Business Tech

After releasing relatively low-performance 2TB hard drives a few months ago, Western Digital announced Tuesday that it's now shipping high-performance versions of these top-capacity drives.

The WD RE4 drive

(Credit: Western Digital)

The new drives are the WD Caviar Black and the WD RE4. According to the company, the former is designed for desktops while the latter is suited for servers and network storage devices.

These two new hard drives are based on WD's 500GB-per-platter technology. They both combine 7200rpm spin speed, 64MB cache, dual-stage actuator technology, SATA 2 (3Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor.

(Dual actuator technology is a head-positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track. The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.)

Other features of the two drives include:

• IntelliSeek, a technology that calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.
• StableTrac, a mechanism that makes sure the motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations.
• NoTouch, a ramp-load technology that keeps the recording head from ever touching the disk media to significantly reduce the wear and tear of the recording head and media as well as provide better drive protection in transit.

In addition, the WD RE4 2TB enterprise drive features 1.2 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF) and other power-saving, speed-enhancing, and fail-proofing technologies.

The WD Caviar Black 2TB (model WD2001FASS) drive is available now for $299. The WD RE4 2TB (model WD2003FYYS) drive is currently being qualified by OEMs. Both drives are covered by a five-year, limited warranty.

The storage-capacity gap between laptop and desktop hard drives just shrank significantly.

Western Digital announced Monday two laptop drives that offer "extreme" amounts of storage: the Scorpio Blue 1TB and the Scorpio Blue 750GB. Prior to this announcement, the largest laptop hard drive available was 500GB.

Scorpio Blue

(Credit: Western Digital)

Currently, the largest desktop hard drive on the market is 2TB. The Scorpio Blue 1TB drive, though half the capacity, is still very impressive, considering the fact that a 2.5-inch laptop drive is much smaller than a 3.5-inch desktop drive. The new WD laptop drives are the first that use 333GB per platter technology.

The Scorpio Blue hard drives support the SATA2 (3Gbps) standard but have a thickness of 12.5 millimeters, as opposed to 9.5 millimeters in other 2.5-inch drives. This means the new drives will not fit in all 2.5-inch slots in laptops.

For this reason, WD designates them as a perfect fit for portable storage solutions and they'll be in WD's new My Passport Essential SE Portable USB drive.

Other than capacity, the new Scorpio Blue drives also feature a set of advanced storage technologies, including:

• WhisperDrive, which is WD's technology that uses seeking algorithms to produce one of the quietest 2.5-inch drives available
• ShockGuard, which helps the drive withstanding shock, such as accidental drops, and vibrations better
• SecurePark, which is a mechanism that parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up and spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures that the recording head never touches the disk surface to improve long-term reliability

Both new drives come with 8MB of buffer memory and spin at 5,200rpm, which is slightly slower than the 5400rpm speed of mainstream laptop drives.

The Scorpio Blue 750GB drive (model WD7500KEVT) is available now and costs $190. The 1TB version (model WD10TEVT) is, for now, only available configured into the My Passport Essential SE USB drive, but it will be available as an internal hard drive in a few weeks. It will cost $250.

Correction: This post previously misstated the location of Western Digital's headquarters.

Western Digital on Monday announced it has acquired solid-state drive maker SiliconSystems for $65 million.

The purchase will provide the current market leader in 2.5-inch drives with a way into the growing SSD market. Based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., SiliconSystems was established in 2002, and makes SSD products for communications, industrial, embedded systems, medical, military, and aerospace applications. SiliconSystems' product lineup includes SSDs with a variety of interfaces, including SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB, and CF, in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, and CF.

The Lake Forest, Calif.-based Western Digital has a strong presence in the notebook industry with its 2.5-inch drives, but not the rapidly expanding Netbook segment. With the acquisition, Western Digital is now instantly a player in that market.

"SiliconSystems' intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD's solid-state drive development programs for the Netbook, client and enterprise markets," said Western Digital President and CEO John Coyne in a statement Monday.

SiliconSystems will be integrated into Western Digital right away. The new business will be named the WD Solid-State Storage business unit.

LAS VEGAS--When Acer and Asus first started pushing Netbooks, it was all about flash memory. But now, a majority of the small, Atom-powered notebooks have hard drives. And Bill Watkins, chief executive of hard drive market leader Seagate, likes it that way.

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins at CES 2009.

(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET)

When the two Taiwanese Netbook makers first talked with Seagate about the category, they told Watkins they didn't need storage for their tiny Atom-powered, Linux-based Netbooks since they'd be used only for surfing the Web and all data would be stored in the cloud.

Just two years later it's a totally different story. Besides more customers preferring Windows XP, Seagate says probably one in four Netbooks now have solid-state drives, and the rest are good old-fashioned mechanical drives.

