Technologies tend to incorporate certain safety mechanisms in order to keep things working properly but as time goes on those early additions tend to spiral out of control and may require tweaking from time to time.

Western Digital Advanced Format Technology, found in the WD10EARS, attempts to improve on drive performance while removing a good chunk of the overhead required to keep a hard drive in tip-top shape. HotHardware has the review:

Western Digital isn’t lying about the efficiency benefits of a 4K sector drive, but the company can use that space in a number of ways. Smaller platters are one option, larger storage capacity is another, and removing the innermost tracks of the platter is a third. This last contains an extra bonus—because read and write speeds are typically reported as an average, knocking off the slowest tracks would make the hard drive look  faster in a benchmark without actually changing performance at all. For now, WD isn’t claiming that Advanced Format delivers any particular advantage and AF drives aren’t carrying much of a premium, if any.

They may not claim any performance benefit but a “green” drive keeping up with the company’s performance model is impressive indeed.

Everyone’s fascination with creating hybrid versions of this and that is a bit frustrating but, when implemented correctly, some of the designs do have some performance merits. Yes we’re talking about PC gear.

The SilverStone HDDBoost Hybrid accepts your standard 3.5″ hard drive and, through software trickery, augments your drive’s performance using a bit of flash storage space it has on board. Hardware Canucks has the review:

The uses for the HDDBoost both start and stop with one undeniable truth: the price of modern, larger capacity SSDs puts them far outside the reach of most consumers. Naturally, prices are falling extremely fast but many times you will have to sacrifice storage capacity for the performance afforded by these high-end drives. However, with this product from Silverstone you are able to have the best of both worlds: the capacity of a hard drive and the fast load times normally associated with an SSD. This should be especially interesting if you want a painless system upgrade with seamless plug and play functionality. Most of the time you won’t even realize the HDDBoost is running other than the suddenly eye-opening speed at which Windows boots or programs load.

A sweet and inexpensive upgrade which should make your system speedier.

There was a time when computers were simply used for simple web page viewing and that rousing game of Solitaire which had you racking up a beefy leader board score that would make you the envy of your colleagues. Well those days are long gone and you need more storage for your media files and other things that take up lots of space.

The Seagate Constellation 2TB hard drive provides quite a bit of storage space and some decent performance potential. LanOC has the review:

The other day we took a look at Western Digital’s 2TB offering, it’s only fair that we see what Seagate has to offer as well. Seagate offers both the Barracuda XT and Constellation drives in 2TB capacities. Today we will  be taking a look at the Constellation. In the past we have reviewed a 2 1/2 inch Constellation drive, I’m curious what four times the capacity and a larger form factor has done to its performance.

A meaty drive which should do well to store your digital bits.

Storage technology stuck with the old PATA standard for far longer than they should have and since they’ve switched to SATA the standards bodies can’t work quickly enough to get newer speed ratings….not that we’re complaining, we love faster speeds!

AnandTech has a look at the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB with 6Gb/s SATA standard support which offers twice the bandwidth of today’s common SATA 300 connection:

Seagate has finally started shipping their new Barracuda XT 2TB drives that feature the new 6Gb/s SATA interface based on SATA Revision 3.x specifications. We had an early preview of the drive a few weeks ago and finally received a production level item for review. Just as important, we now have retail motherboards from Asus and Gigabyte featuring 6Gb/s capabilities. Well at least the Marvell 88SE9128 chipset included on both motherboards is theoretically capable of 6Gb/s operation.

Some SSDs supporting the standard would be nice to see but we’ll have to wait for that.

Solid state drives will maintain their insanely comfortable lead when it comes to outright performance but when it comes to storage sizes we won’t be seeing anything remotely inexpensive from the technology for a good long while so you’ll have to rely on some form of mechanical storage in the meantime.

The new Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB crams in an ample amount of storage space and still manages to eek out impressive speeds, well as impressive as such a drive can be. The Tech Report has a review:

The terabyte model’s platters have only 334GB each, so the new Black represents a substantial 50% jump in per-platter capacity. And there’s been an even more impressive boost in areal density. WD’s 334GB platters shoehorn 235 gigabits into every square inch, while the new ones boast an areal density of 400 GB/in²—an increase of 70%. Obviously, the potential performance implications of such a leap are quite exciting.

