Market growth for hard disk drives is expected to slow this year on rising sales of tablets and other flash-memory devices, according to technology researcher IHS iSuppli. Analyst Fang Zhang said Wednesday that the dominance of PCs “has been usurped as consumers increasingly use tablet devices and smartphones to browse the Internet, download and stream video and share content.” Tablets and the like use flash memory for data storage rather than hard disk drives, which swipes sales from the hard-drive sector. The researcher also noted that solid-state drives are eating into traditional hard-drive markets. It cited two other factors pressuring  [ Read More ]

Intel Smart Response Technology (SRT) is designed to bridge the middle ground between traditional mechanical hard drives and solid state drives by combining the two. Although high capacity SSDs are quite expensive, low capacity units are much less expensive and achieve similar levels of performance. Intel’s SRT lets you use a low capacity SSD to boost the performance of a mechanical drive by using the SSD as a cache. Until now, there hasn’t really been any middle ground between the two. Sure there are products out there like the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drive which boosts read speeds using  [ Read More ]

Details of 83,000 Co-operative Life Planning customers were stolen from the servers of a data recovery service provider, ICO finds An unnamed data recovery service provider was the company from which details of 83,000 Co-operative Life Planning customer were stolen earlier this year, the Information Commissioner’s Office has reported. The company had been engaged to recover a customer data file but, unbeknownst to the Co-operative, it retained the data on its servers after the work was complete. That data was later “hacked into”, and its contents were “accidentally made available online”, the ICO said today. Both the ICO and Co-operative  [ Read More ]

This shiny, streamlined black box is about the size of a couple of decks of cards. Plug it into a Mac or PC via USB 3.0 (or 2.0), fill it up with music, movies and photos, and then enjoy them on any Wi-Fi device — if the files are compatible. Inside this attractive package is a rechargeable battery that powers the drive for five hours, a Wi-Fi access point and 500GB of hard drive storage space (it’s a conventional hard disk, not solid-state).