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Hard drives are about to get supercharged
HAMR and MAMR are a pair of new methods for writing data to hard drives that could boost capacity as high as 60TB per drive, or beyond.
Save $65 on an 8TB Western Digital Elements external drive
If you're looking for an affordable way to store your files locally, Amazon is currently selling the 8TB Western Digital Elements external drive for $115, down from $180. That's the lowest price Amazon has offered this particular model for, according to price tracker Camelcamelcamel. If you want an even more affordable option, the 4TB model is also on sale. It's currently $85, down from $129.45.
Hasbro got 5,000 pre-orders to build a massive replica of Jabba's barge
The huge Jabba the Hutt barge replica Hasbro showed off at Toy Fair this year will soon become a real item making its way to backers' homes. That's because the toymaker's first HasLab project, a program that takes a leaf out of Indiegogo's and Kickstarter's books, is a raging success. It has raised over $2.7 million in funds from over 5,500 backers (as of this writing), eclipsing its original 5,000-pre-order goal. And it has the potential to make more: The campaign still welcomes Star Wars fans willing to shell out $500 for a four-foot-long Khetanna with impressively detailed decks until April 3rd.
Your hard drive's sounds could help hackers crack your system
File this under a totally bizarre and improbable way to hack someone. Security researchers have recently demonstrated a way to use the sounds of your computer's hard drive to possibly transmit information. In short, they can use it to gather your data without you knowing.
Seagate's new 60TB SSD dwarfs the others on the market
Seagate has just announced a whopping 60 TB solid-state-drive, the largest SSD yet with that sort of capacity. Unfortunately, the SSD is only meant for businesses, released as an addition to Seagate's data center portfolio. With four times the capacity of the next leading SSD, this massive hard drive could hold up to 12,000 DVD movies or even a whopping 400 million photos. Just sit back and think about how ridiculous an amount of data that really is.
Xbox One gets its first exclusive external hard drive
Even though modern consoles ship with at least 500GB of storage, you only have to install a small number of digital games before your internal disk is full. Sony and Microsoft have alleviated some of the pain by bundling more storage, but if you've already put money down for a next-gen gaming machine, you're left with the option of switching out the default hard drive or, if your console supports it, attaching external storage via USB. Seagate recognized that most gamers probably prefer the hassle-free option, so it's teamed up with Microsoft to create a new 2TB Game Drive that works with both Xbox One and Xbox 360.
Apple to replace broken 3TB hard drives in some older iMacs
If you have a 27-inch iMac with a 3TB hard drive that conked out on you recently, check your receipt. Apple might be able to fix it for you, so long as it's a late 2012 model and was purchased between December 2012 and September 2013. Cupertino has issued a bulletin warning buyers that "a very small number of 3TB hard drives" in the system "may fail under certain conditions," and is offering to replace affected ones for free. The company didn't elaborate, but commenters on the MacRumors forum believe some of the model's HDDs came from a batch of faulty drives Seagate released sometime ago. In fact, Apple has conducted similar programs in the past to replace 1TB Seagate drives.
Which portable hard drives are worth buying?
With all our computers, phones and cameras, we create a lot of data. And while there are plenty of cloud-based options for storing all the information you generate, many people prefer something they can physically touch. A portable hard drive can give you plenty of control, while still making it possible to carry your data around in your bag. But which drives make it easy to transfer files to them in the first place? And which ones will survive the trips you take them on? We've taken a look at some of the better portable drives available now to find out which ones have the right stuff.
