Storage is one of the great unifiers of the information age. Everyone needs more storage, whether they're an individual consumer or a massive company. For those in the latter group, Western Digital today announced a beefy new HDD that packs a whopping 15TB of storage.
Storage is something that a person living in the digital age can never get enough of, and if you find yourself a little low on available space, then you might want to have a look at Amazon. Today, the company is hosting a one-day sale on a variety of different storage devices, from SD cards and flash drives to SSDs and external hard drives. Some of the discounts on offer are pretty solid, so let's dive into them.
If you want maximum storage in a single drive, Seagate may well have just the hard-disk for you. The drive-maker's latest range packs a whopping 14 TB of capacity, with multiple models targeting everything from desktop PCs through to network-attached storage and more.
While consumers, particularly those on laptops, look to SSDs as their data storage of choice because of their speed and reliability, hard disk drives or HDDs are never going away. In fact, they have become even more critical because of the digital content we produce and store these days. Unlike SSDs, however, hard drives run into the limits of physics sooner. Which is why making a single HDD that reaches 14 TB capacity, such as Western Digital's Ultrastar Hs14, is no small matter for the enterprise.
SSDs may have the advantage of reliability, but the costs of production keep them from becoming the go to solution for large scale storage, like NAS drives. Hard drives, on the other hand, can reach oodles of terabytes but have relatively shorter lifespans. That's why hard drive makers have turned to helium-based designs to bridge the gap. Like the new WD Read and WD Red Pro drives that offer reliable 10 TB of storage perfect for NAS systems.
For the past several months I've been using a piece of OWC technology called the OWC Drive Dock. This gadget surprised me, genuinely - and has proven to change my life in a significant way. Because of this drive dock, I was able to clear out a significant portion of my junk closet. This OWC Drive Dock device is certifiably radical for an old data hoarder like myself.
In this day and age of smartphones, tablets, and laptops, hard drive failure almost seems like a thing of the past. Especially since these devices don’t actually use that kind of storage technology. But for gamers, multimedia workers, and backup storage companies, the reliability of the hard drive can make or break their livelihood. That is why every year since 2013, online backup solution providers Backblaze releases a list of its hard drives and their failure rates, basically forming a fame and shame list of which brands and models had the most or least number of failures throughout the year.
Last week, Amazon announced a new service for uploading large amounts of data to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud storage. Dubbed Snowmobile, it's an actual 18-wheel semi-truck hauling a storage container filled with hard drives. See, it's not meant for times when you need to back up your photo or video collection, but rather for an entire company's data, such as a movie studio's archives or a government agency's library of satellite imagery.
Western Digital has a slew of new product announcements to make today, announcing redesigns for two lines of external hard drives and revealing two new internal solid state drives. The company is teaming up with fuseproject to give the My Passport and My Book lines something of a refresh, while at the same time introducing its new WD Blue and WD Green SSDs.
Hard drive and accessories maker OWC has announced an updated version of its Drive Dock, a docking station that allows users to connect up to two bare drives to their Mac or Windows PC. The new model takes advantage of USB 3.1 Gen 1 connectivity, allowing read speeds up to 434 MB/s and write speeds up to 406 MB/s.
Just about anytime you think you and your computer are safe from hackers and security weaknesses, some bizarre, unexpected method or flaw gets discovered. Case in point: security researchers have come up with a way to steal data from a computer's hard drive just by listening to the sounds it makes. Not only can information be transmitted without a users' knowledge, but their computer doesn't even need to be connected to the internet.
On the principle that bigger is better, Seagate has rolled out its new line-up of 10TB hard-drives, the Guardian Series, targeting those who refuse to delete things or indeed compromise on speed. Made up of three different ranges, each aiming at a different use-case, the Guardian Series is likely to be of particular interest to PC gamers.