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Hitachi was first to hit the terabyte mark when it announced the 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive in January 2007. Fast forward a year and a half, and the company is back with not a larger version of the drive but a more efficient model in the Deskstar 7K1000.B. Like its predecessor, the 7K1000.B is a 3.5-inch, 7,200rpm hard drive that serves up 1TB of storage space and a 32MB buffer. It hits that magic terabyte mark, however, by using only three disks--down from the five-disk design of the older 1TB drive. It also borrows from Hitachi's 2.5-inch mobile drives and includes Bulk Data Encryption.

Hitachi says the new three-disk design improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent compared with last year's model. Fewer platters should also mean improved reliability, acoustics, and seek times. The Deskstar 7K1000.B also matches Samsung's Spinpoint F1, which was the first three-disk drive to offer 1TB of capacity.

While desktops go missing at a much slower rate than laptops, that didn't deter Hitachi from offering Bulk Data Encryption on the Deskstar 7K1000.B. This feature encrypts data as it is written to the drive and decrypts when it's retrieved. This hard drive-level security is superior to software or system-level security measures, and it has no impact on system performance.

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B will sell for $239 when it starts shipping later this month. Hitachi will also ship the Deskstar E7K1000 this month for $279, an enterprise version of the drive designed for low-duty-cycle, 24x7 applications.

Seagate has come a long way in the data storage business, from its 5MB ST506 hard drive in 1979 to its latest 1TB Barracuda introduced last year. And today the company announced that it is the first manufacturer to ship 1 billion hard drives.

If you can't visualize that many storage devices, picture this: You can circle the globe 13.7 times with the 1 billion hard drives placed end-to-end, according to Seagate.

Not all of them bear the Seagate brand. The number also includes the ones manufactured by Conner, which merged with Seagate in 1996, as well as those from Maxtor, which was acquired in December 2005.

More noteworthy, however, are some of the other statistics behind the accomplishment. For example, the first 5MB drive--the Seagate ST506--weighs a hefty 5 pounds and cost $1,500 when it debuted in 1980. A 3.5-inch 1TB drive today, which has 200,000 times more capacity, retails at only a fraction of that cost.

Another interesting fact: It took Seagate 17 years to ship the first 100 million drives, but only 12 years to make the next 900 million.

What's scary is that Seagate expects to hit the 2 billion milestone within the next 5 years, based on current increases in production capacity and demand. That looks like a very possible scenario, considering the amount of data we guzzle daily with no signs of slowing down.

At its press event, Seagate also did a little crystal-ball gazing, predicting that higher broadband penetration and rapid growth in digital content will increase market demand for hard drive storage by almost 80 percent by 2012. But the company has played down the impact of solid state drives (SSDs) on traditional disk-based devices, believing instead that hybrid drives will be more affordable for most consumers. The company will still be involved in the SSD business though, with its first product expected later this year.

(Source: Crave Asia)

Seagate Technology just might have a few patents that make the rest of the storage industry squirm.

Earlier this week, Seagate, the world's largest hard-drive maker, announced that it was suing STEC, alleging that the company violated four of its patents and other intellectual property.

The patents largely revolve around how a manufacturer would take flash memory and make it into a functioning hard drive. Seagate's hard drives store data on magnetic platters. There is more to the drive than the platters, however. Getting the data off of the platters and into a processor requires interfaces, controllers, and other hardware. Seagate's suit essentially states that although STEC might be using flash memory in its drives, the overall construction of its drives infringes on Seagate's patents.

And this one seems to be the big patent in the bunch: U.S. Patent No. 6,404,647 for a solid-state mass memory storage device. It was filed by Hewlett-Packard in 2000, and the U.S. Patent Office issued it in 2002. Seagate acquired it from HP some years back.

"The present disclosure relates to a solid-state mass memory storage device. More particularly, the disclosure relates to a semiconductor mass memory storage device suitable for disk drive replacement," the patent states.

The full patent is far longer, but that's the gist of it. It appears to describe a solid-state drive that could replace a standard hard drive. Seagate isn't talking a lot about the details of the suit, but CEO Bill Watkins said, "STEC is not the only company we are looking at."

