marvel-media.com

marvel-media.com



Many storage vendors are coming out with new ways of connecting your storage to devices beyond the PC. Seagate's FreeAgent Theatre and Western Digital's WDTV connect an external drive or other storage on your network directly to a TV. And Seagate has an interesting partnership with PogoPlug for letting you share your local storage over the Web in a product called DockStar. * Deskstar 7K2000... The most recent version of iTunes has video organization features. * The Impact of Different Hard Drives We compared the dated drive with the latest flagship model on our storage test system, but we also decided to copy the existing Windows XP installation onto the new drive. This provided direct performance comparison using SYSmark 2007. Finally, we installed Windows 7 and repeated the same tests.Although hard drives don't technically follow Moore's Law, they might as well. Every year it seems they get more capacity at lower cost This year's big news was the introduction of 2TB 3.5-inch drives and 1TB 2.5-inch drives, respectively the top-end capacity for desktops and notebooks. Capacity has been growing at about 40 percent a year, and the hard drive space when there are capacity breakthroughs or fresh flagship drives: hitting a new terabyte level, higher RPMs, lower-power models--stuff like that. But each hard drive generation and the generation that follows it usually isn’t large enough to justify a replacement. However, there are more aspects to consider. We took a three year old Core 2 Duo desktop PC and installed a similarly-aged Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 drive. We then took Hitachi’s latest desktop drive, the Deskstar 7K2000, and used it as a drop-in replacement for the older 500GB disk. Current drives are using a technique called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), although other techniques, such as self-ordered magnetic arrays, are also being investigated. * In the enterprise storage market, it's not just drives that matter: It's the controllers and software. Both network-attached storage (NAS) and storage-area networks (SANs) continue to grow, with the latter having become a staple of large enterprises. As of July 2006, the lineup consists of the 5th generation iPod, with a video player; the iPod nano, with a color screen; and the iPod shuffle. The iPod is a brand of portable media players designed and marketed by Apple Computer. Firmware is a special type of software that rarely, if ever, needs to be changed and so is stored on hardware devices such as read-only memory (ROM) where it is not readily changed (and is therefore "firm" rather than just "soft"). Among the vendors, there has been some consolidation among drive makers, with the market for the smallest hard drives. Only Toshiba and Samsung make 1.8-inch drives, with Toshiba seemingly most committed and now shipping a 160GB drive. (It's no surprise that Apple's largest-capacity iPod is also 160GB.) But in part because 1.8-inch drives have been slower than traditional 2.5-inch drives, they haven't seen as much use in