Hasta La Gadget!

Yow. Western Digital — the company responsible for shipping the planet’s first 1TB 2.5-inch hard drive way back in 2009 — just announced a monstrous deal to acquire one of its primary competitors, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. Both outfits have actually shown quite a few interesting HDD designs in recent months, and it’s pretty clear that WD would rather not go at it alone any longer. Granted, these types of deals aren’t entirely unheard of — in fact, Seagate swallowed up Maxtor back in 2005 for a cool $2 billion. Under the deal, which is a mix of $3.5 billion in cash and $750 million in WD common stock, the two will combine in a way that sees the Western Digital brand and headquarters surviving, while Steve Milligan, president and chief executive officer of Hitachi GST, will join WD at closing as president. Hard to say what this will mean for consumer pricing and competition, but we’re pretty certain the powers that be will be looking it all over for fairness before they hop in the blender during Q3. Full release is after the break.

Continue reading Western Digital drops $4.3 billion to acquire Hitachi GST, enter staring contest with Seagate

Western Digital drops $4.3 billion to acquire Hitachi GST, enter staring contest with Seagate originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Mar 2011 07:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Been wondering how that new 6Gbps SATA interface and Marvell controller have been treating Intel’s latest SSDs? The answer, it turns out, is really rather nicely. Faced off with OCZ’s awesomely quick Vertex 3 drive, the 250GB SSD 510 from Intel more than holds its own, occasionally flashing ahead and taking the lead. Opting for Marvell’s processing chip has improved Intel’s sequential performance, but has actually led to it taking a ding on random read speeds — the latter being arguably more important on a day-to-day basis. Still, this $584 drive is one of the finest the consumer world has yet had to feast upon and should encourage high expectations from Intel’s 25nm G3 storage units, which are still to come. As to having the extra Serial ATA bandwidth, we’ll leave it to Anand from AnandTech to summarize: “these next-generation SSDs not only use 6Gbps SATA, they really need it.”

Intel’s SSD 510 reviewed, measures up well against Vertex 3 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 11:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  AnandTech, PC Perspective, Hot Hardware  | Email this | Comments

We thought OCZ’s Vertex 3 Pro was some flaming hot stuff, but solid state storage reviewers have mind-boggling news — the plain ol’ Vertex 3 will bring the same completely ludicrous 550MB / sec read speeds (plus even faster 525MB / sec writes) at a down-to-earth price. Previews found the Vertex 3’s new SandForce SF-2281 controller and Micron 25nm flash memory chips edged out even its own enterprise-grade cousin in nearly every test — with a few anomalies here and there — and were reportedly too fast to achieve full performance with any SATA 6Gbps controller save the one in Intel’s new Cougar Point chipset. Best of all, they claim that OCZ’s targeting a price of just $250 for the 120GB version, or $500 for the 240GB drive benched here. That’s still a chunk of change, but considering current-gen 120GB SSDs still cost over $200 street, it sounds like OCZ and SandForce are setting a bar that will drive down prices across the board. We can’t wait.

Read – AnandTech
Read – Hot Hardware
Read – Legit Reviews
Read – PC Perspective
Read – Storage Review

OCZ’s consumer-grade Vertex 3 SSD gets benched, SandForce SF-2281 helps it spank competition originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 15:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

We can think of a pretty good reason why Apple might have a head-start when it comes to Thunderbolt-capable machines, but Apple doesn’t actually have a timed exclusive on the technology, at least according to Intel PR. The company told us that while it’s currently targeting an early 2012 launch for Thunderbolt with other OEMs — whereas the new MacBook Pro has Thunderbolt right now — there’s nothing stopping other manufacturers from launching machines with the 10Gbps interconnect a good bit earlier if they so desire.

In related news, the first Thunderbolt peripherals have just been formally announced — the Promise Pegasus RAID array we saw spitting out 800MB / sec video streams, and the LaCie Little Big Disk. The former will come in four-bay and six-bay variants, topping out at 12TB of magnetic storage when it arrives in Q2, and the latter will boast a pair of Intel 510 Series SSDs — which, by the way, have yet to be formally announced — in RAID 0 for 500GB of storage in total. PR after the break.

Continue reading Intel refutes Apple exclusivity for Thunderbolt I/O, LaCie and Promise detail first Thunderbolt peripherals

Intel refutes Apple exclusivity for Thunderbolt I/O, LaCie and Promise detail first Thunderbolt peripherals originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink AppleHeadlines  |  LaCie, Promise  | Email this | Comments

All’s not well in hybrid solid state storage land, as owners of Seagate’s Momentus XT are facing serious issues with their drives — despite glowing initial reviews, a number of long-term users claim that the drives chirp, crash, stutter, and freeze with alarming regularity, particularly when installed in a Mac. Seagate forumgoers speculate these are symptoms of the XT’s magnetic platters spinning down inappropriately, due to an overzealous power management scheme. That’s the bad news — and it sounds pretty bad — but the good news is this: Seagate’s owning up to the issues, and is actively involved in getting them fixed. So far, a pair of new firmware updates have addressed some symptoms, a third is on the way, and a Seagate engineer known only as STX_NB is proactively chatting with affected customers about possible fixes. That’s what we call technical support — take notes, tech companies.

Momentus XT hybrid drive causing headaches, Seagate working to fix originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 Feb 2011 17:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Computerworld, Seagate Knowledge Base (1), (2), (3)  | Email this | Comments