Today, Star Wars fans have another way to feel the power of the Force with three new collectible Seagate Hard Disk Drives (HDD) inspired by heroes and villains of the Star Wars galaxy. Featuring Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and Han Solo, the latest additions to the company's line of licensed special edition storage devices bring speed, capacity, and striking appearance to the battle stations of Star Wars collectors and tech enthusiasts.

The special edition FireCuda external hard drives represent the famed characters with three unique aesthetics: the courage of Luke Skywalker, the raw power of Darth Vader, and the confidence of the galaxy's favorite smuggler, Han Solo. The drives offer customizable RGB LED lighting and each design features a default custom character light out-of-the-box: a forceful blue for Luke Skywalker, a wrathful red for Darth Vader, and a white glow reminiscent of the Millennium Falcon for Han Solo. With built-in and customizable lighting options, all three of the drives enable Star Wars enthusiasts and gamers to awaken the powers of the Force at home.

Seagate announces three all-new external hard disk drives (HDD) featuring designs inspired by the stories and characters of Marvel Studios' Black Panther. The officially licensed HHDs are available this month and join the company's line of special edition storage devices. Paying homage to T'Challa (aka Black Panther), Shuri, and Okoye, these special edition HDDs deliver one-of-a-kind pieces of Marvel artwork to fans and highlight traits of the characters with customizable RGB LED lighting: magenta to honor Black Panther, cyan for the innovative style of Princess Shuri, and yellow for the elite strength of the warrior, Okoye.

With up to 2 TB of capacity, the FireCuda external HDDs are compatible with PC, Mac, PlayStation, and Xbox so tech enthusiasts can capture and access a wealth of media, files, and games, regardless of operating system. USB bus-powered and designed with USB 3.2 Gen 1 connection for universal compatibility and quick transfer speeds, the lightweight drives make it easy for Black Panther fans to take their whole library on the road.

Western Digital Corp. (Nasdaq: WDC) today reported fiscal first quarter 2023 financial results. "I am pleased to see the Western Digital team work together to deliver revenue at the upper half of the guidance range and operating income at the upper half as implied by the midpoints of our guidance, in the midst of an incredibly dynamic and challenging macroeconomic environment," said David Goeckeler, Western Digital CEO. "Overall, the organizational and portfolio improvements we have made over the past few years have equipped us to effectively manage through this consumer-led downturn, which is showing signs of stabilization. As we remain focused on innovation and execution, I am optimistic that Western Digital will emerge stronger as we continue to ramp multiple new products into data centers worldwide and market conditions improve."

Cloud storage provider Backblaze is one of the industry players providing insightful reports into the health and reliability of the storage mediums they invest in to support their business. In its most recent report, the company shared data that may finally be pointing towards the general perception (and one of SSD's call to fame upon their introduction): that they boast of higher reliability and lower failure rates than HDDs.

The company's latest reports shows that SSDs have entered their fifth operating year without an escalation in failure rates: something that seems to plague HDDs pretty heavily starting from year 4. The idea is simple: SSDs should be more reliable because there are no moving part (no platters and no read/write heads that can fail). However, SSDs do have other points of failure, such as NAND itself (the reason there's TBW ratings) or its controller. Backblaze's data does however show that those concerns may be overrated. Of course, there's a chance that SSDs employed by Backblaze will hit a "reliability" wall of the sort that HDDs seem to enter in year four of their operation, where failure rates increase immensely. More data throughout a larger span of time will be welcome, but for now, it does seem that SSDs are the best way for users to keep their data available.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking, and storage solution innovator, today launched the 2-bay TS-253E and 4-bay TS-453E NAS. The TS-x53E series are powered by an Intel Celeron J6412 quad-core processor (burst up to 2.60 GHz), which will be available and supported by QNAP for an extended period (up to 2029). The TS-x53E series are ideal for managed service providers, system integrators, and other IT-related businesses requiring matching NAS models for long-term projects.

"Over the years QNAP has received many requests from businesses that require NAS with long-term availability," said Andy Chuang, Product Manager of QNAP, adding "the TS-x53E series, which will be available and supported by QNAP for an extended period, is a perfect fit for these businesses and other users who require the reassurance of long-term availability."