Can a company really patent the concept of a solid-state drive? Determining the scope of patents like this could take years, said Jim Porter, an analyst at Disk/Trends. (We've also only examined it for a while but will do more research and talk to experts. The other patents are Nos. 6,849,480; 6,336,174; and 7,042,664.) Rodine sued a raft of hard-drive makers in the 1990s over its patents for a design for a 3.5-inch drive. The industry eventually went toward 3.25-inch form factors. But the suits were filed, and for a while they sent shivers down the spine of some executives.

If Seagate decides to broadly press its claims and prevails, the patents collectively could be worth millions. They could entitle Seagate to get a few dollars for every solid-state hard drive shipping out the door from manufacturers worldwide. DVD manufacturers pay around $15 to three sets of patent holders for every DVD player they ship. Philips and Sony reaped millions in royalties for inventing the CD. The Blu-ray Disc/HD DVD war centered on royalties. It's a good business too--you basically wait for the check, once you wade through expensive and hard-fought litigation.

So if the patent is so good why would Seagate go after STEC? To set an example. In the tech world, companies typically don't like to sign license and royalty agreements. Potential licensees often make the patent holder sue one or more companies first. If the potential licensees prevail, the conflict can fade away.

If the patent holder prevails in court, other potential defendants line up to sign deals.

STEC is a small player. If it wins, other industry players will applaud its pluck. If it loses, other manufacturers of flash drives like Intel, Toshiba, and SanDisk might decide to line up dutifully to pay Seagate royalties. And since there may not be a pre-existing lawsuit, there won't be as much bad blood.

"They (Seagate) have always been willing to license," Porter said.

Business is slowing a bit in the drive industry.

The Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company said it pulled in $3.1 billion in revenue for its third fiscal quarter, which ran from January through March, and $344 million in net income. Net income per share came to 65 cents.

While the figures for the January-March represents an increase in revenue and net income over last year, retail sales of drives and sales into the notebook market in the past three months came in at less than expected, said CEO Bill Watkins in a prepared statement.

The company, however, also lowered forecasts for the current quarter. Seagate says revenue will come to $2.85 to $3.0 billion while net income will come to 41 to 45 cents per share, excluding certain charges. Analysts have expected $3.1 billion and 57 cents a share excluding charges. It is unclear what might be causing the more drastic drop off in net income, but it could be price declines, a never-ending fact of life for hard drive makers.

(Last year at this time, Seagate reported revenue of $2.8 billion and net income of $212 million, but there were non-recurring charges in both quarters and last year's quarter was a disappointment.)

In all, Seagate shipped 43 million units during the quarter. In the previous quarter, the end of 2007, the company shipped 50 million units. Business usually drops off from the last quarter of a year to the first quarter by around 6 to 12 percent. Thus, the decline in shipments is a little steeper than the norm.

Update: Matt Bryson of Avian Securities concurred, stating that shipments were about three million light in the quarter. The extra inventory will cause earnings to sag a bit, but the second half will be stronger.

Don't make computers seek out data. Make the data move to where it can be used.

That, roughly, is one way to describe the racetrack memory concept, which IBM argues could one day lead to memory that could hold 100 times more data than flash memory does today and cost 100 times less. So that 2GB card you bought for $20 this week would hold 200GB, or more than a lot of notebook hard drives, and cost 20 cents.

In racetrack memory, information is stored in the domain walls, or boundaries, between magnetic regions on a wire. The domain walls are then shuttled up or down the wire via electrical pulses toward another component that can interpret whether the domain wall represents a "1" or a "0."

"We have a series of zeros and ones, and our objective is to shift that information to and fro without upsetting it," said Stuart Parkin, an IBM fellow, in an interview. Parkin is one of the authors of a paper on the subject being published in the April 11 edition of Science. "Unlike a hard drive, we have no moving parts. We have no moving atoms. We just have magnetic moments."

In flash memory and hard drives, data lives in a discrete location and a computer (or hard drive head) finds it. Shuttling the bits on a wire opens up the possibility for making 3D memory, and hence more dense memory, because wires could be stacked on top of each other. The time it takes to record or retrieve data could also be reduced.

Racetrack chips, potentially, could additionally last far longer because they have no moving parts, unlike hard drives, and won't get progressively worn out by successive read-erase cycles like flash memory. Flash chips typically last 100,000 read-write cycles before errors can become a problematic possibility.

The paper in detail describes how they were able to create, move, and interpret domain walls on horizontal permalloy nanowires.