500GB Xbox 360 Media Drive unveiled, priced $110
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Xbox 360. Its nine-year mission: to explore strange new games, and to seek out new hard drives to put them on. To boldly go where no console has gone before - 500GB! Yes, okay, other consoles have boldly gone onto 500GB but the new box is the biggest Media Drive yet for Xbox 360. It's also $20 cheaper than the current 320GB edition, coming in at $110 on retail shelves stateside. As for when it'll hit them, Captain Larry Hyrb simply says "it's on the way," while Xbox.com lists pre-orders as "coming soon." [Image: Microsoft]
Backblaze: Hard drive temps don't affect failure rates
The storage wizards at Backblaze have been analyzing the statistics on drive failures in their huge storage facilities, then posting the results on their blog. Today's stats are rather interesting, taking a look at how drive temperatures affect failure rates. The bottom line? Contrary to the long-standing belief that hot drives fail sooner, their statistics show that only hot-running drives from one manufacturer seem to have a higher than usual failure rate. Brian Beach of Backblaze took a look at the data, which comprises results from more than 34,000 drives. Their Backblaze Storage Pods use big fans so that the drives are usually quite cool, but the study showed absolutely no correlation between temperature and failure rates for the entire population of varied drives from a number of manufacturers. It was when the company started looking at individual drive models that a correlation appeared. Beach notes that the average temperatures for drives used in the Storage Pods run from 21.92°C (71.45°F) for the "green" Seagate Barracuda LP drives to a relatively steamy 30.54°C (86.97°F) for Seagate's Barracuda XT drives. Digging even further, Backblaze was able to show that only one drive model -- the Seagate ST31500541AS 1.5 TB drive -- shows an increase in failure rate as temperatures rise. The overall result was that "As long as you run drives well within their allowed range of operating temperatures, keeping them cooler doesn't matter."
How to create a data recovery external drive
I knew something was wrong when I booted my 2012 MacBook Pro, walked away to get coffee and returned to find the computer had turned off. When I booted again, the grey screen appeared and the MacBook Pro booted part way before powering down. An attempt to boot into Safe Mode revealed that the CPU was halting, killing the processes, then shutting down. Next came booting into Recovery Mode and attempting to fix the disk. After several minutes, the kiss of death was issued: the drive was corrupted, and I needed to erase and reinstall OS X. No big deal. I went to the bookcase for the external drive where I kept my Time Machine back-up. It was a bit out-of-date because of a few weeks of traveling, I thought as I plugged it in, but I would have no issue restoring from it. Right? The dead external drive said otherwise. Well, fudge. The 18-month-old hard drive in the MacBook Pro was corrupt, and my external disk that was barely two years old was toast. Now I needed to get everything off the corrupted MBP. Conventional wisdom gives you several options. One is purchasing Disk Warrior and attempting to repair the disk. Another is producing an image of the hard drive via Disk Utility. A third is accessing the MacBook Pro from another Mac in target disk mode. Since there were no local stores that sold Disk Warrior, and I needed to replace my external drive anyhow, I headed to Best Buy and got one and a Thunderbolt cable. The ailing drive would not mount in target disk mode on my MacBook Air because of the corruption, and attempts to create a disk image on the new external drive failed. Realizing that my options were dwindling, I stumbled across this how-to on Apple's discussion forums on creating a data recovery drive. The basic idea behind the data recovery drive is that your primary computer uses it as a boot drive instead of the malfunctioning drive. In this case, you're advised to use a blank, powered external drive, which I just happened to have. The original steps were authored by Apple community member ds store, to whom I owe my undying thanks and full credit for this guide. Format the external drive with a single-layout partition that has a GUID partition table and is formatted to OS X Extended Journaled. You can do this either using the Disk Utility in Recovery Mode on the ailing Mac or through Disk Utility on another Mac. Hook the external drive up to the ailing Mac if you reformatted on another computer. Install OS X either through Internet Recovery (for OS X 10.7 or later), a USB recovery disk or the original install discs if you have OS X 10.6 or earlier. If your internal drive refuses to mount, when your computer reboots, it will automatically switch to the external drive to complete the OS X installation. If it doesn't, reboot again and hold down the option key and select the external drive. Complete the OS X welcome on the external drive. Put in the same user name on the data recovery disk that is on the internal disk. If all goes well, once you get to your desktop, you'll get a message saying that you'll need to erase and reinstall OS X on the internal drive. However, you can now see your internal drive again. Hurray! You can't write to it, but you can move/copy the files, so do this right away. Drag-and-drop the files from the internal drive over to their corresponding folders on the new OS X installation. ds store suggests leaving your old Users/Library files alone and focus on saving your applications, music, movies, documents and pictures. You might need to change permissions on these files in order to view them. Once you're finished, you can erase and reinstall OS X on the internal drive and migrate everything back from the data recovery drive.
