Stories about: Western Digital

Intel has announced it is expanding its X25-M 2.5-inch and X18-M 1.8-inch SATA solid-state drive (SSD) family with a 160GB drive in a 2.5-inch form factor.

Maxtor's Central Axis (US$319.99) offers a new way to add a centralized, always-available terabyte of storage to your local network, whether you install it at home to share media files or set it up at work to share proposals among your colleagues. You can even stream your media to UPnP AV-compatible (Universal Plug and Play Audio/Visual) networked entertainment systems without using a computer. Best of all, by setting up an account with Seagate Global Access, you can store and retrieve files from the Central Axis device over the Internet.

Fujitsu is in talks to sell its hard-disk drive business to Western Digital, according to a report in the Thursday morning edition of the Nikkei business daily.

EMC plans to hand down advanced features, including de-duplication and even virtualization, to consumer products coming out of its recently purchased Iomega division.

Solid state drives (SSDs) are finally coming into their own -- they're faster, more durable, and use less power than traditional mechanical hard drives. However, the strongest indicator that this may be the storage tech of the future is Intel's release of its X18 and X25 solid state drives.

How much would you pay for a portable hard drive that lets you tote around 160GB in a shirt pocket -- with no need for a power brick? Apricorn is betting you'll be willing to spring for upward of US$260 for its 160GB Aegis Mini. However, it remains to be seen how many are willing to pay that price for portability.

For the IT worker, the phrase "desktop mobility" has many meanings. It can mean having a laptop computer. It can mean keeping all your data in the cloud so that you can access it at any time and from anywhere. It can even mean downsizing your work environment to fit on a PDA or a smartphone.

Recently, Western Digital has come to market with three drives aimed at increasing the performance of both 2.5- and 3.5-in. drives: the Caviar Black, the Scorpio Black and the VelociRaptor. Nothing about them speaks to "green power." Rather, the "black" lineup is aimed at enthusiasts who want performance and let their power supplies be damned if they can't handle the load.

There's no such thing as too much protection for your valuable files. Although external hard drives can provide backup copies of files on your hard drive, what if you use external drives for primary storage? Sure, you can use yet another external backup drive, but a better solution might be a RAID array with two drives. Western Digital offers such a system with its new My Book Mirror Edition ($AUD699).

Convolve last week filed a federal lawsuit this week charging that Dell, Western Digital and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies have violated its patents for vibration control techniques in hard drives and PCs.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been around for many years. Their high cost, however, has limited their deployment to special environments, such as the military, where their rugged, shock-resilient design, coupled with extremely fast performance, justifies the expense.