One of the big breakthroughs in IBM's approach, said Parkin, is the fact that the domain walls are moved with electrical current. In the past, scientists tried to move domain walls in this manner with magnetic fields. That created two problems. One, using magnetic fields takes far more energy. Second, the magnetic fields can disturb adjacent magnetic fields, thereby potentially corrupting data.

"We spent about three years together on this. Three or four years ago, people hadn't even demonstrated moving one domain wall with small bursts of current," Parkin said. "It is an understanding of how the magnetic fields work together with building the nanowires in such a way that the domain walls can move smoothly along these wires without getting stuck on small perturbations."

Parkin is a leading figure in magnetic storage research. His work on thin magnetic film structures allowed IBM, among others, to exploit the giant magnetoresistive effect to significantly boost the density of hard drives.

In the next two to four years, IBM hopes to create a complete, working prototype of a racetrack chip with an integrated device that can read the data shuttling across the wire, said Parkin. In 7 to 10 years, chips like this, conceivably, could start coming out of factories. IBM doesn't make memory chips, but is interested in coming up with ideas and inventions in the area it can subsequently license.

It's all about data storage
If the semiconductor market revolved around processors in the 1990s, you can make a good argument that it's going to revolve around data storage in the next decade. The growth of the Internet and digital media has lead to the need for chips, software, and systems that can help store--and then find and retrieve--terabytes and exabytes of data. (An exabyte is a quintillion bytes, or a billion gigabytes.)

"The problems we're looking at aren't computationally driven, per se, but more information management problems," Mark Dean, an IBM fellow and director of the Almaden Research Center, said in an interview in February. "Computation is not the hard part anymore."

In the memory world, several companies are touting approaches for replacing existing technologies. Earlier this month, for instance, Numonyx--a joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Intel--said that it will later this year begin to commercially ship phase change memory (PCM), a type of dense memory that scientists have experimented with in labs for decades.

Start-up Grandis, as well as IBM, meanwhile, are examining spin transfer torque memory (STT RAM), which operates on similar principles as racetrack memory, while Zettacore is trying to store data with designer molecules. (IBM also has a lab project under way in which DNA could be used to organize carbon nanotubes into grids for data storage.)

Traditional approaches, of course, aren't giving up easily. Toshiba discussed a technique for building 3D flash chips. SanDisk acquired a line of 3D read-only memory flash chips when it bought Matrix Semiconductor, and is working on chips that can read, erase, and rewrite data.

In the hard drive world, Seagate will try to increase density on drives with a heating technology, while Hitachi is pursuing patterned media hard drives.

Editors' note, March 19, 2008 10:34 AM PDT: Dell has rebutted the claim about return rates, and Avian Securities says it won't challenge Dell's numbers. See "Dell: Flash notebooks are working fine" for more details.

Notebooks with flash-based hard drives cost a lot and, according to managing partner Avi Cohen at Avian Securities, they don't work very well either.

A large computer manufacturer is getting around 20 percent to 30 percent of the flash-based notebooks it is shipping sent back because of failure rates and performance that simply isn't meeting customer expectations, the firm stated in a report on Monday. Avian gathered this information on a recent swing through Asia.

Approximately 10 percent to 20 percent of the flash notebooks shipping from the large manufacturer are coming back because of technical failure, Cohen said, far higher than the 1 percent to 2 percent of notebooks that come back because of technical failure with hard drives.

"There is an order of magnitude higher in failure rates," he said. (Avian is a research firm that does not have a financial interest in flash companies, Cohen said.)

The rest are coming back because of lackluster performance. Flash-based notebooks can't match notebooks with regular hard drives in terms of applications like video streaming, he said. These notebooks also cost a lot. Inserting a flash-based drive into a notebook adds about $900 to the price or more.

Cohen prefers to say a large computer manufacturer is having these problems. From my own research, I can tell you that Dell is so far the manufacturer that has promoted flash drives in notebooks the most. Dell gets its flash drives from Samsung. Apple just starting shipping flash-based notebooks.

A Dell representative declined to comment on failure rates or returns. However, Dell is admitting that current flash-based drives can exhibit worse performance on some applications where data is exchanged in small packed sizes, and one of those applications is Microsoft Outlook. "An SSD (solid state drive) can be slower than a traditional hard drive" on Outlook, the representative said. But flash drives are superior for random access, the representative added, than regular drives.