LaCie, the premium brand from Seagate Technology Holdings plc, today announced the latest evolution of its popular mobile HDD storage line - LaCie Mobile Drive and LaCie Mobile Drive Secure. Trusted by design enthusiasts and creative professionals since its inception, LaCie consistently delivers iconic storage solutions in which form and function fuse into holistically enjoyable user experience.

LaCie Mobile Drive lives up to its LaCie pedigree with a design and construction built to last. Encased in an all-new innovative design by Neil Poulton, each drive features sturdy aluminium to bring strength to the enclosure. This new generation of LaCie drives includes important sustainability improvements by using post-consumer recycled (PCR) aluminium and plastic. Packaging in the box is also made from recycled cardboard.

With the great power of the hard drive comes the great responsibility to securely store and quickly access data. Inspired by the world of Marvel's Spider-Man, Seagate Technology plc today introduced three all-new officially licensed Marvel limited-edition Spider-Man external hard disk drive (HDD) designs joining the company's line of special edition storage devices.

Commemorating Spider-Man, Ghost-Spider (aka Gwen Stacy), and Miles Morales, these special edition HDDs deliver the Spider-Man fan an opportunity to own three unique drives featuring one-of-a-kind Marvel artwork. Each drive also features customizable RGB LED lighting, making it the ultimate accessory to Spidey-themed or other gaming set ups.

The new Stream S05 from Silicon Power (SP) was designed to be the perfect portable hard drive for saving on the go. The Stream S05 will be your new favorite 2.5" portable hard drive. Intended for everyday use, its compact and lightweight design comfortably fits in your hand for ultimate portability. Bring it with you wherever you go to back-up everything from important documents to irreplaceable memories, reliably and securely. Photos, videos, songs, documents - whatever you need to back-up, the Stream S05 has space for tons of it with up to 5 TB of storage capacity. Plus, a super-speed USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A interface delivers rapid transfer rates to cut the time needed for storing your files in a safe place.

When it comes to data, everything is growing - quantity, size, format, resolution, use cases, applications, value and more. As people and businesses look for solutions to effectively and efficiently store their data in the zettabyte era, Western Digital HDDs continue to play a critical role in delivering massive capacity, performance and reliability.

Extending its innovation and technology leadership across its portfolio, Western Digital today announced that it is now shipping new 22 TB HDDs targeting three key segments: WD Gold HDDs for IT/data center channel customers; WD Red Pro for network attached storage (NAS); and WD Purple Pro for smart video/surveillance. As highlighted in its What's Next Western Digital Event, these new drives are loaded with industry-firsts, including OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), triple-stage actuator (TSA) and HelioSeal to deliver the industry's highest areal density at 2.2 TB per platter, delivering 22 TB CMR HDDs for its customers.

Kanguru announces a new FIPS 140-2 Certified External Solid-State Drive with enhanced security. The new Defender SSD350 hardware encrypted solid state drive series provides organizations with data protection at its best. The TAA Compliant, Defender SSD350 family of solid-state drives is ideal for high-security environments, including government, defense, healthcare, financial institutions, energy/utilities and other security-conscious organizations that rely on benchmark FIPS 140-2 Certification and military-grade, hardware encryption to meet strict security demands. Designed and built under the independent and rigorous testing verification process conducted by the National Institute of Standards for Technology (NIST), the Defender SSD350 provides organizations with exceptional data security and value.

Packed with military grade security features for both MacOS and Windows, it can also be remotely managed for a complete data security solution. Security/IT Administrators can monitor their organization's Kanguru Defender drives anywhere in the world with the Kanguru Remote Management Console (KRMC), which allows Admins to enforce security policies, locate lost or stolen drives, manage security settings remotely and much more.

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation announces the DT02 7200 RPM 2 TB HDD, designed for desktop, PC computing, gaming and storage applications where performance and reliability are critical. The new DT02 7200 RPM 2 TB HDD delivers higher performance than Toshiba's predecessor and leverages Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Technology. The DT02 7200 RPM 2 TB HDD has a SATA 6 Gbit/s interface and a 2 TB capacity.

