Western Digital’s High Revenue

Western Digital, one of the world’s computer hard drive manufacturer has reported that they had better third quarter revenue, better than what the company has expected. They said that the increase was made possible by the high demand of enterprise customers. It has now dominated the hard disk market. The need for hard drives has been surging continuously because the demand for computers does not stop. It just increases in time.

Analyst have predicted something generally less because people have been choosing the use of smart phones instead of personal computers but it seems that that Western Digital will still be doing a lot of business. PC sales fell to 14 percent during the first quarter of 2013, this makes it the biggest dip for at least two decades but it doesn’t affect the sales of the hard drives. People who are not buying computers already have theirs at home and they still need more storage. 

Blade Runner

Here’s something completely impressive. A different style that has a purpose.  If you’re interested in having four very unusual terabytes sitting on your desktop, then Lacie’s Blade Runner Drive is exactly what you are looking for. This special hard disk drive was designed by Philippe Starck. Starck is a famous French product designer whose notable designs include an optical mousse for Microsoft and several yachts including the $300 million A and even new packaging for a beer company.

The custom-biult 4 TB USB 3.0 drives are being produced in only in a limited edition so if interested, you must be fast to order one. When asked about the product, designer Starck said : ”The warm interior electronics are encased in a mystifying shell, and the blades are the radiator that cools it down. The suspension gives space for air to circulate around the hard drive, and the metal material increases the temperature conduction.” The product will be for a retail price of $299.

What is it for?

A normal computer today would normally come with one or more hard disks. These hard disks do one very important thing which is necessary for majority if computer users, it stores digital information. It also provides access to to large amounts of data. It works as simply as a cassette tape, wherein files/data can be erased, re-written and can even remember what has already been stored in the past. All data that are stored in a disk are in the form of files. A file is a string of bytes. It can be in a form of different things such as images, texts, software application and so on. When a program running on the computer requests a file, the hard disk retrieves it and sends them to the central processing unit one at a time to be accessed. The bigger the capacity of the disk drive, the more files you can store. The bigger the capacity of the drive, the faster the computer can run as well.

4TB Hard Disk Drive

This year has been the unveiling of 4TB hard disk drives. Companies have been pushing for better and bigger storage and better performance. Both Toshiba and Western Digital has released their new products towards the end of the year.

Toshiba said “The range has been developed with the storage challenges presented by big data and cloud services in mind,” It is 50% increase in storage capacity than the last ones they have produced and 18% faster too!  The sample shipments will be available beginning this month and a bulk produce by the New Year.

Western Digital 4TB WD Black drives have maximum capacity, says Matt Rutledge, VP of Western Digital’s client storage group. He continued on “Maximizing the features and functionality of power computing applications such as gaming, multimedia and video editing, the new WD Black 4 TB hard drives offer capacity and performance – without compromise.”

Both of these products are expected to drive sales by next year, making the future of hard drives more impressive.

HDD’s will get even smaller next year

Laptop and Notebooks are making strides like never before this year. Therefore, one of its major components needs to change or, in this case, shrink but retain its memory size.

HDDs apparently represent the most expensive component in a netbook system, as CPUs, LCD panels, optical disc drives and batteries mostly fall between US$20 and US$25 each, while a 2.5-inch HDD can go for as much as US$43-45, a perfectly good reason for trying to lower the cost of these specific components. The three storage companies are said to be focusing on minimizing the cost of the drive’s ICs, magnetic platters, and pick-up heads. Storage capacities for the lower priced hard drives are to fall between 80GB to 120GB, on the condition that the price cut is effective.

Small is the future…

Source

New Hard Disk Drives

I’m no longer surprised whenever something so advanced and high tech comes up. I’m always impressed but no longer surprised. Just this month in Singapore, researchers have developed one of the world’s thinnest hybrid hard disk drives with storage capacity of over 1 terabyte. Woah, right? A typical hard drive is 7mm thick but this one is only 5mm thick. It has bigger capacity too since the typical ones can only store 500 gigabytes. Its perfect for tablets and ultrabooks.

It is called “A-Drive” is a hybrid hard disk drive. It costs less and provides more storage space. How much more? Well it can easily store 250,000 songs!  It is expected to cost around $60 when it comes out soon. There are no exact dates when this product will be available in the market.been developed by a team of researchers from the Data Storage Institute (DSI) of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research.

Hard Drive Myths part 3

The truth is current design of hard disk’s head actuators are not power-driven by any motor. Previous design of the head actuators are actually powered by a stepper motor. But currently head actuators use the voice coil instrument that uses electromagnetic power to stir the heads. In short, head actuators don’t have a motor to fail and not powered by any mechanical motor.

In addition, take note that head actuators’ automatically when there are power cuts meaning it is not an active process. Head actuator uses spring to park itself. The spring retracts the actuators when the power is cut while it moved against the spring tension when active.

Upgrading Your System: Goodbye to IDE Hard Disks

Although IDE hard disks are not yet obsolete, we have to face the truth that is has long been ousted from being the standard, having been replaced by the much faster SATA. And with technology advancing continuously, we can only guess how long the SATA will hold its place, especially with solid state drive now being used as hard drives in laptops.

If you are still using IDE hard disks, it is useful to know all you can about your hard disk. But it will be equally useful to start thinking about upgrading your system, or at least backing up your data in an external hard disk or even online via cloud services so that once your hard disk gives, you won’t be at a loss on what to do. While it is commendable that you aren’t buying into consumerism and using your hard earned money to invest and trade in the Forex instead of buying newer computer units each time a new model comes out, your old one is bound to breakdown sooner or later.

Image via Matt Kieffer

Hard Disk Role in Computer System

The hard disk possesses a major role in the various aspects relative to the operation of a computer system that includes:
• Performance – hard disk is important in determining overall computer system performance because the speed of boot up and loading of software applications are directly affected by the speed of the hard disk. It is equally vital during multi-tasking operations or processing large amounts of data;
• Storage Capacity – obviously, being the main storage device, a higher capacity allows for storage of more data and programs;
• Software Support – with inflated operating system files and software applications, the hard disk provides critical support to their stable performance;
• Reliability – good quality coupled with smart maintenance and back up will help protect your data.

Hard Drive Against Tape Drive

Prior to the introduction of hard drives, the main medium of storage used specially by mainframe computers is known as the Tape Drive. There are significant differences between the two storage mediums which include:
• Magnetic recording material on tape is coated on a thin plastic strip, hard drives utilize layered high precision aluminum or glass disk;
• The seek operation is faster on a hard drive compared to a tape drive;
• The head on a tape drive comes in contact with the media while on a hard drive there is no actual contact but flies over the media;
• A hard drive can store huge amounts of data in a relatively small space compared to a tape drive.