Backblaze stats on 27,000 hard drives show which ones keep on ticking
When your business value proposition is delivering inexpensive, reliable cloud backup for thousands of customers, you're going to learn a thing or two about drive reliability. The Backblaze team has been sharing that HDD savvy (gleaned from several years' experience and more than 75 petabytes of storage) in a series of blog posts over the past couple of months, and we've been fascinated to note their discoveries. Now Brian Beach at Backblaze has addressed the eternal question: What hard drive should I buy? BB's StoragePods are packed with consumer-grade hard drives just like the ones you'd buy at Costco or Best Buy, so it's reasonable to use Backblaze's failure stats as a proxy for how these drives might perform on your very own desk with your very own Mac. Granted, drives in a StoragePod are in more continuous use and subject to more vibration than a home-use drive, so your mileage may vary. Of the 27,000-plus drives running in Backblaze's server racks, the vast majority (almost 13,000 each) are Seagate or Hitachi models. There are only a couple of drives that Backblaze won't buy or try -- WD's Green 3TB drives and Seagate LP (low power) 2TB models -- because the BB StoragePod environment doesn't agree with them, possibly due to vibration sensitivity on spin-down/spin-up. Other than that, the company buys drives on a commodity basis, going with the best GB/$ ratio available at a given point in time. Best of the BB batch? Hitachi/HGST's Deskstar 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB models. Beach says, "If the price were right, we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives. They have been rock solid, and have had a remarkably low failure rate." At the moment, due to price fluctuations, the drives of choice are a Seagate HDD.15 4 TB unit and the Western Digital 3 TB Red. As Beach notes, however, Hitachi's storage unit (originally purchased from IBM in 2002) has been bought (and split) in the past two years, with the 3.5-inch business going to Toshiba and the 2.5-inch product line going to WD. Although HGST is still marketing and making the Deskstar line, it's likely that technology will settle under the Toshiba brand in the future.
Do enterprise-rated drives really hold up better? Backblaze finds the truth
Last month we covered a study by online backup provider Backblaze in which the company looked at statistics for all of the hard drives used in their storage facilities and determined -- among other things -- that the median lifetime of a hard drive is about six years. There were a number of other fascinating tidbits, like the fact that the consumer-grade drives used in Backblaze's Storage Pods show three distinct failure rates over their lifetimes. Now the company has revealed statistics showing that more expensive enterprise-rated drives actually have a higher failure rate than much less expensive consumer drives. Backblaze uses many more consumer-grade drives than those enterprise drives, but it does have a number that are used in server and in one Backblaze Storage Pod that was specifically set up to test enterprise drives. When the company looked at the annual failure rate of drives, enterprise drives failed at a rate of 4.6 percent per year, while consumer drives showed a rate of 4.2 percent. It should be pointed out that Backblaze does not have data on enterprise drives older than two years, so they're not sure if the failure remains constant or begins to increase (as with consumer drives) as time passes. The bottom line? When the question "are enterprise drives worth the cost?" is asked, Backblaze's answer is that from a reliability perspective, the answer is no. The company's report points out that enterprise drives do have longer warranties, which is a benefit only if the higher price of the drive and its longer warranty is less than the drive replacement price. Backblaze concludes that "If you're OK with buying the replacements yourself after the warranty is up, then buy the cheaper consumer drives."
How to replace Xbox One HDD for more storage, a voided warranty
It's possible to replace the Xbox One's 500GB hard drive, but Microsoft doesn't want you to and the potential upgrades are significantly less noticeable than the PS4 replacement, Engadget reports. Adobe techie Brian Williams replaced the Xbox One HDD with a 500GB Samsung EVO SSD and a Seagate 1TB hybrid SSHD, and found the boot time for Call of Duty: Ghosts improved incrementally: 35 seconds for the built-in HDD, 27.7 seconds for the SSHD and 27 seconds for the SSD. An SSD replacement in the PS4 improved Killzone: Shadow Fall's boot time from 60 seconds to 39 seconds. Those who simply want more storage in their Xbox One can follow Juvenal1's Linux-based how-to or watch Williams' video walkthrough of the process. The Xbox One will eventually support USB external storage, so this particular replacement dance isn't necessary, though it certainly is complicated.
The PS4's 500GB HDD compared with an SSD, SSHD
Tested got its hands on a PS4 and switched out its standard 500GB hard drive for two new drives: a 250GB Samsung solid-state drive (SSD) for $175 and a 1TB Seagate hybrid drive (SSHD) for $110. Both performed better than the in-console drive, with the SSD shaving off the most loading time and the SSHD close behind. Loading a campaign from the menu in Killzone: Shadow Fall, for example, took the default drive 60 seconds, the SSHD 42 seconds and the SSD 39 seconds. The SSD performed the best, but it only has 250GB of space, and larger SSDs can cost upwards of $350, Tested noted. The site recommended the SSHD as the best hard drive for your buck.
