Brando, Brando, oh purveyors off all things plastic and electronic in a myriad forms and shapes. If you didn’t like the Brando SATA drive horizontal dock with HDMI output, now you can have the vertical model.
Right now, you’re probably working on a SATA-based hard drive, with a transfer speed of 150MBps (SATA) or 300MBps (SATA2). Meanwhile, Seagate just demonstrated their tentative SATA3 spec, which reaches speeds of 600Mbps.
The external SATA standard is still a comparatively rare and inconsistent one, but OCZ has designed the Throttle, an eSATA flash drive with a clever compatibility trick up its slee—err, cap.
We doubt that the LaCie 5big Network storage array will one day spontaneously become self-aware and take over your office, but the visual nod to HAL is unmistakable nevertheless. And on purpose. Designer Neil Poulton said he created the array thanks to inspiration from the supercomputer at the heart of 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, aside from that all seeing eye thing on the front, this beast is all about affordable storage, not ending your life.
New SATA specs!! The governing body of SATA (known as SATA-IO) has announced their SATA Revision 3.0 specifications, which is important because it will dictate the transfer speeds of internal hard drives (among other things). SATA Rev 3 will hit data transfers up to 6 Gbps (the original maxed at 1.5 Gbps and sequel reached 3 Gbps) and allow for better power management. Sounds good…it’s just too bad there’s not a hard drive on the market that can read or write at 6 Gbps. (Well, other than this crazy rig.) [SATA-IO via Electronista]
…they might not have been so different from these external drives from Meninos Design Studio. Acrylic cases coated in customisable vinyl, 250-500GB, 7200RPM drives are hidden behind your favourite take on glossy commercialism (from mock Red Bull containers to giant Marlboro packs…or even your own custom skin.) Our favourite is this little Pulp Fiction reference, but all of their designs beat yet another silver box:
Fujitsu might have been the first to introduce a 2.5″ 7200rpm hard drive with 320GB capacity, but Hitachi is hot on their trail. Today, Hitachi announced that they too have a quick lil’-drive, the Travelstar 7K320. The HDD will support the same SATA 3Gbps interface as the Fujitsu, but will supposedly use less power. With only a 1.8 watt read/write power draw and a 0.8 watt low power idle, Hitachi claims the 7200rpm 7K320 power consumption is on par with their 5400rpm models. So if you were set on getting a faster 2.5″ 320GB HD for your notebook, Hitachi’s version should be available in a few weeks with a US$219 price tag. Press release after the jump.
The Mercury-On-The-Go from OWC is a somewhat tempting three-way connectible 500GB portable HDD. Component-wise there are no surprises, under the hood is a 2.5″ 5400 RPM Hitachi Travelstar 5K500 with an 8MB cache. With Firewire 400/800 and USB 2.0 you get three-way connectivity and bus power.
The bitch about using 1.8″ drives in computers is that they run at a sluggy 4200rpm, as opposed to the 5400rpm commonly clocked in 2.5″ laptop drives. Toshiba today announced a 1.8″ drive that runs at 5400rpm in capacities of 80GB (MK8016GSG) and 120GB (MK1216GSG).
Samsung is intent on leading the way in SSD adoption with their new 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch 64GB solid state drives featuring a super-fast SATA II interface. With a combination of speed, 100 MBps write speed and a 120MBps read speed and lower power consumption, it won’t be long before we see these babies popping up in a lot more devices. Unfortunately, prices are still a barrier, and that is not expected to change when Samsung finally announces how much these drives will cost. [Akihabara News via SciFi Tech via Uberreview]
