Korean silicon giant Samsung is ready with its 1.5TB high-capacity desktop hard drive, under the EcoGreen F2 series. The drive is labeled HD154UI. With this drive Samsung looks to focus on storage rather than performance, giving this drive a spindle speed of 5400 rpm, aided by a 32MB cache. This is where the company gets to brandish energy-efficiency, thus living up to its EcoGreen brand name.

Despite these specifications, the drive manages a decent set of scores on the HD Tune benchmark, churning out read/write speeds of around 105 MB/s sequential, and around 48/72 MB/s random access. It has a rated average seek-time of 8.9ms. This Samsung drive comes in the standard 3.5" form-factor. It uses the standard SATA II interface. The drive features some proprietary acoustic management features such as SilentSeek and NoiseGuard. It will be available in Japan later this week at a price of ¥11,580 (around US $130).

Japanese electronics firm Fujitsu has decided to closed down its hard disk drive (HDD) head production, to consolidate losses incurred by the business over the recent red quarters. Fujitsu produces HDD heads for both the components industry and its own HDDs. The company said it would book a loss of 5 billion Yen (US $55.8 M) in its investment in a manufacturing facility at Nagano, north-west of Tokyo.

The said facility will continue manufacturing other drive components such as circuit boards, while employees working for drive-head production will be moved to other jobs. While production of drive-heads will stop in March, the company is in talks with several companies over selling off its entire HDD business, according to company spokesperson Takashi Koto, without disclosing the names of the companies on table. Toshiba comes up as a prospective buyer. It has confirmed that it is in talks with Fujitsu over the sale of a business.

Spire, manufacturer of pc components and world famous for its quality and affordable thermal products today officially announced the Spectrum II. This upgraded version is a great little back-up tool to transfer and back up your valuable data from any IDE/SATA Hard Drive at speeds of up to 480 Mbps. At home, in the office or on the go, simply plug and play and secure your data by utilizing the one touch backup (OTB:optional) on the Spire Spectrum II.

The Spectrum II supports any 2.5" / 3.5" and 5.25" IDE/SATA Hard drive or other applicable device with the support for both PC and MAC Desktops or notebooks. If you want the most versatile back-up device on the market, choose Spectrum II. Don't settle for 1-year warranty as offered by others. Trust the brand with the industry experience and 3-year warranty, Spire - Powered by Innovation.

Seagate has issued an official statement today, acknowledging all recent problems with some Barracuda 7200.11 drives. Based on the information posted in the company's forums here, select Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB 3.5-inch hard drives made in Thailand, suffer from a firmware issue that bricks the HDDs after a short period of time. After three to five months of normal operation these defective hard drives will suddenly lock-up as a protective measure and prevent the system from recognizing the drive from then onwards. In most cases the information won't be lost, but the drive will be completely useless, changing the drive's electronics won't help much either. This problem occurs not only to the 1TB Barracuda models, but to Seagate 1.5TB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB Barracuda 7200.11 drives, along with some Maxtor and ES.2 models. That's pretty disturbing, but now Seagate will provide its customers with an updated firmware if their drive is problematic.

Transcend Information, Inc., a global leader in the digital storage industry, proudly announces its new 2.5" portable hard drive, the elegant and sleek StoreJet 25F. Measuring only 113.8mm long by 80.9mm wide and just 15.9mm thick, the StoreJet 25F is designed for business travelers and people who prefer an elegant way to carry their data. Combining its huge storage capacity with designer gloss diamond pattern and lustrous metallic finish, the StoreJet 25F is truly a marriage of technology and style. Moreover, its useful anti-slip rubber feet provide a stable base for resting on a table or computer case. Despite its compact size, the StoreJet 25F has up to 500GB of storage space so users can easily transfer, store, and share important files and data.

Seagate today announced two new members of its award-winning Cheetah enterprise-class hard drive family: the Cheetah 15K.7 hard drive and the Cheetah NS.2 hard drive. Current economic challenges have put even more focus on reducing spending to ensure long-term business sustainability. For businesses that have an existing investment based on a standard 3.5-inch enterprise infrastructure, the new Cheetah drives bolster sustainability through easy drive/system integration, and provide improved levels of system performance, capacity, reliability, and lower power consumption.

pureSilicon is demonstrating the highest-density SSD available today: the 1TB Nitro Series. This represents a major advance for the storage industry since it combines maximum density with high performance and low power demand. Four of these drives deliver 4TB in the same space as a standard 3.5-inch HDD, so server footprint requirements and energy consumption in data-intensive applications can be considerably reduced.