"For us, it's a big win, since we can sell a lot of drives then," Watkins said in an interview here at CES. "Everyone tries to low-end storage, but they can't get away with it."

Not that he thinks the Netbook is all that great an idea for PC makers. Most of them dismiss the idea that Netbooks will cannibalize traditional notebooks, as Dell did earlier Friday at its press event. At that, Watkins scoffs. "It's a low-end notebook. And it's just chewing into the $800 notebook market," he said.

Seagate's chief is known for being rather frank in his opinions, and his take on this year's CES was no different.

Regarding the much-buzzed about Palm Pre, Watkins says the company nailed it. "It's a better iPhone. It's taking the things the iPhone doesn't do well and improving them," he said, like a physical keyboard instead of a virtual one.

And a trend he likes is pico projectors. Not for the actual gadgets themselves, but the idea that people are finding ways to get content off their devices in new ways. The form factor itself isn't ideal.

"Why would you want to carry an extra device around?" he asks. "Once they're integrated into devices, (pico projectors) will be cool. That's the next step of taking content off devices and finding different ways to enjoy it."

Seagate is here at the gadget extravaganza to push its consumer-oriented storage solutions, like the FreeAgent HD Theater device that allows media stored on an external drive to be connected by dock to both PC and TV.

Consumer storage is one of the only areas that's growing for Seagate. The PC ecosystem has been battered by the troubled global economy--the industry is expected to see negative unit growth in 2009, a first since the tech bubble burst in 2001.

As for Seagate, hard drive shipments were lower in December 2008 than September 2008, the first time ever, said Brian Dexheimer, the company's chief sales and marketing officer. But consumer storage devices like the FreeAgent drives have been the one bright spot, with sales rising 15 percent on the year.

The company, he said, is preparing for a "very conservative outlook" this year.

Heading back to school means two things: getting back on a regular sleep schedule, and going shopping.

And consumer electronics retailers have always been particularly grateful during the season in between the Super Bowl and Black Friday for the spike in money spent at their stores during July and August every year.

Typical spending this time of year is on a computer, but as the U.S. becomes more and more saturated with PCs, the back-to-school retail boon for retailers is expected to be more modest this year than in years past.

More than 80 percent of computers purchased at retail this time of year are notebooks. Click the image for a full photo gallery.

This year there should be a 25-percent increase spread across July and early August, according to forecasts by The NPD Group. To compare, the week before the Super Bowl normally sees a 16 percent jump over the weeks before, and Black Friday alone sees a 160 percent jump.

As with previous years, the notebook is the computer of choice for most students heading back to campus. Currently, three out of every four computers sold at retail is a notebook, the rest are desktops. But it's more pronounced this time of year, when "over 80 percent" of computers sold are notebooks, according to Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for The NPD Group.

And though retailers would love for shoppers to pick up cameras, GPS, and MP3 players while they're loading up for school, consumers do tend to stay focused. Printers, mice, USB sticks, external hard drives and keyboards--things that are made for use with the PC--are the other products that tend to get a back-to-school bump.

There are a few things happening this year that could prove interesting. First, there have been rumors of Apple redesigning the MacBook. It's the notebook that has a lot of cachet for college students in particular. The most sales for the season are done over Labor Day, but Apple--if it does update its signature notebook--won't do that until mid-September at the earliest.

There are also some things we won't see. Those cutesy, lightweight laptops you've been hearing about? Even though they're intended for educational applications, don't expect them to be on campus in large numbers come this fall. Though netbooks are no longer the domain of second-tier PC makers--all the big guys are making them now--Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Lenovo, and soon Dell.

"We haven't see a lot of indication that there's going to be much out there for back to school," said Baker, who tracks retail electronics sales. "Most (vendors) won't hit in big quantities until Christmas." Though models like Acer's Aspire One and HP's Mini-Note are available, they're online-only at this point.

And though it's done well at e-tailers like Amazon.com--where nine of the top 20 best-selling laptops are netbooks--online retailers are not necessarily indicative of the larger computer-buying population. "To get real industry-changing volumes, (netbooks) need to be at Best Buy, Circuit City, and Costco," said Baker.

Also, don't anticipate huge discounts on computer hardware. The average price of a Windows-based notebook sold at retail these days is $750, which hasn't changed at all from this time last year. That's because there's just not as much room for a lot of price slashing.

"There's not so much room for pricing to collapse anymore," said Baker. "We're not talking about $1,100 notebooks anymore." He's right. The margins are so thin on these that the lowest traditional notebooks can go anymore is about $399 or $499. Of course, exceptional consumer demand for netbooks could eventually change that.

Click here to view CNET's Back-to-School Gift Guide 2008.