The DT02 7200 RPM 2 TB HDD has a 19% increase in data transfer speed compared to Toshiba's current "DT02 series," achieving a maximum of 210 MiB/s, equipped with a 256 MB buffer, making it suitable for desktop, PC computing, gaming and storage applications. The DT02 7200 RPM 2 TB HDD is available from this month.

Building on significant technology innovations cultivated over decades, Western Digital today announced that it is sampling its new industry-leading 22 TB and 26 TB UltraSMR HDDs to select hyperscale cloud customers, further expanding its areal density leadership and delivering customer value by driving TCO lower. Western Digital's HDD technology portfolio and areal density leadership puts it at the center of storage innovation. Leveraging its unique OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), triple-stage actuator (TSA), HelioSeal and now UltraSMR technologies, Western Digital is on a clear path to delivering 30+ TB with ePMR.

"As a longstanding partner of the industry's leading cloud providers, we understand their unique requirements in building next-generation cloud infrastructure and invested in several HDD innovations we developed alongside our areal density technology," said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, EVP and GM, HDD Business Unit, Western Digital. "Our intent with taking this development strategy was not only to address the capacity demands of the world's largest cloud titans but to deliver on a roadmap that would also support the evolving economics of their data centers for decades to come. With ePMR, OptiNAND and now UltraSMR as the foundation of Western Digital's HDD roadmap, our cloud customers can continue rapidly scaling their business by taking advantage of our innovations to lower their storage TCO."

Today, Seagate celebrates Star Wars Day with the introduction of three collectible Hard Disk Drives (HDD) inspired by Boba Fett, Grogu, and The Mandalorian. Released on the fan holiday playing off of the popular Star Wars quote "May the Force be with you," the newest additions to the company's line of licensed special edition storage devices bring a tangible piece of the galaxy to the hands of collectors and tech enthusiasts.

"We are thrilled to announce the latest release in our ongoing collaboration with Lucasfilm, bringing three fresh and iconic designs to gamers and Star Wars fans," said Jeff Fochtman, senior vice president of business and marketing at Seagate Technology. "From the designs to the functionality of the drives, this release brings a force to the battle stations of Star Wars enthusiasts."

Sabrent announces DS-UCTB 10-Bay 3.5" SATA Hard Drive Tray-Less Docking Station (USB 3.2 Type-C And Type-A) (DS-UCTB). This Sabrent SATA Hard Drive Tray-Less Docking Station enables you to access 3.5" hard drives, without the frustration of assembling enclosures. By inserting a 3.5" SATA hard drive directly into this docking station, you can quickly access drive contents and transfer files. Transfer data quickly and easily through USB 3.2 at speeds up to 10 Gbps.

Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, and Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller and storage solutions, announced today plans to expand their SSD portfolio of next-gen high-performance, high-density enterprise NVMe SSDs. The new SSDs will help enterprises lower total cost ownership (TCO) through increased storage density, lower power consumption, and higher performance. The companies also announced that they have entered a long-term partnership that will strengthen the development cycle and distribution of enterprise-class SSDs.

Seagate and Phison have collaborated on Seagate's mainstream SATA SSD products since 2017. That close cooperation has continued through the company's performance-leading line of FireCuda consumer gaming NVMe PCIe Gen4 x4 SSDs and the world's first purpose-built NAS NVMe SSDs. The partnership will now focus on meeting the evolving global enterprise demand for higher density, faster, and smarter storage infrastructure needs that complement HDD storage to enable comprehensive enterprise applications such as hyperscale data center, high-performance computing and AI.

Samsung and Western Digital today signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that implies that the two companies will join their efforts to create next-generation data placement, processing, and fabrics (D2PF) storage technologies. The MOU states that the two companies will collaborate on creating Zoned Storage devices, including ZNS (Zoned Namespaces) SSDs and SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) HDDs. The ZNS SSD initiative is a challenge of creating entirely new SSDs that work on the ZNS principle instead of traditional block-based drives. Opposite to data in traditional SSDs written in blocks, ZNS SSDs will place data into zones and have software understand where each bit of information is written without excessive read/write action. Another benefit of ZNS is that managing data allows less garbage collection, thus higher efficiency.