Seagate today announced at the 2009 Consumer Electronics show two new additions to the Seagate Pipeline HD family of purpose-built hard drives for Digital Video Recorders - the Pipeline HD Mini and Pipeline HD.2. The Pipeline HD Mini hard drive is the world's first 2.5-inch drive engineered specifically for use in digital video recorders (DVRs). With 160GB and 250GB capacities now available, DVR manufacturers can benefit from the lower-power performance and slim form factor of these new, smaller hard drives without sacrificing capacity for their content-hungry customers. The Pipeline HD.2 is Seagate's second generation of the Pipeline HD drive built in a 3.5-inch form factor. These new Pipeline HD.2 hard drives, available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities, give home entertainment device manufacturers one and two disk, cost-optimized solutions for today's high definition video recording applications.

According to reports by TechConnect Magazine, the third generation of the SATA interface could be introduced as early as the second quarter of this year. The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), who have developed the technology, are expected to finalize specifications, with the launch of products sporting the new interface at the same time. The first backwards compatible drives to feature the new interface are expected to be solid state drives (SSD), followed by hard disk drives (HDD) shortly after. The main advancement is doubling the bandwidth from 3Gbps to 6Gbps, but until the official announcement of the final specifications are released, we will not know what further changes are in store.

Toshiba Storage Device Division (SDD) is yet another manufacturer that is enhancing its storage line-up, by releasing a new half-terabyte external hard drive, after the start of Consumer Electronics Show 2009. The new 500GB Toshiba USB 2.0 portable external hard drive (model number HDDR500E03X) comes with a glossy black finish and frost white contemporary graphics that will appeal to most customers. Inside the case is a new 500GB ultra-quiet hard drive, with 8MB buffer size and improved acoustics. The drive also ships with NTI Shadow real-time backup software pre-installed. Toshiba's new 500GB USB 2.0 external HDD is priced at $179.99 (MSRP) and available now at Toshiba Direct and through major retailers and online outlets.

No, seriously don't. An engineer at Sun Microsystems' Fishworks lab discovered that yelling at your hard-drive causes sharp (yet momentary) increases in the hard-drive's latency. The engineer demonstrated this by yelling a portion of a server holding a RAID JBOD array, while monitoring its IO/s and latencies of the drive he was yelling at it. Each time he yelled at it, there was a surge in the drive's latency. The engineer posted his demonstration on YouTube. Now you know that yelling at your hard-drive isn't going to help, or is it? This opens up some interesting topics to research on, of how the rather loud environment enterprise hard-drives are put through in high-density storage environments impact on them, and to what extant vibration dampening helps them. The video can be viewed here.

Verbatim Americas, LLC, a global leader in digital storage solutions, announced today two new Quad Interface Desktop Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) with capacities of 500GB and 1TB. The pro audio/video-grade storage and backup solutions offer Mac and PC users universal connectivity with plug and play support for all four of the leading interfaces: USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and eSATA II (external Serial ATA II). With these connection options and the equivalent of 1000 Gigabytes of storage backed by Verbatim's reputation for reliability, the new external drives are ideal for audio, video, digital photography and music professionals as well as graphics applications where capacity, performance and reliability are essential. Affordably priced, the drive also puts volumes of storage within the reach of consumers and small businesses with large amounts of video, photos, music, and data files that they want to store, edit and protect.

MSI today announces U115 Hybrid. The very first notebook computer in the world that is capable of operating both SSD and HDD hard drives simultaneously, combining all the features of SSD and HDD in the U115 Hybrid for your enjoyment.

With MSI Exclusive Hybrid Storage Technology, in the "ECO on" mode, the battery life of U115 Hybrid is super long. This amazing battery life can escalate the mobility and the productiveness of the U115 Hybrid, which can also make your daily lives much more convenient.

Personal storage expert Plextor unveils the first truly pocket-sized external hard disk - one of the smallest 1.8-inch drives in the world. Weighing just 90g, this miniature device enables home users and business users to carry and share important data with them anywhere.
Perfect for PC and Mac users who find memory sticks too limiting, yet don't want the bulk of a full-sized external drive, the Plextor Pocket HDDs are only about the size of three memory sticks, yet offer much larger capacities - up to 120GB of storage. Plextor's pocket HDDs come in two sizes, the 60GB PX-PPH60U and the 120GB PX-PPH120U.

For people that still experience the freezing problems with their 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives, here is some relief for you. As previously reported here, Seagate has released a new firmware for the small number of drives with strange behaviour. Here's the official statement:

Some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drives may show uncharacteristic operation when used with Mac and Linux operating systems in multi-drive configurations. Users may experiences pauses in video streaming applications or a dropped drive from RAID arrays. Customers seeing these symptoms should contact Seagate Technical Support for a firmware upgrade. In order to assure the proper application of the new firmware, please email a description of the issues you're seeing to Seagate (discsupport@seagate.com) Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. Also, please describe your system, operating system and the application in use when the issue arose, and you will receive a prompt response with appropriate instructions. As an alternative to the contact email address above please access http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/.

