Storage World

Fortress FXHDD2540 40GB

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 c...

Super Talent W1600UX2G7

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...

IOMEGA eGO

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 ,...

Th e Solid State of Storage

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 impervi...

New Hard Drives Are Soft On The Ears

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, meani...

NEC & Hitachi Drench Hard 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 ...

SanDisk Revs Ducati’s Engine

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...

Samsung Starts Sideways Storage

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 t...

Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition

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 ...