hdd

Are future mainstream Ultrabooks going to usher in the hybrid hard-disk drive?

Acer may have kicked off this trend with the hybrid-drive-packing Ultrabook Aspire S3, which sports a 20GB solid-state drive matched with a standard 320GB spinning hard disk. So, will others follow? Yes, says a report in Digitimes.

Though a hybrid system can't match the performance of a 128GB SSD-only laptop, an ancillary 20GB drive is a relatively large chunk of flash compared with, for example, the 4GB SSD (or flash drive, if that's what you choose to call it) in the Seagate Momentus hybrid drive.

How … Read more

Asus is due to release its Ultrabook lineup on Tuesday, as vendor momentum in this new Windows laptop category gains steam.

The Asus Zenbook line is expected to start at under $1,000 and be populated with 11- and 13-inch models ranging up to $1,499.

The UX21 model, for example, will come with an 11.6-inch display, a Core i5 Intel Sandy Bridge processor, and a 128GB solid-state drive. The high-end 13.3-inch UX31 will have a Core i7 chip and 256GB SSD.

Models are also slated to come with beefed-up sound and USB 3.0 ports. The latter … Read more

Samsung plans to sell its hard-drive business, a new report claims.

The electronics company would like to make $1.5 billion on the sale, but it might take less than $1 billion, The Wall Street Journal is reporting, citing an anonymous source. The source told the Journal that, in no uncertain terms, "Samsung is trying to get rid of [its HDD operation]," and one of its chief competitors, Seagate, is a potential suitor.

Though Samsung has been competing in the hard-disk-drive business for quite some time, the company is still far behind the leaders in that sector. According … Read more

Hard-disk drives are becoming so inexpensive that prices alone--seemingly improbable a couple of years ago--garner headlines. So, how will speedy yet pricey solid-state drives keep up?

Beyond the above-the-fold "2TB for $75" attention-getters, laptop hard disk costs have also been dropping like a rock, pushing mobile hard drives far below solid-state drives. The laptop market is one of the primary markets for flash memory-based SSDs, which are generally faster--in some cases much faster--than HDDs.

Case in point: the Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 HDD. The $64.99 price at Newegg.com not only gets you a 500GB capacity drive in … Read more

Happy Chinese Lunar New Year! According to the lunisolar calendar, this year's animal zodiac celebrates the rabbit, the fourth animal in the 12-year cycle. Jeff can't get enough talk about Chinese cultural traditions, although this day of celebration is a little bittersweet for me thanks to a present I received today from Amazon.com.

Rabbit Mothers aside, Verizon subscribers and AT&T haters are celebrating today for the release of the Verizon iPhone. Early reviews are already in, and it turns out the Verizon iPhone is indeed...a phone; which is more than we can say for the AT&T version.

CNET's cell phone expert Kent German already ran anecdotal testing to compare the data and call quality of the Verizon handset, and Big Red's version definitely has the advantage in almost all of the trouble-prone test sites in San Francisco. Keep in mind that this may change depending on your location, but if you were waiting to see if Verizon would deliver on its promise for better service, it did.

Like a good Apple fanboy, Wilson already has a digital copy of News Corp.'s experiment iPad-only newspaper, The Daily. He played around with it for a little while before the show, and even though he refuses to say anything bad about it on the recorded segment, I'll throw him under the bus to tell you that he wasn't entirely happy about the loading speed of the category carousel on the front page. We're also wary of a daily newspaper that updates itself at noon every day...is this today's news tomorrow?

We can't say anything too incendiary about The Daily since we live in fear of Peter Ha, a friend of the show who's also the tech editor for the good afternoon paper. He's booked to guest host tomorrow's episode of The 404, so we'll wait to grill him on it then.

Google also gave its Android Marketplace a makeover yesterday, and although it's been criticized in the past for being too difficult to install and pay for apps, the company hopes to change that with a new interface that allows users to access the store with their Google IDs. You can search for apps on desktops or laptop computers, and the apps will automatically download and install on your Android phone.

The new Android Market will also allow in-app purchasing, so you can add levels to games and other enhancements to existing apps over Twitter to all your friends. Check it out at http://market.android.com.

Mubakalar finally approves of a few voice mails that we listen to after the break, so keep them coming! The phone number to call is 1-866-404-CNET.

Finally, if you're looking to back up your data so this doesn't happen to you, consider today's Deal of the Day, brought to you by Kodak.

It's the Western Digital 1TB Portable USB Hard Drive for $99.95 from B&H Photo and Video. The drive is portable, easy to use with any USB 2.0 port, and is made from recycled materials to decrease your digital footprint on the environment. Enjoy!

LAS VEGAS--Marvell announced its new storage controller this week that combines a regular hard-disk drive (HDD) and a solid-state drive (SSD) to create a hybrid storage solution designed to offer SSD-like performance while retaining the capacity benefits of traditional hard drives.

Intrigued by the idea, I visited the company's demonstration today and found it indeed intriguing and at the same time practical.

At the demo, Marvel used a controller card, powered by its HyperDuo chip, that has two SATA 6Gbps ports. This card is similar to any PCIe SATA controller cards you find on the market. The difference is, … Read more

LAS VEGAS--At CES 2011, Verbatim introduces a series of peripherals to arm travelers with digital tools to complement a digital lifestyle. The first two products are hard drives: the Titan XS SuperSpeed 3.0 external hard drive wrapped in a shock-proof rubber enclosure for twice the toughness and 10 times the transfer speed of traditional USB 2.0.

The other HDD is the Store 'n" Go SuperSpeed that has onboard connections for USB 3.0 and FireWire 800. It's also compatible with Macs right out of the box thanks to the HFS+ formatting. Unfortunately, the capacity for both … Read more

A Chinese embargo on rare earth elements is causing a dramatic spike in the price of materials, which is expected to lead to a jump in high-tech product prices before settling back down in a few years, according to report released today.

Prices will increase rapidly until "non-Chinese rare earth mines are up and running, increasing product availability and thereby decreasing prices," wrote Robert Castellano, president of The Information Network, in a research note today. (See: Pay dirt: Why rare earth metals matter to tech (FAQ).)

But for the time being, Castellano points to some alarming statistics. In … Read more

The hybrid hard-disk drive market is expected to reach 600 million units in 2016, according to market researcher Objective Analysis. This would mean an explosion of mainstream drives that integrate the performance-boosting benefits of flash memory.

The first generation of hybrid drive technology was "well conceived but poorly implemented," according to a report released on Monday by Objective Analysis. "Now that working versions have been implemented the hybrid drive promises to sweep the PC hard drive market."

"We expect the hybrid drive market to nearly double every year for the five years following its initial adoption, reaching 600 million units by 2016," said analyst Jim Handy, who authored the report, in a statement. "This blazing growth will result from hybrid drives replacing standard HDDs in mainstream PCs."

Hybrid drives, in their current form, add a small amount of flash memory to a traditional spinning HDD. But this pinch of flash can deliver a big boost to performance on certain tasks at relatively little extra cost, as CNET Reviews demonstrated with the 500GB Seagate Momentus XT and as other reviews of the Seagate drive have shown.

"The NAND [flash memory] in these hybrid drives will be pretty small. Seagate's Momentus XT does a really good job with only 4GB of flash, and Nvelo's Dataplex software accelerates HDDs very well with only 16GB of NAND," said Handy, responding to an e-mail query. … Read more