hdd

Seagate announced today the shipment of its 4TB Desktop HDD 3.5-inch internal hard drive for general consumers. While this is not the first 4TB hard drive on the market, the company says it's the first that uses the 1TB-per-platter design. Basically, on the inside, the Desktop HDD comes with four platters (disks), each offering 1TB of storage space.

The Desktop HDD is also the first desktop internal drive from Seagate that uses the new streamlined naming convention. Seagate's consumer-grade hard drives were formerly called Barracuda. Earlier this year, the company also shipped the first hybrid drive of … Read more

Laptop hard drive speeds aren't tied strictly to revolutions per minute anymore, according to Seagate.

Seagate is abandoning 2.5-inch 7200rpm magnetic mobile hard drives for hybrids that have slower-rated RPMs but integrate large solid-state drive (SSD) caches, the company said today in a statement provided to CNET.

"Seagate's innovation in the area of Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD) technology provides a much faster overall performance platform than 7200 RPM based hard drives," the company said.

Bottom line: Seagate is saying a 5400rpm hard drive with a large SSD is faster than a pure 7200rpm magnetic … Read more

EaseUS Disk Copy makes it utterly simple to create a bootable disk for your system on a CD or DVD, USB drive, or ISO image file, and use it to copy or clone disk partitions and recover data and partitions from backups, including sector-by-sector copying for total compatibility. With it, you can perform disk operations that usually require more than one drive (even more than one computer), such as recovering a backup of your main drive.

EaseUS Disk Copy is fully portable, so it runs as soon as you click its program file without having to be installed, even from … Read more

Apple's recently introduced Fusion Drive system is available in Apple's current Mac Mini and will be included as an option for other Mac systems starting in November and December of this year. This new drive setup has its benefits, but also some limitations, and to address these Apple has issued a FAQ that addresses troubleshooting and how the drive can be used and configured.

A Fusion Drive is essentially a hybrid volume that spans both a solid-state drive (SSD) and a hard drive installed in the Mac. As large SSD drives are unfortunately still rather expensive, to get … Read more

An Acer touch-screen Windows 8 laptop has popped up on the Home Shopping Network, along with other systems.

Brace yourself: touch-screen laptops will not be cheap.

Most of the specs are pretty underwhelming: a 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U "Ivy Bridge" processor, 750GB hard disk drive, DVD drive, a thickness of over an inch (that's considered plump in the age of the ultrabook), and a weight of 5.4 pounds.

But one hardware feature sets it apart from the Windows 7 rabble: a 15.6-inch touch screen to go with Windows 8's touch-centric interface.

And that … Read more

Think 2.5-inch spinning hard disk drives are slow compared with the solid-state variety? Not always, Toshiba seems to be saying with today's announcement of drives that top 10,000rpm.

Toshiba launched four 2.5-inch HDDs, ranging up to 900GB in capacity, that boast speeds of 10,500rpm.

That's faster than the 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm 2.5-inch HDDs typically found in laptops.

The internal transfer rate for Toshiba's AL13SEB900 family of HDDs is 286 MB/s (megabytes per second), a boost of approximately 32 percent over the previous generation of drives "due to improved liner recording density," according to Toshiba.

Though slower than the fastest solid-state drives on the market, that kind of transfer rate approaches some less-expensive SSDs in speed. … Read more

With Fujitsu today announcing new ultrabooks based on Intel's latest Ivy Bridge processor in Japan and Dell's XPS 14 Ivy Bridge ultrabook imminent in the U.S., it is becoming apparent that spinning hard drives are back in vogue for these slim laptops.

The 0.6-inch thick, 3-pound Fujitsu UH75/H ultrabook comes with a Core i5-3317U (1.7GHz) chip, a 14-inch display with resolutions up to 1920x1080, and a 500GB hard disk drive with a solid-state drive cache for the base model.

That last storage specification matches a similarly-configured Dell XPS 14 ultrabook model that is expected … Read more

The hard-drive activity LED on your computer's front panel flashes when your HDD is active. It blinks reassuringly when you think your system has frozen up -- or it did, when computer cases still had HDD LEDs. Fewer and fewer PCs display HDD LEDs, though most motherboards still support them. No need for hardware mods with Free HDD LED. This portable freeware monitors your HDDs, including SSDs, and displays disk activity in a desktop widget and system tray icon. It monitors SATA and IDE internal drives as well as USB drives, which means it's compatible with most drives, … Read more

In September of last year, slowdowns in the growth of the PC market led to a surplus of OEM RAM supplies and resulted in massive drops in prices for RAM in the following months. This made upgrades to higher-density RAM chips much more feasible for many Mac users, allowing them to do more with their Macs without experiencing slowdowns and other problems that happen when systems run low on memory.

Even though RAM upgrades being cheaper has allowed many to increase the performance of their systems, another major performance bottleneck of modern computers besides the RAM is the hard drive. … Read more