hard drive

You might think that buying and using a hard drive is a simple matter of picking one from a catalog and connecting it inside a computer. That may be true fro the simplest of desktops but when you factor in devices like NAS products, the selection process can be quite daunting, especially when data storage manufacturers aren't so forthcoming with critical details. To dispel any lingering doubt and confusion, Toshiba and Western Digital have released the list of hard drives that use the now somewhat controversial SMR technology and which ones don't.

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People might take hard drives for granted these days. After all, their use of moving parts makes them less suited for mobile devices and their bulky sizes give off an "old school" vibe. Hard disks and their magnetic plates and moving read/write heads, however, still trump Flash NAND technology when it comes to capacity, which is why they are still the go-to for large storage devices like NAS. Unfortunately, picking out a hard drive is harder than you might think, especially when manufacturers themselves aren't being upfront about the technologies they use.

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This week the folks at Western Digital released a new collection of WD_Black series hard drives (HDD and SSD) with radical new industrial designs. When you're buying a hard disk drive or solid-state drive, especially an external HDD or SSD, you'll first look at the capabilities of the drive - mostly innards. Then you'll look at the external bits - the way the case looks, the bits you'll be seeing every time you access your gaming machine. Because of this, Western Digital went the extra mile (in the right direction) with their latest round of WD_Black.

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The amount of data we generate and accumulate is sometimes too much for our laptops or even desktops to accommodate. Normal external hard drives are veritably just that, hard drives you plug in as needed. Networked Attached Storage or NAS provide some speed, reliability, and power but at the price of complexity. Enter Direct-Attached Storage or DAS like the new TerraMaster D2 Thunderbolt 3 that offer the reliability of NAS drives without the hassle nor the latency of networks.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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