Storage

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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Smartphones have become powerful enough to support new multimedia experiences, both in creation and consumption. Smartphone cameras are capable of recording videos in 8K resolution while smartphone screens can fit even up to 4K videos. Those activities, however, also require not just a beefy processor or spacious RAM. They also require high-speed storage that can keep up with all the data transfer demands they entail, which is what Samsung's latest smartphone data storage solution is promising to provide.

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Despite being marketed as Google's best Pixel ever, the Pixel 4 has its fair share of disappointed critics that perhaps all boil down to one thing. There are those that feel that Google has not done enough for the price it was asking for and the things it did work on, like Motion Gestures, isn't something fans are really falling in love with. That might be part of the interest that the Pixel 4a is generating, seemingly offering a more affordable Pixel experience without the cruft. And based on one leak, it will definitely be an upgrade to the Pixel 3a in more ways than one.

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The mobile lifestyle now no longer just applies to smartphones. It's no longer unusual to see people carrying laptops around and working anywhere there's a Wi-Fi connection or a power outlet or both. The change in lifestyle and work habits has also changed the way we store and access data or even the volume of data we accumulate in a short amount of time. That means that portable storage, even usually expensive SSDs, has become more common and so is the risk of theft or loss. Samsung is coming to the rescue with a portable SSD that offers an additional layer of security on top, literally.

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The way we create and consume media these days has pretty much changed the way we store and retrieve data. Large hard drives with their moving heads and spinning disks still have a home in desktops and data centers but regular consumers would prefer more durable and more portable storage devices for the modern lifestyle. At CES 2020, Western Digital is showing off a few new products to address that need, including a portable SSD with an 8 TB capacity and 20 Gbps SuperSpeed.

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Glass might not be the first material you think of when it comes to long-term resilience, but Microsoft's new Project Silica could turn it into the storage method of choice for saving data you really don't want to degrade. Brainchild of the company's Microsoft Research team, Project Silica encodes information on a super-strong slice of glass - and to prove it works, they stored a classic movie on there.

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In the data storage market, bigger and faster are often seen as the hallmarks of a winning product. But in this day and age where almost everything important is stored digitally, data storage products need to go beyond those two raw features. Reliability and versatility are just as important as speed and capacity and Samsung is more than happy to promise those through its latest generation of solid-state drives that boast the combination of three technologies to open up a "new paradigm" of SSD performance.

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Today's technologies, both software and hardware, have made it easier to do work almost anywhere and everywhere and in almost any condition. Of course, when it comes to extreme conditions, you will need equipment that won't easily break under pressure or even under water. That's where rugged devices come in and LaCie's three new SSDs make the perfect partners for equally rugged laptops and smartphones used for crafting the next YouTube hit.

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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 current state of technology is pretty much a compromise when it comes to data storage. HDD's have high capacities and are cheap but sometimes unreliable while SSDs are thinner, more durable, but also more expensive. On smaller devices, PCIe attached NVMe storage offer speeds that even UFS much less eMMC storage can only dream of but users are mostly stuck with what's soldered onboard. Toshiba, however, is saying you don't need to choose with its new XFMEXPRESS form factor that is practically an SSD card not unlike a microSD card.

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Throughout all of Samsung's troubles in terms of smartphone revenues, its silicon and data storage businesses have always brought in the dough. There is news that those are now also in peril, which is why it is now boasting of its sixth gen V-NAND data storage that crams more than a hundred layers in a single stack of 3D memory.

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