Storage Hard Drives Pack into Smaller Devices

Seagate Technology LLC, Cornice Inc. and Western Digital Corp. are kicking off the New Year by introducing a variety of new-look hard drives designed to increase storage performance, efficiency and portability.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Seagate added to its consumer portfolio by announcing its 160GB Seagate Portable External Hard Drive featuring perpendicular recording and a 500GB eSATA Pushbutton backup drive.

Available next month, the new hard drive is targeted at data-intensive applications such as video editing and large volume data transfers, said officials of Seagate, based in Scotts Valley, Calif.

Built with capabilities architected for extended road usage, the 2.5-inch Seagate 160 Portable External Hard Drive does not need a power cord and can carry business files, digital photos, digital music and digital videos in a box weighing less than 1 pound.

Following Seagates $1.9 billion acquisition of Maxtor Corp. last month, Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said his company will aggressively address customers storage concerns as they move their growing content onto smaller and more mobile devices.

The Seagate 500GB eSATA Pushbutton Backup Hard Drive, set for release in April, offers data backup at up to a 300MB per second or 3Gb per second interface rate for desktop systems, entry servers or digital video workstations.

Enabling smaller and thinner consumer electronic devices to be built more easily, Cornice on Monday unveiled its ultrathin 8GB and 10GB Cornice Dragon series micro hard drives. The 8GB is currently available, while the larger 10GB hard drive will be released in the near future, according to officials of Cornice, based in Longmont, Colo.

The new Cornice storage offerings will allow OEMs to provide customers with sleeker and higher-capacity CE devices for use in items such as mobile phones, personal storage devices, and audio and video players.

The hard drives feature Cornices Crash Guard protection, which offers Active Latch to protect heads from scraping; Skip Control to ensure continuous playback regardless of environmental conditions; and Drop Safe, enabling the device to sense a drop and protect the head in time.

/zimages/4/28571.gifClick hereto read more about offerings at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, including business-focused products.

WD (Western Digital) on Monday announced its new 150GB WD Raptor featuring double the capacity of the 10,000 RPM WD Raptor Enterprise SATA (serial ATA) hard drive.

Currently shipping, the 150GB WD Raptor hard drive features random I/O performance with NCQ (native command queuing) to boost performance by designating multiple simultaneous read and write commands—a feature common in multiuser server workloads.

SATA hard drives are quickly gaining ground as an affordable option for customers running storage systems and server environments. According to IT research firm Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., by 2009 approximately 30 percent of hard drives used in multiuser applications will bear SATA technology.

Additional server and networked storage applications benefits of the WD hard drive include its built-in RAFF (Rotary Accelerometer Feed Forward) technology and doubled the cache to 16 megabytes to serve and record enterprise data more quickly.

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