Seagate, a world leader in the manufacturing of high performance hard disk drives, in association with Western Digital has recently unleashed a new sophisticated hard drive named the Barracuda 7200.12 HDD. It’s a 3.5 inch hard drive running at speed of 7200-RPM. It has got an aerial density of 329 Gigabits per square inch and hence the performance it gives is outstanding. The Barracuda has got only two platters and offers 1TB of storage space.

This hard drive is developed to bolster the most demanding PC applications. It has got a 3Gb/sec Serial ATA interface, that’s the industry’s leading standard offering incredible data read/write rates. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 3.5 inch hard drive will also be released in 750GB and 500GB storage capacities with a built in high speed cache memory of 32MB and 16MB respectively.

The company also announced its Constellation hard drives. The Constellation series has got two speedy and reliable hard drives. One measures 2.5 inches and the other measures 3.5 inches. Both the drives are optimised for enterprise level deployment and feature Seagate’s PowerChoice technology that reduces the power consumption by up to 54 percent. The Constellation 2.5-inch hard drive is available in 160GB and 500GB storage capacities and the 3.5 inch Constellation HDD comes in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. Both versions of the Constellation series are available with SATA as well as SAS interface.

Aleratec Inc has recently unveiled its next generation hard disk drive duplicator and sanitizer. The company has launched the new 1:5 HDD Cruiser that can duplicate 5 Serial ATA based hard disk drives simultaneously and sanitizes 6 HDDs at a time. The sanitization process is so perfect that all your confidential data is unreadable.

The 1:5 HDD Cruiser is a stand alone unit and it doesn’t need any computer to operate. Now there is no need to hook up yourself to a computer for hours and get screwed up by working on complex hard disk duplicating and sanitizing software. The 1:5 HDD Cruiser has got different bays equipped with quick and easy loading doors. All the bays are made of Aluminium for optimal thermal conductivity to avoid overheating. All you have to do is load the HDDs in these bays and close the doors. The drives will be connected automatically via internal Non Scratch SATA connectors. You can sanitize the drives in three ways, i.e. one pass data overwrite, three passes data overwrite and Seven pass DoD 5220.22-M.that ensures maximum confidentiality. This way data you had stored on HDDs, like the Seagate Barracude 7200.11 1.5TB, can never be accessed or read by anyone else again.

Perry Solomon, President and CEO of Aleratec said, “Duplicating the contents of a hard disk drive is easy with the 1:5 HDD Cruiser. It is equipped with quick load drive bays so there are no cumbersome external cables needed. Just load your source drive in the top bay and load up to 5 target drives in the in the remaining bays. The 1:5 HDD Cruiser will copy the exact content and format of the source drive to the 5 targets. You can even add site licensed operating systems and application programs so a system upgrade is completed with just a drive swap.”

G-Technology has recently unveiled a new series of its external storage drives that are based on the 2.5 inches solid state drive technology. The company has developed the G-DRIVE mini SSD and the RAID 0/1 G-RAID mini SSD. The former one is available in 120GB and 250GB storage capacities while the latter one is available in 250GB and 500GB storage capacities.

All the drives are fully rugged devices and the company claims that because of the absence of any type of mechanical assembly, there is no single chance of drive corruption. Whilst normal G-Technology hard drives, such as the G-Technology G-DRIVE Combo 1TB, might have more storage capacity, the durability of the SSDs is unquestionable. As per the lab tests each SSD can endure extreme shocks up to 1500Gs, vibrations, abnormal temperature and are fit to use at high altitudes. These external drives sports three different types of interfaces, i.e. FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0. So you can use it at varying speeds depending on the type of port your Mac machine has. When connected to a FireWire 800 port the drives offer a data write speed of 60MB/sec and 75MB/sec read speed.

Roger Mabon, vice president of Fabrik’s G-Technology product group said, “These products target a very niche market segment that understands the cost benefits of using a superior quality, yet simple, SSD-based external storage solution. Nothing comes close to their quality, performance and reliability.”

