This week’s Loose Wire column is about Flash drives: I LEFT YOU last week in the capable hands of Ethel Girdle, the fictitious octogenarian who took her accusations of built-in obsolescence to the technology giants. One of her beefs was about so-called flash drives–small devices that store data, for example as memory cards for MP3… Read More »
Small is beautiful. The Guinness World Records has certified Toshiba’s 0.85-inch hard disk drive as the smallest HDD in the world (it’s not actually out yet; expect to see it in September). Toshiba say it’s the first hard disk drive “to deliver multi-gigabyte data storage in a sub-one-inch form factor”. (The 0.85-inch measurement refers to… Read More »
Are we far away from terrabyte hard drives? Hitachi said today they have “the world’s highest capacity 3.5-inch ATA hard drive, the 400GB Deskstar 7K400”. The new drive has been designed for audio video The Deskstar 7K400 provides enough capacity to store the following: 400 hours of standard TV programming 45 hours of HDTV programming… Read More »
Hitachi today is now shipping one-inch diameter drives storing 4 gigabytes with a a data transfer rate that is 70 percent faster than the previous-generation Microdrive. Hitachi reckons it’s the “world’s smallest hard disk drive“, weighing just over a half an ounce and equivalent in size to a matchbook. Hitachi will continue to offer its… Read More »
Something I’ve often wondered about: why is a 20 gigabyte hard-drive actually only 18.6 GB? Some folk in LA are not only wondering, they’re suing. The Register reports that US PC users have banded together to protest against “deceptive advertising” of hard drive capacity by filling a lawsuit against the world’s biggest computer manufacturers. The… Read More »