory goes mainstream, enthusiasts will have plenty of worthwhile products to choose from. For now, though, Super Talent’s 1,600MHz DDR3 kit should definitely be on everyone’s short list.

Pocket USB hard drives are all the rage. One of the more attractive and reasonably priced offerings is the Iomega eGo. The drive packs 160GB of storage capacity into its red, chrome-accented frame. It’s shielded from tumbles and comes with a fine backup program, at least if you’re a Microsoft Windows user.

Designed to be economical, the eGo offers a better cost per gigabyte ($1) than many of its peers. Its hard drive yields decent performance, taking 54 seconds to copy our 1.2GB test folder , which is fast enough for backup or data transfer. The drive is rated to survive a fall of 51 inches at least when it’s not plugged in and operating.

The eGo comes with a license for a good backup program, EMC’s Retrospect HD. Retrospect can protect both document folders and entire hard drives, including the operating system and applications. But the drawback is that you have to download the program from Iomega’s support site. Worse, it works only on Windows systems.

All in all, the eGo is a solid portable hard drive for storing and transporting your digital life. It should be on your short list if you’re looking for more storage for your laptop or home PC.

The likely successor to the hard drive is solid state. But there’s still a price barrier.

Are hard disk drives destined to go the way of floppy drives? If the nascent trend in laptops is any indication, solid-state drives (SSDs) may eventually supplant hard drives.

SSDs are made of nonvolatile flash memory rather than the spinning disks and read/write heads of hard drives and are prized for their lower power consumption, reduced heat buildup, and dead-quiet operation. They are also impervious to shakes, shocks, and drops, which is why Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, and Toshiba have brought notebooks with SSDs to market.

SanDisk, one of the top SSD makers, says the flash memory drives can also improve system performance with data transfer rates of 67MB per second or more. SSDs can also stretch battery life, requiring just 0.9 watt of power, versus 1.9 watts for a hard drive.

The catch, however, is the price tag. SSDs cost from $11 to $19 per gigabyte, whereas hard drives cost a mere 32 cents per gigabyte. And though several companies have announced 128GB SSDs, most offerings top out at 64GB. “Businesses need to look at total cost of ownership of SSD versus HDD,” says Jim Elliott, director of fl ash marketing at Samsung. “If you’re managing a fleet of laptops, SSDs can reduce failure rates, downtime, and lost productivity.”

SSD prices will keep them out of the hands of most consumers. Laptops with SSDs cost $500 to $700 more than ones outfitted with three times the amount of hard disk storage. Analysts at Gartner predict that prices will fall and capacities will rise so that by 2010, about 20 percent of notebooks will ship with SSDs.

Manufacturers continue to work overtime to create quiet components for computers. In addition to power supplies, CPU cooling units, and graphics cards, hard drives are also receiving attention, and for good reason drives are a notorious noise source.

One of the latest developments in this realm is the SpinPoint S166 series of “ultra-silent” hard drives from Samsung. These drives use the company’s proprietary SilentSeek and NoiseGuard technologies to increase speeds while reducing noise, meaning that consumers won’t have to sacrifice performance for silence.

How much quieter are these drives? According to Samsung, which benchmarked the 80GB and 160GB S166 drives against competing drives, the new drives generate 2.4 bels (1 bel equals 10 decibels) in idle mode and 2.75 bels in seek mode, compared with 2.8 bels and 3.2 bels, respectively, in competing drives.

The S166 drives feature 7,200rpm speeds, an 8MB buffer, a SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) 3Gbps (gigabits per second) interface, and NCQ (Native Command Queuing) technology, which boosts the internal read-write optimization of the drives. Also included is improved “fly-height” control technology that increases readwrite sensitivity and an optimized actuator assembly that reinforces the mechanical function of the drives.

NEC and Hitachi say the new liquid-cooling system they jointly developed for desktops reduces PC-related noise to just 25db, which they say is quieter than the average home DVR. In addition to using Hitachi’s CPU liquid-cooling plate and wrapping the drive in noise-absorbing material and vibration insulation (which reduced hard drive noise by 10db), the companies claim the cooling system relies on the world’s first hard drive liquid cooling plate, which the pair developed together. Look for the system in NEC desktops selling in the Japan market “in the near future.” No word, though, on U.S. availability.

