For people who want storage performance, solid state drives are the way to go. But with SSDs still costing around an arm and a leg plus a few strands of facial hair per Gigabyte, the good old hard drive is still the standard. But for people, nay, enthusiasts who want the best performance—which means going over the standard 7200rpm speeds on most hard drives today—without being stuck with the 128 to 256GB caps on SSDs, you shop for WD’s 10,000rpm VelociRaptor.
Seagate has announced the Momentus Thin, a new line of super slim laptop hard drives that measure only 7mm thick for fitting into similarly slim ultraportables. It’s a pretty significant size-cut, with the average 2.5-incher (such as Seagate’s own Momentus 5400.6) usually measuring 9.5mm. The Momentus Thin will pack a standard 5400rpm spindle, a SATA 3Gb/s interface, and an 8MB cache, but limited capacity that tops out at 250GB.
Toshiba has introduced a new line of 1.8-inch hard drives with a maximum capacity of 320GB (currently the industry’s highest for the 1.8-inch form factor) for fitting into thin and light notebooks, portable drives, and mobile devices (such as Apple’s iPod Classic). Falling under Toshiba’s MK3233GSG family of compact drives, the new models will be available in 160GB, 250GB, and 320GB capacities, and will feature 5400rpm motors, a 16MB cache, and a SATA interface.
Come to think about it, a 320GB iPod would be awesome, but any mobile device with 320GBs of internal storage would be great. Not to mention the fact that it’ll still be way cheaper than devices packing an SSD at half this capacity.
Seagate has just announced the Barracuda XT, a hard drive that’s listed as the industry’s first 2TB desktop drive to run the 6Gbps SATA interface. The drive also features a 7200rpm motor and a large 64MB cache for performance. It’s built with a standard 3.5-inch desktop form factor, and is listed to offer a 600Mbps burst transfer speeds, and pans out to a more realistic 140MBps sustained transfer rate. The SATA II interface is supported, but should still work with older SATA 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps systems.
The 2GB Barracuda XT will sell for $299.
Hitachi has just updated their line of 3.5-inch consumer-class CinemaStar hard drives with the 1TB, 7200rpm CinemaStar 7K1000.C and the 1TB 5K1000 CoolSpin. Based on 500GB-per-platter technology, both drives are designed to handle HD media streaming with advanced AV features, low temperatures and power consumption, and quiet operation.