Again, to obtain the firmware first you need to find your HDD's model number, serial number, current firmware version using either Seatools for DOS or just look at the drive's sticker it should be written there, and finally you need to describe your system specs, operating system and the application in use when the disk freezes. After you have that information, please contact Seagate Technical Support, by email or by phone, they'll send you the new firmware and probably tell you how to update.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, announced today that it has begun mass producing 256 gigabyte (GB) solid state drives for use in notebooks and desktop PCs. With the addition of the high-speed 256GB drive, Samsung now offers the most extensive line of SSDs in the industry with 8, 16, and 32GB SSDs for low-density designs and 64, 128 and 256GB alternatives for the higher densities.

Seagate, the world's leading provider of storage solutions, unveiled today a gift idea that will keep on giving for years to come. Originally introduced in September with a choice of four colors, the new award-winning FreeAgent Go portable hard drive is now available in all the colors of the rainbow, including: think pink, ruby red, solar orange, spring green, forest green, royal blue, sky blue, champagne gold, titanium silver and tuxedo black. The initial color options of ruby red, royal blue, tuxedo black and titanium silver are still offered and widely available.

Toshiba Corporation, the pioneer in small form factor hard disk drives (HDDs), today announced a new half-terabit HDD, the flagship model in a series of 5,400 RPM Serial-ATA (SATA) 3.0 Gb/s 2.5-inch HDDs offering enhanced features that will improve the user experience in mobile applications and other digital devices.
Available in capacities from 500GB to 120GB, the new series of quiet and durable drives is targeted for integration into notebook PCs, sub-notebooks, small form factor and energy star PCs, game consoles, external storage devices and consumer electronics products.

Fujitsu Limited today announced the development of two new series in its line of 2.5" enterprise hard disk drives (HDDs), the 10,025-rpm MBD2 RC series and 15,000-rpm MBE2 RC series, both of which provide standard support for the 6Gb/s SAS interface. The MBD2 RC series will be released in the first quarter of 2009 calendar year, and the MBE2 RC series will be available in the second quarter.
Compared to current 2.5" models, the new series improve performance by 60% in terms of internal transfer speeds. They are also more environmentally friendly, with halogen-free design - a first for Fujitsu's enterprise HDDs - and industry-leading power efficiency. Moreover, the series boast perpendicular magnetic recording, which enables increased recording density and allows the MBD2 series to have capacities up to 300 GB, noteworthy for 2.5" HDDs. The new models are well-suited to a range of applications, from servers to high-capacity storage systems.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today introduced the Travelstar 5K500.B, a mobile hard drive that combines advanced data encryption technology with eco-friendly features, such as halogen-free design and a read/write power specification that is the lowest in the industry.
The drive has earned the new Hitachi EcoTrac classification, used to describe products that minimize environmental impact in the areas of product design, manufacturing, operation and disposal.

Fujitsu Limited today announced that it has developed two new 500 GB 2.5" hard disk drive (HDD) models that feature a rotational speed of 5,400 RPM and deliver industry-leading levels of energy efficiency. The MJA2 BH series will be available from the end of December 2008, and the MJA2 CH series will be available in the first quarter of the 2009 calendar year. With industry-leading levels of energy efficiency, the new models consume only 1.4W of power when recording data, one-third less than previous models. Moreover, these are Fujitsu's first halogen-free HDD models, making them an environmentally friendly products across their lifecycle, from deployment to disposal.

Toshiba Corporation, the industry pioneer in small form factor hard disk drives (HDDs), today announced expansion of its market-leading 1.8-inch lineup with three new high-capacity, high-performance Serial ATA HDDs for mobile PC applications, including the industry's first 250GB) 1.8-inch HDD. Toshiba's third-generation 5,400 RPM SATA 1.8 HDD family also features 120GB and 160GB capacities, along with the throughput power of the SATA 3.0Gb/s interface. In addition, the new series includes Toshiba's state-of-the-art free fall sensor option, which enhances protection from external shock and vibration events by responding to drops as low as five inches in height.

Toshiba Storage Device Division (SDD), the pioneer in small form factor hard disk drives (HDDs), today announced the world's first dual-platter 240GB(1) (MK2431GAH) and single-platter 120GB (MKxx31GAL series) 1.8-inch HDDs for integration into portable media players, camcorders and compact ultra-mobile PCs for the holiday shopping season. The new MKxx31GAL series also includes an 80GB capacity offering, rounding out the most complete line of high-capacity 4,200 RPM 1.8-inch HDDs for consumer electronics (CE) and mobile PC system manufacturers.

Toshiba's two new Parallel ATA HDD families feature the industry's highest areal density at 344 gigabits-per-square-inch, using fourth-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, which was first introduced and commercialized by Toshiba in 2005. Toshiba's technology leadership in PMR has enabled the company to consistently deliver leading-edge capacities in the 1.8-inch form factor to support growing demand for the miniaturization of mobile devices to run digital video, photo, audio and computing applications.