To that end, Samsung is coming out with a new type of drive that corrects that issue, the Dell representative said. (Calls are out to Samsung, but no reply yet.)

While the returns are bad news for notebook makers right now, the problems also dim the outlook for the flash industry in general. Flash manufacturers are looking for applications that will suck up the large volume of chips coming out of factories right now. The industry went on a building spree in the last few years. Many hoped that notebooks would accomplish this. Notebook makers currently are inserting flash that can accommodate a single bit per memory cell. Both notebook makers and flash makers want the industry to shift to cheaper flash that can hold two or more bits per cell so the prices of these notebooks can be closer to conventional notebooks.

Multi-bit flash, however, isn't as reliable, so if the industry is having problems with single-cell flash, it's going to be tough to shift to the cheaper type of memory, Cohen said. As a result, the oversupply in flash will linger and prices will continue on their rapid downward descent.

Flash sells for around $3 a GB, about a 50 percent decline from the last quarter of last year, according to Jim Handy of Objective Analysis.

"SLC (single level cell, the name for single cell flash) is just a proof of concept," Avian's Cohen said. Will these problems be solved? Yes, but it will take time, he said. A shift to multi-level cell may not begin until the end of the year. Some flash makers had hoped it might start occurring now.

I can actually back up some of Cohen's comments on application performance. I tried a flash notebook recently. While the silence was great -- the notebook makes no sound -- it was tough to see a marked difference in performance. Or at least one that was worth $900.

Though the MacBook Air and ThinkPad X300 might be prettier and thinner, Toshiba's outdone them both in a crucial area.

Japan's Toshiba announced Monday that it had bumped the specs of its Dynabook SS RX to include a 128GB solid-state drive (SSD) as an option. That's twice the size of the Air and the X300, both of which come with a 64GB SSD. (Note: It's an option for the MacBook and standard on the ThinkPad.) So far, it appears it will be available only in Japan starting next month.

The 128GB SSD is an option, and the standard is an 80GB hard drive. Other specs include a 1.2-gigahertz Core 2 Duo U7600 processor and 2GB of memory. With the hard drive, Toshiba promises battery life of just over 6 hours, and with the flash drive, 12.5 hours.

Longer battery life is one of the principal benefits of using solid-state drives in PCs, as well as faster boot times, and because they lack the moving parts of traditional mechanical drives, less chance of losing data if you drop or bump the notebook. Also, they're lighter, thereby enabling notebook makers to slim their PC design down.

There's still a downside to SSDs. Price is the biggest one by far (an SSD option can double the price of a laptop with a traditional hard drive), but it also has the potential to wear out quicker than conventional drives.

Despite that, all the top hard drive makers are getting into the flash business. Samsung's vice president of memory marketing, Jim Elliot, said the company (currently ranked 4th in total hard drives shipped worldwide) expects the market share of solid-state memory to increase from 1 percent used in PCs today to 27 percent over the next three years.

Do you want to know the best thing about a notebook with a flash memory drive, rather than a conventional hard drive?

It's the silence.

The notebook I'm testing--a Dell Latitude D830 with a 64GB flash hard drive from Samsung--hasn't emitted a sound in three days. Flash drives, which store data in NAND flash memory, don't require motors or spinning platters. Thus, there are no whirring mechanical noises.

Compare that with my T42 ThinkPad. It sounds like a guinea pig got trapped inside, particularly during the start-up phase. Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee.

The lack of a mechanical hard drive also means lower power consumption and less heat. In turn that means the fan rarely, if ever, needs to kick into action. As I type, for instance, the notebook is running eight video streams-- two from CNN, two from CNET, two from MSN, a video on new bands on Crackle, and a pirated Led Zeppelin video on YouTube--and the fan won't trip over. The computer is running on battery power and the videos, with a few minor gulps, are all running smoothly.

If it did have a conventional hard drive, the fan would have flipped on, sapping battery power, and cranking out some white noise. I know that because I got the fans on my ThinkPad (as well as home notebook from Hewlett-Packard) to start in similar circumstances.

Is the quiet and extra battery life worth nearly a $900 premium? In a word, no, but you've got to look at the future. Although in the price stratosphere now, flash drives will start to compete more directly with drives over the next four years. Flash memory density continues to increase at a rapid pace, doubling almost every year, and large manufacturers like Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk and Intel have or are opening factories geared at churning out flash. Taken together, this will lead to an easy availability of chips, better capabilities, and recurring price wars.