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Intel, the world’s biggest semiconductor development company, has decided to make a new series of hard disk drives that will offer double the storage space than current offerings. It will make eight new drives that could hold up to 320GB data. The consumers will be able to get them in the fourth quarter this year. The Intel Corporation has decided to make such a move so that it can capture the emerging market for chip based storage devices in its early stages.

Intel’s ongoing venture with Micron Technology Inc. (that was started in 2005) will be the base of the new project. Micron Technology Inc. will make NAND Flash memory. The chips will be manufactured using the Intel’s most advanced manufacturing technology, i.e. 32-nanometer production. The company believes that the flash technology will completely replace the current mechanical hard disk drives, like the Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB, in both portable computing machines as well as in desktops. Apart from the new hard drives the company will is also looking forward to launch some other goodies for the computing professionals. It will release a new processor that will be able to process complex graphics of its own. No need to add a dedicated graphic card. Apart from this the company is aiming at development of 16GB flash memory to incredibly fasten the boot up time and enhance the PC reflexes. The processor is codenamed the Intel Havendale and the flash will be known as Braidwood and are expected to hit the consumer markets in the first quarter of 2010.

Seagate, the world’s top notch maker of high performance hard disk drives has recently expanded its Cheetah hard drives line up by introducing two new Cheetah models named the Cheetah 15K.7 and Cheetah NS.2. Cheetah hard drives are known for their performance, speed and reliability and these two newbies are targeted at enhancing these three prime attributes.

These drives are ideal for use in corporate IT environments based on a standard 3.5-inch enterprise infrastructure. They are optimised for low power consumption and offer the advantage of low drive replacement costs and low storage cost per gigabyte. As of now, the new Cheetah hard drives are the largest capacity mission critical drives and come in 600GB storage capacity, which is larger than the 400GB provided by the older Seagate Cheetah NS hard drive. Seagate build them exclusively for 3.5-inch Tier 1 storage applications. Both the drives are powered via 2nd-generation PowerTrim technology that enables dynamic power consumption management. It actually makes the drives smart enough to adjust the power consumption according to the level of activities.

John Rydning, IDC’s research director for hard disk drives said, “External storage system OEMs continue to consume the majority of 3.5-inch performance-optimized HDDs shipped each quarter, whereas server manufacturers consumed nearly all of the 2.5-inch SFF performance-optimized HDDs that shipped in 2008. Seagate’s new 3.5-inch Cheetah disk drives with up to 600GBs of capacity will fill a critical need for both its customers and end users looking to extend the life of existing external storage system platforms.”

Diskeeper, the well known organisation specialising in storage maintenance, has recently unveiled its new flagship product called the Solid State Drive Optimiser. The company claims that it is the first optimiser ever designed exclusively to boost SSD performance. It is targeted towards enhancing the speed and lifespan of the solid state drives.

As SSDs are increasingly becoming popular in the mobile computing market it was expected to have some innovative accessory for them. These drives are far better than the legacy hard disk drives that use mechanical assembly inside the chassis box. The read/write speed of the SSD is comparatively much better. What makes these drives ideal to use in laptops and servers is their ability to endure bumps and drops. However, there are some issues with SSDs which the manufacturers are trying to resolve from the date these drives were introduced in the market. Issues are regarding deterioration in the drive’s performance. This is where Diskeeper products come into play. The Diskeeper aims at the development of enhanced drive controllers to manage read/write balance across the drive.

The company has used its HyperFast technology that eliminates the free disk fragmentation which is the main cause behind the SSD performance degradation. It also reduces the overall erase-write cycles and thus the lifespan of the SSD is also enhanced. HyperFast forces the file system to perform sequential data write instead of doing it randomly. This is the key that that ensures a stunning performance.

Apart from laptop theft, losing lost USB drives containing sensitive data is another major issue emerging nowadays. Everyday one or more organisations face the consequences of losing sensitive information, such as customer database, banking transactions, security files and more from lost hard drives. In order to prevent such issues, flash drive manufacturers began to create secured USB drives which offer features like data encryption and user authentication. One can find a variety of such secured pen drives, but the only problem is that most of them were developed exclusively for Windows operating systems. As a result Mac machines were still vulnerable to security threats.

