Sometimes friends really come in handy... Western Digital and Toshiba are trading favours, with WD giving Toshiba the equipment and IP required to make and sell consumer-grade 3.5" HDDs.

In return, Toshiba is giving WD all assets from Toshiba Storage Device (TSDT), including a 2.5" HDD manufacturing facility. TSDT is currently closed down following the 2011 Thailand flood disaster.

Why are the 2 companies going such a barter? Simple-- WD needs to offload part of its 3.5" HDD business in order Continue reading...

SanDisk announces the Extreme SSD-- a 2.5" SSD carrying a 6GB/s SATA connection, ideal for customers looking to boost aging PCs.

The company claims the drive handles read speeds of 550MB/s and write speeds of to 520MB/s, with up to 83000 random write and 44000 random read IOPS. It will be available in x3 sizes-- 120, 240 and 480GB.

OEMs also have a SanDisk announcement with the X100 SSD, a SATA drive coming in either 2.5" (7mm or 9.5mm) or customised form factors.

Go SanDisk Launches Extreme Continue reading...

According to the Seagate Q2 2012 (fiscal) report, the HDD industry still has to recover from the October Thailand floodings-- the company estimates the industry shipped 119M units, while demand for the period totals 175M units.

HDD shipments from Seagate total 47M (including 700000 Samsung drives), a 4% Y-o-Y decline the company blames on component supply constraints related to the floodings. As a result Seagate predicts flooding-related issues will continue affecting the HDD industry throughout Continue reading...

Hitachi says the G-RAID external HDD can turn any PC into a content creation workstation through high speed connectivity and capacities of up to 8TB.

Connection interfaces include 3Gbit eSATA, FireWire 800 (FireWire 400 via cable) and USB 2.0. The drive carries Hitachi 4TB 7200RPM Deskstar 7K4000 HDs with a 6Gb/s SATA interface and a 64MB cache buffer.

The company claims the drive handles simultaneous playback of multiple layers of HDV, DVCPRO HD, XDCAM HD and ProRes 422 HQ footage.

It is ready Continue reading...

Swiss Army-branded product maker Victorinox has a stand at CES 2012, where it unveiled its latest product-- the Swiss Army SSD.

Just like the popular knife/tool set, it emerges and collapses into its case, and even has a couple of small blades. Being around the size of a small Swiss Army tool set Victorinox claims it is the smallest high-capacity SSD on the market, with sizes ranging from 64GB to 1TB.

It supports both USB (2.0 and 3.0) and eSATA connections, and carries a tiny ePaper display for Continue reading...

RunCore will be launching new storage products at CES 2012-- including the Xapear, the Falcon series and the Pro V 7mm 2.5" SSDs.

The RunCore Xapear has an encryption system using RFID tags, using an AES 128 encryption algorithm to control access permissions. Users can also check on the SSD or activate a self-erase function by connecting it to a mobile phone SIM card via GSM network.

The Falcon series is a Marvell-based SSD solution, with R/W IOPS speeds the company says are higher than its current Continue reading...

The CompactFlash Association reveals the follow-up to the CompactFlash format-- the XQD specification, using PCI Express technology to reach data transfer speeds starting from 2.5Gbps to up to 5Gbps in the future.

The CompactFlash format currently has a niche in high-end devices, as professional SLR and video cameras.

The association says the card will write data at a minimum of 125MBps, wheras today's CompactFlash cards write at a maximum of around 100MBps.

It also aims at professional photography Continue reading...

Sanho plans to provide wifi connectivity to any device with a USB port with the HyperDrive CloudFTP, a pocket-size adapter turning any USB storage into a wireless file server.

It not only creates an ad-hoc wifi network (working independently of the internet or other existing wifi networks) to share connected USB data, but also connects automatically to online cloud-based storage services such as iCloud, Dropbox and box.net.

Alternatively it can also join existing wifi networks, sharing storage Continue reading...