The PC Report

Toshiba has announced today a storage technology breakthrough that could, in the near future, have our computers loaded up with 10 TB hard drives. Through the use of a new storage technique known as bit-pattern recording, Toshiba has made a prototype hard drive that packs an areal density of 2.5 Tb per square inch – roughly five times more than existing Toshiba hard drives.

Through bit-pattern recording, a hard drive can now utilize only a few magnetic grains per bit rather than hundreds as used in the old uniform magnetic coating system. These magnetic bits are then organized into rows to make it easier for the hard drive to locate data and the result is a huge amount of data per HDD platter that allows a three-platter, 10 TB hard drive by an estimated 2013.

Not only has Toshiba created a 2.5 Tb per square inch prototype, they also have begun work on doubling that density to around 5 Tb per square inch. Again, this leads to bigger hard drives and more TBs per platter.

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Seagate today has released the company’s first Hybrid Hard Drive, the Seagate Momentus XT, that combines a physical spinning disk with a bit of solid state NAND to give the best in performance. Seagate claims that this drive is around 80% faster than a normal 7,200 RPM hard drive, and looking at the tests done by AnandTech in their review (check the source link below) it appears as though this is close to being the truth. Performance-wise the drive sits somewhere between a WD VelociRaptor and a 5,400 RPM drive.

The drive itself is available in 250 GB, 320 GB and 500 GB capacities for US$133, US$132 and US$156 respectively, which comes out to around US$60-70 more than a standard 7,200 RPM drive. Each drive also comes with 4 GB of solid state NAND to help speed up the drives and store critical data that needs to be accessed quickly; what is put in the NAND is up to the on-board controller. The drive is perfect for laptops as it comes only in a 2.5″ form factor with a 9mm height, plus 32 MB of cache for the 7,200 RPM disk.

The drives should be available very soon from your favourite retailers.

According to the latest reports, Seagate could be readying a 3 TB hard drive for release later this year. Problem is – most systems can’t handle the upped storage thanks to ancient 30-year old BIOS restrictions that is limited to 2.1 TB hard drives. Anything over 2.1 TB and your system will read less than the full capacity of the drive, with Seagate’s tests showing that as little as 990 MB of a 3 TB drive is visible in XP. There is a solution to this logical block addressing (LBA) standard:

Craig [a Seagate rep] explains that “we need to extend that to Long LBA addressing,” in order to get around this. Long LBA basically increases the number of bytes used to define an LBA address in the command descriptor block, but it also requires a supporting OS.

According to Seagate, this includes the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista, as well as modified versions of Linux, but it doesn’t include Windows XP. Not only that, but you may not even be able to see 2.1TB of a 3TB drive when using Windows XP.

It looks like if you’re wanting a 3 TB drive in your system you’ll need to do a major overhaul. Maybe this will force some more users onto 64-bit with better systems

With the world looking towards solid states drives as the new performance king in storage realms one might easily miss the Western Digital VelociRaptor 600 GB. The WD6000HLHX comes in a 2.5″ form factor with 3.5″ heatsink, 10,000 RPM spindle for 3 platters totalling 600 GB of storage, 32 MB cache/buffer, SATA 6 Gb/s interface and a dual-core processor/controller for the ultimate in speeds.

The drive itself is around 20-25% faster than any high-performance hard drives on the market – quite amazing considering the limitations of hard drives. There are currently 4 models from the new super-fast VelociRaptors – two 600 GB model that retail for US$329, one with the heatsink in the 3.5″ form factor and one without in the 2.5″ form factor, and two 450 GB model that retail for US$299 (again with and without the heatsink). Being so fast of course comes at a premium, with the drives coming in at US$0.55 per GB; around 5x more than 7,200 RPM drives available.

The drives with the heatsinks are available now though select retailers, and the versions without will be coming sometime this quarter.

If you’re in the market for a new SATA 6Gbps hard drive with a nice and large amount of storage then you can now pick up the latest drive from Seagate. The Seagate Constellation ES hard drive comes in a 3.5″ package, supports SATA 6Gbps and spins at 7200 RPM with “best-in-class” reliability. It will soon be available in 500GB, 1TB and the advertised 2TB sizes to store all your stuff; no pricing info yet though…

The current 9.5mm-tall 2.5-inch drives are too tall for some laptop designers, and they want to go slimmer without turning to more expensive measures such as 1.8-inch drives and solid state drives. The perfect solution? Seagate’s Momentus Thin hard drives that are set to launch sometime this week for developers to get their hands on to.

The “world’s thinnest 2.5-inch hard drive” is 7mm high and is set to be a low cost solution for netbooks and ultraportables that want thinness, cheapness and capacity. The drives will come in 160GB and 250GB configurations, both with 8MB of cache and spinning at 5,400RPM on the SATA 3Gb/s interface. OEMs should start seeing these drives early next year, with laptops to follow.

Today Seagate has announced that it will be launching the first 2TB drive to implement the new SATA 6Gb/s technology (aka SATA 3). The 2TB Barracuda XT is set to use four 500GB platters spinning at 7200 RPM, will have 64MB cache and should have a maximum transfer rate of around 140 MB/s. Other than that, the drive will use the SATA 6Gb/s interface and will be fully backwards compatible with SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 1.5GB/s

The drive will hit the streets later this week for around US$299, and will be perfect for those new P55 motherboards supporting the SATA 6Gb/s interface

This isn’t the first 2TB desktop hard drive that Western Digital has released, that title went to the 2TB Caviar Green back in January. The problem with the Caviar Green hard drives was that the platter spun at a slower 5400RPM so WD has released some faster, 7200RPM 2TB drives – the Caviar Black and RE4.

Both hard drives use a four platter array with 64MB cache, run off the SATA 3Gbps interface and an integrated dual processor. The RE4 is designed to be for enterprise users needing some long-term reliability with the drive promising 1.2 million hours MTBF, a “multi-axis” shock sensor so the drives stop when it gets knocked and Active Power Save.

Prices are currently at US$299 for the 2TB Caviar Black but the RE4 is still in OEM qualification so it is yet to receive a price tag.

You don’t often hear about what TDK is doing in the hard drive world, but today we actually do. TDK produces read/write HDD heads for some hard drive producers, and is currently producing 500GB/platter heads for our desktop hard drives. However, according to a leaked roadmap, TDK has some 640GB/platter heads in the OEM testing phase, with mass production slated for early 2010.

With 640GB per platter we could be seeing manufacturers releasing 4-platter, 3.5-inch 2.5TB drives. Manufacturers could also up this by releasing a 3.2TB 5-platter drive, but this is less likely. As usual with all new technology, the 2.5TB drives will probably cost 3 or 4 times as much as a single 1TB drive.

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This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen a 500GB platter, but it sure is great to see some more hard drives adopting a faster way to access data. By reducing the amount of platters there is less work required in moving a head to the data. This advantage can give up to 30% greater performance over a 3-platter hard drive, which is good news for performance buffs.

Anyway, Samsung debuted their latest 1TB Spinpoint F3 HDD that utilises two 500GB platters as mentioned above, as well as a 500GB edition. The hard drives use the standard 3.5″ form factor, spin at a normal 7,200 RPM and have 16 or 32 MB buffer cache. According to Samsung, the 500GB model is available now with the 1TB version slated for a release next month.

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