With this in mind the world leading manufacturer of flash based storage devices SanDisk has launched a new range of secured flash drives, including the SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise and SanDisk Cruzer Professional, that offer native cryptographic services and can be run on both Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. It features hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption and allows OS X users to log in and shut down access to the encrypted storage area, manage passwords, manage contact information and other preferences, as well as upgrade the firmware via Internet. So if you are a Mac lover then the SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise is an essential peripheral to have.

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You must have seen a variety of flash drives with different colours, shapes and designs imprinted on them but the two new entrants by LaCie will definitely make you feel distinctively amazed due to their coin shaped designed. That’s right, the two new flash drives called CurrenKey USB flash drives (where curren implies the currency) redefine the art and craft for portable memory drives completely. Unlike other rectangular flash drives, the CurrenKey USB flash drives incorporate a round shape for the first time and look exactly like a contemporary coin.

These are designed by the 5.5 designers exclusively for LaCie. The two CurrenKeys differ from each other with respect to colour, storage capacity and of course, price. One of them can accommodate 4GB of data and is available in bronze finish at a price of £19.99 whereas the other can hold 8GB of digital media and features a silver finish. You can get it at a price of £34.99. But both are obviously far behind the LaCie Brick Desktop Hard Drive 500GB in terms of storage capacity, although they make up for this deficiency with slimmer sizes, an interesting design, and low price. Both the flash drives can be opened by rotating the coin’s edge and plugged in to any Windows PC, Mac or Linux machine. Shock-proof, die-cast metal is used in making of these flash drives which gives it extreme endurance against hard drops, knocks and shakes. So you will never end up frustrated because of crashed data.

Unsurprisingly, the Solid State Hard Drives or SSDs are one of the hottest computer peripherals now a days. This is because of the significant benefits that these flash based drives offer over the traditional hard drives containing mechanical inner-parts.

The absence of any mechanical assembly and rotating disc with a reading head on it make the SSDs more tolerant against sudden bumps, dust and falls. Apart from this the Solid State Hard Drives are based on flash storage which offers a significant improvement in read/write speed. Due to such advantages the SSDs are likely to replace the traditional hard drives despite of the fact that they are very much expensive per byte.

No mechanical parts, no hassle. That’s the winning feature of the SSDs, but still there is a catch which can demoralize the computer enthusiasts who are seeking a big leap technically with the coming of such drives. Similar to the traditional hard drives the Solid State Drives too are a victim of Data Fragmentation in which the free disk space gets fragmented over a period of time. This fragmentation process is common in all the NTFS based Windows and it causes delay in disk’s read/write speed.

Apart from this the fragmented data generates even more serious issues in case of SSDs. The SSDs have a limited number of erase-write cycles and due to data fragmentation the erase-write cycles increases at a fast pace. This ultimately wears out the SSD too early. Thus the SSDs have to be optimized to cope up with data fragmentation otherwise this can lead to performance degradation of such drives by 80 percent.

Seagate has launched its new range of hard disks that are intended to provide high-level data security. Designed for executive notebooks the new Momentus FDE (full-disk encryption) hard drives are backed by McAfee’s software for the enterprise-wide management of notebooks.

These hard drives provide full data protection in the event of lost or stolen notebook. It has got the powerful government-grade encryption that is the best for securing sensitive information such as customer database, official documents or any other private data. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator management system and endpoint encryption client are the applications that are used with the Seagate Momentus FDE hard drives while implementing embedded hardware encryption. These hard drives offer complete security under heterogeneous environments. They are available in 5400 and 7200rpm models. Presently the maximum storage capacity offered by these drives is 320 GB but the hardware market will welcome the 500 GB (half a terabyte) disks soon.

These secure hard drives from Seagate are simple to use and install. The end user need not interact with the complex security policies. Instead, he has to authenticate himself by simply entering a BIOS password and that’s all. The drive automatically secures the data transparently without affecting the system’s performance.