Flash prices dropped 50 percent in 2006. Prices rose a bit in 2007, but then dropped 50 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2008, says Jim Handy of Objective Analysis. Hardware manufacturers can now buy 1GB of flash for $3, he added.

When the premium becomes more acceptable, say $100, the category could take off. The lack of noise isn't one of the benefits I expected, but it was tangible. Listening to the drive on my IBM always prompts two thoughts. One, turning on a PC takes more time than it should and, two, this thing could collapse at any moment. To be honest, the ThinkPad has never imploded because of a hard drive problem, but the internal clanking makes it sound like it could. Silence gets rid of a minor aggravation.

Flash drives also boost performance, although less than I expected. The Dell with the flash drive takes anywhere from 1 to 6 seconds to come out of standby mode, depending on what types of applications were left on. Occasionally, the video that was playing when the computer was put into standby mode starts again. The ThinkPad takes at least 12 seconds.

Starting the Dell after a complete shutdown takes 19 seconds. It takes the ThinkPad 45 seconds to get to the part where I can enter a password. After the password is entered, it takes another 55 seconds before the computer is operational. Some of the slower times on the ThinkPad can be attributed to a slower processor and a more ornate start-up cycle. Even if you don't take that into account, the flash advantage only comes to seconds.

"If it takes one and a half minutes versus two minutes to boot up, are you going to care?" asked Handy.

Weirdly, shutting down both computers takes about the same amount of time. (Flash drives can take minutes off the launch of Outlook, but I couldn't test it because of network problems.)

Battery power is tough to compare. The Dell has a larger battery pack than the ThinkPad. The ThinkPad is also much older. Still, the Dell with the flash drive seems to last longer than notebooks with standard drives. Fully charged, the battery says it will go five and a half hours, and the time remaining on the battery seems to follow the clock, i.e. an hour of battery time nearly comes to 60 minutes when few applications are on. With eight video streams, the five hours drops to two, but then kicks back up as windows are closed. Handy noted that a flash drive might consume a watt of power while a fast drive might consume 12 watts.

The drawback is the price. The same Latitude with an 80GB standard hard drive currently sells for $869 on Dell's site. Swapping the drive for a 64GB flash hard drive adds $899 to the price. The upgrade more than doubles the price of the notebook to $1,768 and slightly eliminates storage. That's down from the $920 price for the flash drive a few months ago, but out of reach of most buyers. (And it's worse at other vendors. Apple, which started offering flash drives after other PC makers, sells its 64GB flash drive upgrade for $999.)

Photos and high-definition video, among other applications, is also boosting the need for storage, which can favor hard drive makers. Samsung, among others, believes that corporate buyers only need around 64GB of storage, which will be economical to provide in flash in a few years. Consumer laptops, however, come with 160GB to 500GB of storage; 500GB of flash may not be reasonably affordable until 2012, and then consumers might need terabytes.

But if you can offload files onto a backup hard drive, flash could work for you.

A fire has destroyed an historic Silicon Valley building at the center of a preservation fight.

An early morning fire on Saturday swept through Building 25 at IBM's Cottle Road campus in San Jose, Calif., according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News. The building, which opened in 1957 but had been vacant since 1996, was the site where the flying hard disk drive--an ancestor to the modern hard drive--was invented.

The 40,000-square-foot building was also hailed as precursor to the modern high-tech campus for "creative engineers"...built "in true California style, (with) patios between the wings (that) give the effect that offices and laboratories extend out-of-doors," according to historical descriptions from IBM. "Decorated in quiet pastel shades, the interior is casual yet austere, creating an atmosphere conducive to contemporary concentration."

After the building was closed in 1996, a chain link fence was erected when it became a frequent target for vandals and a haven for the homeless.

Preservationists had been battling with the city of San Jose, which had sided with big-box retailer Lowe's to raze the structure and build a 180,000-square-foot store on the site. A deal in the works between Lowe's and preservationists would have allowed for a portion of the building to be remodeled to share the site with the store, the newspaper reported.

"There's no remodeling that," fire Capt. Dave Parker told the newspaper as he glanced at the smoldering building.