A slick drive with plenty of storage space and speedy enough for plenty of tasks.

The good old 2.5 inch hard drive is the king of mobile storage offering, nowadays at least, a good chunk of space to store your files, oddly enough it’s still difficult to get them mounted in your run of the mill ATX case.

TestSeek has a look at the Icy Dock MB882 hard drive enclosure which allows you to slot your 2.5″ drive into a 3.5″ drive space:

Until recently there was no point in installing 2.5 inch drives in desktop cases. These drives couldn’t compete with the 3.5 inch drives either in performance or price. With the SSDs now dropping in price the scene has somewhat changed or is at least undergoing a change. If you are building a HTPC or something similar you may actually want a SSD in it to make it more silent, faster or for whatever reason. Now as most desktop cases, even smaller HTPC cases, only supports 3.5 inch drives, you will need some kind of converting hard drive enclosure if you want to install a 2.5 inch hard drive. And this is where the Icy Dock MB882 case comes in.

A handy option for those with extra 2.5″ drive rattling around…I know I sure do.

Storage drives are getting all sorts of fine tuning for the green segment. While a single hard drive might not consume the sort of power that would change things dramatically the amount of power saved across a RAID array of such drives could be impressive.

Legit Reviews has a look at the Western Digital 2TB Caviar green and black drives one of which promises to sip power while the other goes for all out performance. Here’s a look:

The WD Caviar Green 2 TB drive might not shine in the performance benchmarks, but it does shine in other areas like power consumption, heat and noise levels. It uses 4-5 Watts less power while completing seek operations and our testing showed that it was also 6C to 9C cooler depending on the state of the drive.  This makes the Caviar Green 2 TB drive the ideal choice for energy-conscious customers or for those that are building a system in a chassis that doesn’t have good airflow.

Performance or power savings and cooler operating temperatures, decisions decisions.

Zero Assumption Recovery

Developer: Zero Assumption Software
Usage: Data Recovery Software
Zero Assumption Recovery Website

Sometimes, through no fault of your own of course, things tend to go south really quickly on your storage medium due to the slip of a finger or yes even seemingly random corruption creeps up on you rendering your data unreadable. There’s usually a number of steps that go along with such a disaster anger, doubt, fear, and finally acceptance…fortunately there’s at least one last utility you can try that tries its darndest to recover your precious files.

Read more…

You’d think putting together an external storage solution would be simple right? Well considering the amount of heat a hard drive throws off and the general lack of cooling most enclosures provide you might be facing some premature drive failure down the road.

Hardware Bistro has some thoughts on the Sunbeam Airbox eSATA/USB hard drive enclosure and its rather immense cooling solution which should keep even a Western Digital Raptor’s heat levels in check. A gander if you will:

Something unique about Sunbeam Airbox when compares with other external HDD enclosures is the active cooling fan which is always forgotten by other external HDD enclosure makers. This active cooling fan is a 80mm blue LED fan where its blue LED lightning can be switched on & off as not everyone will like this lightning all the time; a very caring consideration.

Don’t expect SATA 2.0 speeds out of this thing but if you’re looking to maintain an appropriate temperature for your external storage it’s as good choice.

Taking your data with you wherever you go gives you a great amount of freedom, of course the danger of losing or damaging that information comes along with that freedom. How exactly do you protect your storage when you’re constantly on the go?

The Tech Report has a look at the In Win Ammo ruggedized hard drive enclosure which sports the added benefit of built-in encryption. Interesting stuff for sure:

Rather than gating access to a drive’s contents with a password, fingerprint scanner, or old-school combination lock, the Ammo comes with two RFID keys that can be used to lock and unlock the drive. One of these keys is a faux dog tag that fits the Ammo’s theme perfectly, but isn’t something most folks would want to wear. Fortunately, the other key is a discrete little bit of red plastic that’ll easily fit on a keychain.

Some protection from rough handling and plenty of protection from theft or loss, a must have if your information is at all valuable.