Software adoption for ZNS makes it hard, and Samsung's conjoined efforts with Western Digital aim to simplify it. Western Digital notes that "In addition, this collaboration is expected to serve as a starting point to expand zone-based (e.g. ZNS, SMR) device interfaces, as well as future-generation, high-capacity storage devices with enhanced data placement and processing technologies. At a later stage, these initiatives will be expanded to include other emerging D2PF technologies such as computational storage and storage fabrics including NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF)." So, with further development of ZNS, Samsung and Western Digital will collab on more advanced storage options as well.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking, and storage solution innovator, today launched the 2-bay TS-233 NAS suitable for home/office environments. With a sleek design and quiet fan, the TS-233 provides a cost-effective centralized storage, backup, file sharing, and multimedia solution that features rich NAS applications for greater productivity and boundless entertainment.

The TS-233 features an ARM Cortex A55 quad-core processor with integrated 2 GB memory. It can be used with 3.5-inch SATA 6 Gb/s SSDs and supports AES-NI encryption acceleration, providing a secure, high-speed backup/restore, file access and sharing experience. With a built-in NPU (Neural network Processing Unit) processor, the TS-233 also boosts QNAP AI Core (the AI-powered engine for image recognition) performance for high-speed face and object recognition.

AI-enabled video imaging and analytics systems require support for heavy workloads that process and analyze multiple streams and thousands of hours of video data. Today during the ISC West trade show in Las Vegas, Nev., Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, launched the new SkyHawk AI 20 TB hard disk drive (HDD). The mass-capacity HDD adds to the company's leading line of video imaging and analytics (VIA) devices.

Purposely designed for network video recorders (NVRs) enabled with AI for edge security applications, Seagate's SkyHawk AI 20 TB HDD intelligently adapts to the scale of the users' AI environment, supporting up to 64 HD video streams and 32 AI streams. With this capability to support scalable AI workloads, SkyHawk AI meets the growing needs of advanced VIA systems to analyze and record video footage while simultaneously supporting GPU analytics.

As developers create compelling PlayStation 5 (PS5 ) and PlayStation 4 (PS4 ) games, players are building up their game libraries and eagerly searching for high-capacity add-on storage options. Today, Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) expands its storage capacity for PS4 and PS5 consoles with our officially licensed external Game Drive—featuring 2 TB and 4 TB capacities. Leveling up the company's line of PlayStation storage for gamers, the new external hard drive offers the ultimate game vault for PS5 and PS4 storage and delivers the ability to play PS4 games directly from the drive.

Specifically designed and optimized with firmware to work with PS4 and PS5 consoles, these drives are lightweight and offer plug-and-play installation in under two minutes with no tools required—so players can jump into action. Connected and powered with high-speed USB 3.2 Gen 1 (USB 3.0), Seagate's add-on storage options for PlayStation consoles do not need a separate power cord, making it easy for players to play from anywhere.

Toshiba Electronic Components Taiwan Corporation announced HDD shipment unit and Exabyte grew 4% and 61%, respectively in 2021. The company shipped 54.68 million units equaling 187.24 Exabytes for the year. Nearline, Mission Critical, Desktop/CE segments posted higher unit and Exabyte results for the year with Nearline HDDs leading all applications with units surging 73% and Exabytes skyrocketing 114%. Toshiba set a new shipment record for Nearline HDDs in 4CQ21, as units grew to 2.90 million units totaling 33.93 Exabytes for the quarter and was up over 94% from a year ago. Toshiba led the industry in Y-Y growth in eight categories for the year, and holds a unique position as an HDD company posting unit growth in 2021.

"Toshiba continues to execute in the Nearline space, and this is reflected in the company's new Nearline unit shipment record in 4CQ21," stated Ed Burns, Research Director at IDC. "Toshiba's cutting-edge technology such as FC-MAMR (Flux-Controlled - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MAS-MAMR (Microwave Assisted Switching - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) should further their competitiveness in the Nearline HDD market."