Backblaze answers the question 'How long do hard drives last?'
Backblaze knows storage. The online backup company uses more than 25,000 spinning hard drives at any one time, stuffed into the proprietary Storage Pods it developed and made an open-source design. Well, with that many hard drives working away, the company has been able to keep track of failure rates and Backblaze's Brian Beach wrote a wonderful post on the life cycle of hard drives for the company blog. There are some interesting tidbits in the post. For example, all hard drives exhibit three different failure rates during their lifetimes. Early on, there are failures due to infant mortality -- those drives that might have made it through testing but had some fault that caused them to fail shortly after installation. That failure rate is about 5.1 percent of all drives per year during the first year and a half. After that period, the failure rate flattens out to about 1.4 percent for the next year and a half, and then diving to an 11.8 percent annual failure rate after three years. On average, 80 percent of all hard drives are still in use after four years. Through extrapolation, Beach posits that the median life span of a hard drive -- the point at which 50 percent of drives will have failed -- is about six years. The important thing about the Backblaze study is that it doesn't look at specialized data center-grade hard drives. Instead, the company uses consumer-grade drives just like you and I would purchase. Why does Backblaze use these cheap drives? It allows the company to store 75 petabytes of data at extremely low cost through the use of these drives in racks full of RAID Storage Pods. More than anything, the numbers prove what we've said all along -- if your hard drive hasn't failed yet, it probably will soon. Be sure to back up early and often.
PlayStation 4 to include a 500 GB hard drive
Along with the $59 price listing for the DualShock 4 and PlayStation Eye accessories, a Sony Japan press release noted that the PlayStation 4 will include a 500 GB hard drive. When looking back at our initial specs comparison between the Xbox One and PS4, the latter system's storage capacity was one of the points that was had yet to be revealed when the system was announced in February. Another big detail missing in February was the system's $399 price, which was announced during Sony's E3 press conference Monday.
Western Digital ships 7mm WD Blue, world's thinnest 1TB hard drive
Move over, Seagate -- there's a new sheriff in slimtown. Not content to introduce the first 5mm thick 500GB HDD, Western Digital just announced that it's shipping the world's thinnest 1TB hard drive, the 7mm WD Blue. It features StableTrack which secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce vibration and improve tracking, plus dual-stage actuators -- electromagnetic for coarse displacement and piezo for fine movement. SecurePark keeps the heads clear of the disk surface and increases shock resistance. It's the same HDD we caught in prototype form at IDF 2012 and we reckon the 7mm WD Black (hybrid) version we saw at CES 2013 can't be far behind. The 1TB model (WD10SPCXX) is priced at $139 with a two year warranty and is available to OEMs, integrators and consumers right now. We fully expect this drive to appear in one of the laptops / tablets launching at Computex this week, so don't miss our coverage.
The Daily Grind: Do you keep games installed even when you're not playing them?
My adventures in Star Trek Online have come to a close now, but the client is still on my hard drive. There's no reason it needs to be there, and getting rid of it frees up some space for other games or data. I can always reinstall if I need to. Yet I find myself oddly reluctant to delete games off of my computer even when I'm not playing them, even if I know the odds are low I'll ever play them again. Part of this is because it's easier to patch up from a midpoint than to start over and install fresh, but part of it is just plain nostalgia. Still, it does create unnecessary computer clutter. So today, I ask of you: do you keep games installed even when you're not playing them? Is your desktop bearing shortcuts to games you have left behind, or does it only have online games you're actually involved with at any given moment? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Western Digital ships upcoming WD Black hybrid drives to OEMs
As devices get thinner and thinner, there's no place in the world for chunky hard drives, and to that end Western Digital has been talking about bringing ultra-thin 5mm hybrid drive technology to the market. We just got a look at the new drives here at CES, which will be branded WD Black -- two 2.5-inch models consisting of a 500GB, 5mm thick (or thin) unit with 24GB of NAND memory, along with a 1TB, 7mm drive that also has 24GB of NAND. A spokesperson said that NAND could eventually go up to 32GB. There's no performance figures or pricing available yet, but WD has already started shipping copies of the new models to OEMs, and expects that they'll land in the laps of consumers within the next 6 months. %Gallery-175646%
