HDD

Western Digital to Settle SMR HDD False Advertising Class Action Lawsuit

Home News (Image credit: Shutterstock) WD has moved to settle one of its ongoing class-action lawsuits for false advertising associated with its SMR WD Red hard drives, according to a report from LawStreet. The proposed settlement comes after widespread criticism from WD’s customers about its surreptitious use of slower shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology in some of… Read more

Sky Dirt: Backblaze Introduces Cloud-Based Chia Farming

Home News (Image credit: Shutterstock) Chia is heading to the cloud. Backblaze today announced that Chia Coin farmers can upload their plots to its B2 cloud storage platform for $5 per TB per month. A quick primer on Chia: It’s supposed to be more environmentally friendly than Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies because it uses… Read more

Chia Demand Prompts WD, Seagate to Ramp Up HDD Production

Home News (Image credit: Toshiba) Demand for hard drives skyrocketed recently because of Chia cryptocurrency farming, causing major HDD shortages and sending retail prices to record highs. In a bid to meet the demand for hard drives, Seagate and Western Digital are ramping up production of their high-capacity HDDs by essentially cranking up their existing production… Read more

Researchers Propose Graphene Overcoats for HAMR HDD Platters

Home News (Image credit: Seagate) Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology promises to enable hard drives with a 100TB capacity in about a decade from now. But HAMR requires all-new record heads with a transducer that heats up platters as well as new types of media. Researchers at the Cambridge Graphene Centre believe that in addition to new heads… Read more

NVMe 2.0 Brings Support for PCIe-Connected Hard Disk Drives

Home News (Image credit: Shutterstock) The new NVM Express 2.0 (NVMe 2.0) Protocol has been released. While the thrust of the protocol focuses on flash storage and networking, the latest additions include full-blown support for hard disk drives (HDDs). The addition of hard drive support is one of the biggest changes coming to NVMe 2.0… Read more

ssupd Meshlicious Review – Doubling Down on Mesh

Introduction I would like to thank ssupd for supplying the review sample. ssupd is a sister brand of Lian Li, and their first case, which we get to review here, is the Meshlicious. ssupd stands for “sunny side up design” because “nothing beats the feeling of cooking the perfect sunny side up egg and the… Read more

Acer Laptops Get RTX 3000, Tiger Lake H-Series

Home News (Image credit: Acer) Acer’s bringing Intel’s new high-powered 11th Gen Tiger Lake chips to its gaming laptops, alongside new mobile RTX 3000 GPU options and a new design for one laptop in particular. New, more budget-friendly RTX 3000 gaming desktops are also joining those mobile options, giving gamers who haven’t been able to… Read more

Et Tu, RAM? Computer Memory Price Hikes Are Coming

Home News (Image credit: Micron) High demand for PCs and, importantly, desktop PCs has already resulted in increased graphics card, PSU, HDD, and SSD pricing, but apparently, now DRAM is getting even more expensive, too. According to a new report from Taiwan, memory prices are set for double-digit growth in the coming months. Contract memory… Read more

Frontier Supercomputer to Get World’s Fastest Storage: 75 TB/s, 15 Billion IOPS, 700 PetaBytes

Home News (Image credit: OLCF) The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) has announced the first details about the Orion storage subsystem of its upcoming Frontier exascale supercomputer set to go online in late 2021. Being the industry’s first 1.5 ExaFLOPS supercomputer, Frontier will need a very fast storage subsystem. It looks like it is set to get… Read more

SSDs Outsell HDDs in Unit Sales 3:2: 99 Million Vs. 64 Million in Q1

Home News (Image credit: Micron) Solid-state drives have a number of advantages when compared to hard drives, which include performance, dimensions, and reliability. Yet, for quite a while, HDDs offered a better balance between capacity, performance, and cost, which is why they outsold SSDs in terms of unit sales. Things have certainly changed for client… Read more

Seagate Lists the Mach.2: The World’s Fastest HDD

Home News (Image credit: Seagate) Seagate has finally listed its dual-actuator hard disk drive — the Mach.2 Exos 2X14 — on its website and disclosed the official specs. With a 524MB/s sustained transfer rate, the Mach.2 is the fastest HDD ever, its sequential read and write performance is twice that of a normal drive. In… Read more

Chia Coin Won’t Drive Up Most HDD Prices, Analysts Claim

Home News (Image credit: Toshiba) Financial analysts believe that while hard disk drive pricing has spiked in recent weeks due to Chia coin mining and will continue to be higher than usual for a while, average HDD prices will not get considerably higher than they are today as there is extraordinary demand for specific models… Read more

Intel Optane Memory H20 M.2 NVMe SSD Review: Running Optane and Flash in Harmony

Our Verdict Blending Optane memory and QLC flash, Intel’s Optane Memory H20 is an innovative M.2 NVMe SSD that delivers a unique caching experience. It is ultra-responsive to most consumer workloads, especially repetitive tasks. For + Optane caching improves system responsiveness + Rivals high-end NVMe SSDs in light and mixed workloads Against – Low endurance… Read more

How to Use Raspberry Pi to Farm Chia Coin

After you’ve gone through the process of building Chia Coin plots on a PC (see how to farm Chia Coin), there’s no need to waste the electricity and tie up expensive computer hardware keeping those plots connected to the Internet. Instead, it’s best to take an external drive or drive(s) with the plots on them… Read more

Google and Seagate Are Using AI to Predict Hard Drive Failures

Home News (Image credit: Shutterstock) Google Cloud and Seagate offered a peek at their efforts to use machine learning, a type of AI, to predict when data center hard disk drives (HDDs), which are responsible for storing many terabytes of data, might start to fail so they can plan around those disruptions to their systems…. Read more