Toshiba Corporation held an investor relations event in Tokyo, Japan. During Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation's presentation, Mr. Hiroyuki Sato, President & CEO of TDSC, unveiled a descriptive roadmap of Toshiba's next-generation Nearline HDDs. Data generation continues to grow at a double digit rates every year, and demand from cloud companies to store the burgeoning data is driving the need for higher capacity HDDs. To meet this surging demand, Toshiba plans to leverage its proprietary recording technologies, FC-MAMR (Flux-Controlled - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording), MAS-MAMR (Microwave Assisted Switching - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording), and Disk Stacking technology to lift Nearline HDD capacities to 30 TB by FY2023, and greater capacities beyond.

"Toshiba continues to work closely with the cloud companies to understand their exact capacity and performance requirements, and the ability to utilize our next-generation technologies will be key to meeting our customers' needs," said Raghu Gururangan, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. Vice President, Engineering & Product Marketing. "Many years of close collaboration work with our key component suppliers is leading to impactful technology breakthroughs to achieve higher capacities, which ultimately reduces TCO (total cost of ownership) of our Nearline HDDs."

Backblaze, a cloud storage provider has recently released their latest annual report on the performance of their 202,759 hard disks in operation. The company operates drives of various capacities and ages from Seagate, Toshiba, HGST, and WDC monitoring each models annualized failure rate (AFR). The latest report shows that the AFR for all drives in operation rose to 1.01% in 2021 up from 0.93% in 2020 but significantly below the 1.83% reported in 2019. The larger capacity newer drives are primarily responsible for this figure with them accounting for 69% of total active drives but only 57% of drive failures.

The most reliable drive operated by Backblaze remains the 6 TB Seagate ST6000DX000 with an AFR of just 0.11% while having an average age of 80.4 months. The least reliable drive is also from Seagate with the 14 TB ST14000NM0138 having an AFR of 4.66% in Q4 2021 down from 6.29% in Q3 2021. While these statistics cannot be used to reliably judge the quality of drives from any particular manufacturer they serve as a good reference for general trends in hard drive reliability.

Toshiba America Electronic Components today announced a new Nearline HDD shipment record of 2.89 million units for the December 2021 quarter. The new Nearline unit record reflected year over year growth of 80% and topped the previous best quarter by 4% set earlier in the year. Nearline Exabytes in the quarter grew sequentially to 33.81 and was up over 94% from a year ago.

"Toshiba continues to execute in the Nearline space, and this is reflected in the company's new Nearline unit shipment record in 4CQ21," stated Ed Burns, Research Director at IDC. "Toshiba's cutting-edge technology such as FC-MAMR (Flux-Controlled - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MAS-MAMR (Microwave Assisted Switching - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) should further their competitiveness in the Nearline HDD market."

Infortrend Technology, Inc. (TWSE: 2495), the industry-leading enterprise storage provider, satisfies requirements of high throughput and fast response time for high-performance computing (HPC), media post-production, and medical PACS applications ­— with EonStor CS NVMe SSD storage delivering 13 GB/s throughput in a 3-node cluster, and performance linearly increases in a scale-out mode.

Today's HPC applications perform computationally intensive operations with billions of files across multiple resources of different nature at PB scale. Storage for HPC, therefore, must be able to simultaneously support multiple random and sequential IO workloads of different sizes. Otherwise, it can extensively delay the HPC application output and the company's success. EonStor CS NVMe SSD storage, CS 4014U, effectively eliminates these concerns and guarantees fast response time, satisfying various types of IO profiles.\

DeepCool, a global brand in designing and manufacturing high-performance computer components for enthusiasts worldwide, announces the CK SERIES Mid-Tower Cases, which consists the CK500, CK500WH, CK560 and CK560WH. Available in black and white, all cases deliver a balance of airflow, silent performance and exceptional cooling for the modern-day builder.

The CK SERIES deliver a no-nonsense approach to a clean, sleek computer chassis design. For Minimalist Builders who appreciate the CK500 and CK500WH minimal solid front panel can be rest assured that airflow performance is not hindered thanks to enlarged ventilation outlets throughout the front, top, and rear panels for additional air movement. For Builders that insist for even more airflow, the CK560 and CK560WH feature a unique cross-hair patterned steel front panel. All cases offer a clean aesthetic and fits a modern day look while being feature-packed for additional hardware expansion and upgrades.