If you’ve ever throttled up a Ducati, you know it’s not just another motorcycle; it’s heaven on wheels. SanDisk apparently feels the same. The company has partnered with the high-end bike maker to create a line of Ducati-branded memory cards, including a limited edition 8GB Ducati Edition CompactFlash card ($314.99).

SanDisk says the line is “the elite, fastest, most high-performance products in the SanDisk portfolio of products.” In addition to the 45MBps read/write 8GB CF card, San-Disk is selling a 2-in-1 4GB Extreme Ducati SD Plus model ($129.99; 20MBps read/write), which is part memory card, part USB drive after you unfold a hinged cover, and a 4GB Ducati Ed USB Flash Drive.

Link: 4GB Ducati Ed USB Flash Drive

Perpendicular storage continues to gain momentum in the storage world, with Samsung joining Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, and other manufacturers releasing the next-generation hard drives to the market.

Samsung introduced its M80 Series drives featuring PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) technology in 80GB, 120GB, and 160GB capacities. The drives represent Samsung’s first foray into drives based on perpendicular technology, which places data bits perpendicular to the disc, compared to traditional longitudinal drives, which lay data bits end to end. The perpendicular technology allows drives to squeeze more data onto a disc and also prevents data corruption.

The 2.5-inch drives also offer increased data protection through the incorporation of free-fall sensors. Whereas other notebook drives offer up to about 325G of operating shock tolerance, Samsung’s new drives provide 700G of tolerance. Further, the company claims that the drives can more accurately detect changes in acceleration caused by a free fall, and the sensor “parks the drive’s head on the ramp” and turns the hard drive off, in turn protecting the drive (and its data) from damage caused by a fall.

Samsung also says its free-fall sensors differ from those in competitors’ hard drives because they’re located on the hard drive instead of a notebook’s motherboard, which increases the response time when a fall occurs and also boosts the quality of fall detection.

The OneTouch III Turbo Edition is Maxtor’s bow into the add-on RAID market. In an appeal to video-friendly Mac users, the device comes preformatted for OS X, but it’s nothing a reformat can’t fix. Maxtor’s client application makes quick work of diagnostics, backup/restore configuration, synching, and RAID 0 or RAID 1 selection. However, the RAID area in my software stated that the UI would return upon completion of RAID setup for formatting. This happened when connected via USB but not 1394a. I needed to manually create the partition and format it using Administrative Tools’ Disk Management.

Beyond that, there’s no bad news here. Maxtor’s design is simple, this is just two drives (500GB each, 7,200rpm, 16MB cache) in a subdued but sexy, rubberized enclosure with plenty of ventilation and a quiet fan. The unit is heavy and brick solid. You can pick striping or mirroring, and you have USB 2.0, 1394a, and 1394b (FireWire 800) ports at your disposal.

Here’s the kicker: In theory, a striped RAID 0 should show nearly double the throughput of a RAID 1 mirror before overhead. But, 10GB transfer tests show only a few percent benefit from striping. For example, running on a Gigabyte nForce 430-based motherboard, a 10GB write to the Turbo in RAID 0 over USB 2.0, 1394a, and 1394b clocks in at 26.0MBps, 28.7MBps, and 62.8MBps, respectively. With RAID 1: 25.3MBps, 27.5MBps, and 66.5MBps. These numbers are about 30% under what Maxtor states as its optimal in-house results (attributable to overhead factors). The interfaces emerge as the bandwidth bottleneck, even with 1394b. You’ll get a minor benefit with striping until an eSATA version arrives.

The Turbo Edition is the best external hard drive I’ve seen yet, although the ability to conglomerate drives a la Netgear’s SC101 would be a plus. This is a hot, high-value package.

Order now for Maxtor 1.5 TB OneTouch III Turbo Edition Hard Drive ( C01W015 )