Storage World

The Bottomless DVD

Imagine storing 10,000 standard-definition movies on one disc. Sound impossible? Not to a team of Australian researchers. The team recently published a report in the journal Nature in which it details its development of a five-dimensional storage medium that promises to store up 10 terabytes on a single disc. Peter Zijlstra, James W.M. Chon, and MinGu of the Swinburne University of Technology found a way to combine addressing data using wavelength, polarization, and three spatial dimension...

Apple Remodels the MacBook Pro

The 15-inch MacBook Pro has been totally re-engineered. Apple's "unibody architecture" builds it out of a single piece of aluminium, which, says Apple, reduces construction failures. The design is easier to service, too. We looked at a 2.53-GHz Core 2 Duo model with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 5400rpm, 320GB hard drive. The ports, including Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, two USB, audio-in and -out, and an ExpressCard/34 slot-are on the left. The slot-loading SuperDrive and a Kensington lock slot s...

Chip giants unite for Flash replacement

A joint venture between two of the world's largest chip firms plans to release a new alternative to Flash memory this year. Numonyx, formed from the memory units of Intel and STMicroelectronics to commercialize phase-change memory, was created to commercialize Phase Change Memory (PCM), which is said to combine the read speed of NOR Flash and write speed of NAND. PCM memory also degrades far more slowly than Flash memory and requires no erase cycle. Phase-change memory works by using ti...

IBM Races To Create Faster Storage

The continuing evolution of processors tends to spark impressive innovation in other component areas, because no manufacturer wants its technology to be a data bottleneck in new systems. As such, the storage arena has made significant progress in recent years, particularly with solid-state drives, and now IBM is pushing that technology even farther. IBM has released details on a solid-state storage technology dubbed racetrack, named after the technology's penchant for racing data around a tra...

The State Of Solid-State

With the prices of traditional hard drives continuing to drop faster than a lead balloon, manufacturers are seeking technologies that not only can surpass those drives in performance and flexibility, but that can also deliver a higher financial return. On both counts, the SSD, or solidstate drive, appears to be the technology of choice. In December, Intel unveiled its Z-P140 PATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment) SSD line of tiny drives with relatively tiny (2GB and 4GB) capacities. A...

Seagate Is Not For Sales Yet

Gateway may have its price, as we learned in late August when Acer bought the cow hided company for a reported $700-plus million, but Seagate isn’t on the selling block, says CEO Bill Watkins, despite rumored interest from Chinese, Korean, and Japanese companies in obtaining ownership of the U.S. hard drive maker. Although the buying and selling of tech companies has become somewhat back-page news in recent years, the interest by a Chinese company in buying Seagate got the attention of U.S. gove...

Toshiba Notebook Drives Now Bench Press 320GB and More

If you’re a big-time notebook user, you have to be big-time happy with news of Toshiba’s new MK-52GSX 2.5-inch SATA notebook drive, which maxes out at a bigtime and world-best 320GB. The two-plattered giant runs at 5,400rpm and sports an 8MB buffer and 12ms average seek time. Expect production to start yet this year. Elsewhere, Toshiba also recently took memory card storage to unprecedented heights with a new 32GB SDHC card. Although that capacity won’t be ready until January, expect new 16G...

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 ...

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...