hdd

Despite industry leader Seagate's poor showing earlier this year, analysts say there's still plenty of demand for hard disk drives.

In the first quarter of 2008, HDD vendors shipped 137 million drives, which is 21 percent higher than the same quarter the year before, according to iSuppli, a market research company which keeps track of the industry. Those drives are primarily being snapped inside notebook PCs, other portable devices, desktops, and external drives.

Things weren't looking so good when Seagate reported its earnings in April, and revenue was below what analysts were expecting. But the demand for … Read more

It's been awhile since we've seen a ruggedized external hard drive come to the market. The last one we reviewed was the LaCie Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive; it scored well in the speed tests and even withstood a 30-inch drop off a desk in nonoperating mode.

Iomega's eGo camo portable hard drive takes it a step higher and bumps the maximum drop height to 60 inches (5 feet), or so they report. Along with the standard read and write tests, we also took the liberty of performing a drop test to prove its toughness. The day we … Read more

We first caught a glimpse of the Maxtor Black Armor back in January at CES 2008. Since then, we've been excited to get it into our labs for testing to see if it measures up to the rest of the market. After a few months of waiting, we finally got it and...not so much.

The Black Armor's No. 1 concern is data security. Like a little digital lockbox, everything inside the hard drive is protected by 128-bit government grade encryption that's built into the hardware itself, rendering the drive useless in the wrong hands. The owner … Read more

Today, Toshiba announced a 1.8-inch hard drive that combines high capacity with high performance. The drive (model MK617GSG) gives you 160GB of storage spinning at 5400rpm. Other 160GB 1.8-inch drives have been chugging along at 4200rpm, until now. Expect to see this drive--and the single platter 80GB version of it--in mininotebooks in August. No details yet on how much of a discount these drives will offer over similarly sized solid-state drives.

Crossover vehicles are all the rage. There is nary a midsize sedan on the market that isn't in line to be redesigned as a small wagon or SUV loaded with family-friendly options and sold as a minivan substitute. Into this fray comes the 2009 Dodge Journey R/T AWD, riding on a stretched Avenger platform and squeezing a third row of seats into the bargain.

So how does Chrysler, inventor and ongoing proponent of the minivan, fare in its effort to de-minivan the minivan? A lot about the Journey is good, especially the available interior electronics. It's available … Read more

Bigger, faster, thinner is the name of the game in hard drives.

Fujitsu is only the latest drive maker to use superlative adjectives to market its newest product. In this case it's the MHZ2 BJ series of its 2.5-inch hard disk drives, which the company claimed Monday is the "world's first" 320GB drive that rotates at speeds of 7,200 revolutions per minute.

That claim can be a tad misleading since there are drives out there that do the same spin speed, though they're smaller in size. Plus there are higher capacity drives already announced and on the market. … Read more

Before you plunk down for an external drive, check out the clever yet poorly named SATA HDD Stage Rack. It's like an iPod dock, but for spare SATA hard drives you may have lying around. GeekSTuff4U.com is selling the SATA HDD Stage Rack for the odd but reasonable price of $46.79. The dock accepts 3.5-inch desktop drives and--with an insert--2.5-inch laptop drives, and it works with both PCs and Macs. It's unclear if the dock can be powered solely by USB, or whether it's necessary to make use of the dock's DC-in … Read more

Not all gadgets are the technological equivalent of genetic mutations. Some hybrids actually make sense and don't even look like lab experiments gone awry.

On paper, at least, Hitachi's hybrid camcorder appears to be one of these exceptions. Gizmag says the video camera, which Hitachi calls the first DVD/HDD product of its kind, can easily burn videos directly onto a DVD inside the camcorder, bypassing the need for a computer altogether. It comes in 1.3- and 3.3-megapixel models, each with an 8GB hard drive that can store 110 minutes of video, at about $1,450 … Read more