Toshiba Electronics Europe (TEE) announces the European availability of the THNSNH SSD drive family using the company's 19nm Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash technology.

Ideal for high-end notebooks, tablets, AIO desktops and PCs, THNSNH drives come in a 2.5-inch form factor with either 7.0mm or 9.5mm profiles and 60, 128, 256 and 512GB capacities.

The drive series also includes data protection via Toshiba's Quadruple Swing-By Code (QSBC) technology.

Go Toshiba Storage

HGST announces it managed to combine self-assembling molecule and nanoimprinting technologies to create “dense patterns of magnetic islands” only 10nm wide-- allowing it to increase the densities of future HDDs.

The company says the 10nm pattern shows "excellent" initial read-write and data retention results from lab tests, as well as double the bit density of current disk drive platters.

The highest capacity (4TB) HDDs on the market have a platter density of 1TB, meaning the doubling of densities Continue reading...

In a sign of the market shifting from HDDs to SSDs Seagate announces it will stop production of 2.5-inch HDDs with 7200rpm spindle speeds by end 2013.

The company also says it will start selling 2.5-inch 5400rpm HDDs for value notebooks.

Mobile HDDs with 7200 RPM rotational speeds are something of a minority, generally finding use in high performance notebooks for professional or prosumer customers.

Seagate currently offers 4 different 2.5-inch 7200 RPM drives-- the Momentus 7200.4, 7200.2 Continue reading...

Integral launches the USB 3.0 Portable SSD-- the first external solid state drive (SSD) from the company making use of the USB 3.0 interface.

Around the size of a credit card and weighing just 41g, the drive features read speeds of up to 230 MB/s and write speeds of up to 140 MB/s. Being an SSD, it is shock-proof, silent and more durable than regular portable HDDs.

The USB 3.0 Portable SSD is available in 128, 256 and 512GB sizes and is compatible with both Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows Continue reading...

Researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) believes they have the next storage format-- DNA, a material that is both robust and long lasting while being incredibly small.

The EBI claims one can store "at least" 100 million hours of HD video in a cup of DNA.

As an alternative to HDDs and magnetic tape, DNA might be hard to beat. As EBI researcher Nick Goldman puts it, "DNA is a robust way to store information because we can extract it from wooly mammoth bones, which date back tens of thousands of years, and make sense of it. It is also incredibly small, dense and does not need any power for storage.”

If one is to believe a "leaked" roadmap on Russian website Always More Digital Western Digital is set to release 5TB HDDs in 2013-- with slides showing the future of both Green desktop and Red NAS 3.5-inch drives.

The supposed Green drive roadmap mentions the release of a 4TB WD40EZRX with 64MB cashe and SATA III interface on Q3 2013, before a 5TB W5OEZRX with the same cache and interface hits the market on Q4 2012.

Meanwhile the Red drive roadmap shows an identical release schedule for similar Continue reading...

Wireless-enabled memory card maker Eye-Fi doubles the storage space with the Eye-Fi Pro X2-- a Class 10 SD card with 16GB of storage, double the 8GB of previous offerings from the company.

Like other Eye-Fi cards, the Pro X2 provides the wireless connection of cameras to mobile devices (such as smartphones or tablets). It also connects directly to a wifi network to automatically move content to PCs, the Eye-Fi View cloud storage service or social networks.

An "endless memory" mode automatically Continue reading...

Do you think 7mm-thick HDDs are a bit too fat? Western Digital claims it has a solution-- a hybrid HDD only 5mm-thick designed for integration in the thinnest of laptops.

Currently in sampling stage, WD gives few details on the slim HDDs other than "5mm hybrid HDDs will enable the market’s thinnest PCs to offer 500 GB of capacity, utilizing almost 50% less volume compared to current 9.5mm HDDs at 10% the cost of similar capacity SSDs." Interesting claim, that.

The drives pair MLC NAND flash storage Continue reading...