Hitachi outs a pair of 4TB HDDs for your storing pleasure — Engadget

My Comments

Hitachi has raised the ante again for hard-disk storage by delivering a 4Tb 3.5” hard-disk unit. They have packaged it as a retail-sold aftermarket retrofit kit with SATA connectivity for around US$399 and as a USB 3.0-connected external hard disk for US$420.

The Engadget article went on about us thinking of cloud storage as the way to go for personal data storage and that it would please those of us who place emphasis on desktop-local or NAS-hosted data storage. This would include most business operators who want direct control over their business data. I also see this hard disk as being relevant to the network-attached storage sector where you place emphasis on data capacity with these devices as they become local warehouses for high-definition video, high-quality music and high-resolution photos.

A question that may need to be raised with NAS applications is whether the NAS’s firmware / operating-system can address unique physical disks with a capacity of 4 or more terabytes. Here, I would suspect that most Linux-based firmwares could do so but even if the current firmware can’t address the 4Tb or more physical disk, a subsequent version could support the volume size.

Of course, as more hard-disk plants in Taiwan get back to full steam after the floods and more of the 4Tb hard disks come on the market, the prices could reduce where this capacity becomes more reasonable for home and small-business users. Other interesting factors that could come of this include the development of single-unit 2.5” hard disks with capacities of 1Tb or greater or smaller hard-disks with higher capacities that would appeal to those of us with a need for higher mobile data capacity.

Du SSD pour les “vieilles” bécanes | Le Journal du Geek (France – French language)

My comments

You may be keeping an older IDE-based computer going or have a computer which has one IDE bus but plenty of SATA connectors on the motherboard. Hey, you may think of adding a solid-state drive to this computer in order to benefit from high operating speeds and low energy consumption but the fact that the only vacant secondary-storage interface is IDE-based throws your plans haywire.

What Buffalo has now done is to provide an SSD which connects to the IDE bus on these computers. The main limitation with this is that they only come in a 2.5” chassis, which means that you may have to use a 2.5” mounting kit and adaptor plugs if the computer you plan to upgrade is your desktop rig. They have a 64Mb cache and come in capacities of 32Gb, 64Gb and 128Gb with a price list of USD$250, USD$360 and USD$630 respectively. This may be a steep premium to pay if you want that quicker boot time for your older computer.

In my opinion, I would place the 64Gb drive as a drop-in replacement for the system drive (operating system, program files) in a multi-drive computer while keeping the “data” drives as regular rotary drives. Here, this could lead to quick boots and application starts without much power being used. The 128Gb drive may be useful as a drop-in replacement for the hard drives in older laptops that have a fair bit of life in them so as to keep them running longer on their batteries.

My comments on this article

What has pleased me about Buffalo releasing the world’s first USB 3.0 external hard disk is that they have taken a “systems” approach to getting the standard off the ground. This is through supplying a USB 3.0 PCI-Express interface card for use with recent-issue desktop computers with a vacant PCI-Express x1 slot on the motherboard as well as, of course, the necessary cables.

It may appeal to those of us who like to take apart and put together desktop computers a lot and are likely to build “homebrew” server systems. But wait for 6 months to a year and the USB 3.0 sockets will appear as part of the next generation of motherboards and be integral to laptop computers and other small-form-factor systems.

HEXUS.Net article, EHomeUpgrade article

My comments on this 2.5” hard-disk NAS

Initially, the use of a 2.5” hard disk in a NAS would have been simply considered as a “toy” but there are more “business-class” multi-disk NAS units like this one come on the scene that use these disks. This QNAP unit – the SS-839 Pro – impressed me because of the fact that there is a NAS fit for the business or “muscle-NAS” market that give respect to this low-power small form factor.

It also can hold 8 of the disks in the same footprint as a typical 5-bay “muscle NAS”, with support for sophisticated RAID and “business server” functionalities available in this class of device. Another benefit that I also like is the ability to have less power consumption than a NAS of this class and can provide for more expandability as one’s data needs grow.

Once the 1 Tb 2.5” hard disk comes on the scene, this will certainly wipe the 3.5” form factor off the map as far as hard disks are concerned and make that size only for certain removeable media.

Cited article

HEXUS.net – News :: Deal of the day: 1TB Hitachi Deskstar hard drive for under £52 : Page – 1/1

Hard-disk storage continues to get cheaper by the day, but we’ve yet to see anything as cheap as this:

It’s the Hitachi DeskStar 1TB hard drive, and it’s being offered at bargain-basement prices on various websites. The cheapest we’ve seen, though, is Ebuyer.com who is currently offering the drive for just £51.82 delivered. That’s around 5p per gigabyte, for a 7,200rpm SATA drive with a 16MB cache. It just doesn’t get much cheaper than that, if at all.

Ebuyer’s website reckons the etailer has over 800 in stock, so this could be a good opportunity to max out your PC or NAS.