UPDATED: Corrected the information that McAfee provides software security solution for Dell's self-encrypting PCs as previously suggested in the article.
A Momentus FDE 2.5-inch SATA hard drive.
(Credit: Seagate)According to credible sources, a notebook computer is stolen every 53 seconds--and 97 percent are never recovered. In most cases, the risk of losing data stored on the hard drive is much higher than the value of the notebook itself.
To address this issue, Seagate, Dell, and McAfee teamed up to announce on Monday data encryption solutions for PCs that work without you even having to know about it. The solutions include new self-encrypting hard drives, software managing systems, and computers that implements the two.
The new hard drives belong to the Seagate's Momentus FDE family. FDE stands for full-disk encryption, Seagate's self-encrypting method for 2.5-inch hard drives.
Dell is the PC vendor that implements the new hard drives in a variety of its business computers.
McAfee annouced that it has joined the list of security software providers that support Seagate hard drives' embedded hardware encryption. This offers customers another choice of enterprise management solutions required to secure notebook computers.
The new Momentus FDE notebook hard drives comes in two performance grades: one that spins at 5400rpm and the other at 7200rpm. Both are presently available in 320GB and 16GB storage capacities, with 500GB versions coming early next year. However, the 5400rpm Momentus FDE has only 8MB of cache as opposed to 16MB of the 7200rpm version.
These drives features SATA controller interface and built-in AES encryption, a government-grade encryption capable of encrypting a hard drive's entire content transparently and automatically.
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The 1-inch SSD.
(Credit: Super Talant Techonology)Solid-state drives aren't always faster than regular hard drives, but they sure can be tinier.
The smallest regular hard drives are the 1.8 inchers that Toshiba has been making for ultracompact laptops. On Wednesday, Super Talent Technology announced two SSDs that come in a significantly smaller form factor: .85 inch and 1 inch.
The new SSDs use Intel Z-P140 NAND Flash-based SSD technology and employ the older parallel ATA (PATA/IDE) interface, as opposed to the current and popular SATA interface used in regular-size SSDs. Both offer rather modest read and write speeds of 40 megabytes per second and 30MBps, respectively. They are also available in very small storage capacities. The .85 inchers offer 2GB and 4GB, while the 1 inchers offer 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB sizes.
Thanks to their tiny physical form and limited storage space and speed, these new drives are only suitable for ultramobile PCs and digital-multimedia broadcasting devices.
It's unclear how much these new SSDs cost. Chances are, however, that you won't be able to purchase them at all; rather, they will be available to OEM manufacturers only.
(Credit:
Dong Ngo/CNET)
I just got my hands on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, which at 1.5TB is the largest consumer hard drive you can get presently, and now I realize just how big it really is.
If you bought a new computer in the last two years, chances are it came with a hard drive somewhere between 250GB and 500GB. This is already a huge amount of storage considering that just four years ago, most hard drives offered 100GB or less.
A 250GB hard drive offers about 16 times more storage space than the 16GB version of the iPhone 3G. For context, my iPhone can hold enough music for me to listen to, literally, for a few days nonstop.
The new 1.5TB hard drive, which started selling in late August, has the same amount of storage as six 250GB hard drives or three 500GB hard drives. On the other hand, it still has virtually the same physical form factor--it's a standard 3.5 inches and supports the popular SATA II interface. This means the drive works the same as well.
I tried the Seagate Barracuda with our test bed, and it did offer about the same throughput speed as other 7200rpm SATA II hard drives. It was also quiet and didn't generate too much heat. It is recommended, though, that you use Seagate's DiscWizard utility, rather than that of the OS, to format the drive.
One thing that's truly different here: you can get the hard drive online for about $190, which translates to about 12 cents per gigabyte. That's about the best deal for a storage device I've seen. As a bonus, the 1.5TB Segate Baracuda 7200.11 also comes with a five-year warranty.
Two weeks after announcing two new high-speed solid-state drives (SSD), Super Talent Technology on Tuesday announced it will release the MasterDrive LX as a budget solid-state drive later this week.
(Credit:
Super Talent Technology)
The MasterDrive LX comes in 64GB and 128GB versions and will cost about $179 and $300, respectively. Both drives are SATA-II and use NAND flash technology. They will be compatible with computers that support the ever-popular 2.5-inch SATA hard drive.
The low prices do come with a shortcoming: the throughput speed. The new MasterDrive LX drives are significantly slower than other SSDs; it's even slower than some regular SATA hard drives. They support sequential read speeds of up to 100MB per second and sequential write speeds of up to 40MB per second. To put this in perspective, regular SATA hard drives can offer about 100MB per second, while the new Intel SSDs reportedly offer up to 240MB per second throughput speed.
However, the MasterDrive LX is still more desirable than regular hard drives in terms of battery life and durability. I hope this is just the beginning and soon you'll be able to buy SSDs for the same prices you currently pay for regular SATA hard drives.
The MasterDrive OX SSD
Tuesday, Super Talent Technology introduced two "dangerously fast" solid-state hard drives, the MasterDrive OX and the MasterDrive PX.
The budget MasterDrive OX uses multilevel cell NAND flash and has data speeds of up to 150MB per second in sequential read and 100B per second in sequential write, according to the company. The MasterDrive OX comes in capacities up to 128GB and has a 1-year warranty.
The higher-end MasterDrive PX, on other hand, uses single-level cell NAND flash and focuses on the reliability and endurance, rather than capacity. It, too, is supposed to have lightning-fast sequential read and write speeds, up to 170MBps and 130MBps, respectively, according to STT. The MasterDrive PX SSDs are available in 32GB and 64GB capacities, and comes with a 3-year warranty.
Both drives use standard 2.5-inch SATA-II interface and will be available later this week. The 128GB MasterDrive OX has a street price of about $419, which is about the same as the new SSD that Intel released a few days ago. The MasterDrive PX, on the other hand, is much more expensive, costing $499 for the 32GB version and $849 for the 64GB version.
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