Toshiba announced today the Toshiba MK01GRRB/R series hard drive for the enterprise market. It offers up to 300GB of storage in the 2.5-inch design.

Brutal flooding has hit Thailand recently. The flooding, which killed hundreds, severed railroad links across the country, shut highways and damaged many buildings, naturally caused disruptions for the local industry. Two of the world’s largest producers of hard drives – Seagate Technologies and Western Digital Corp. – on Wednesday provided updates on the impact of the flooding.

If you install OCZ’s latest solid-state product in your desktop or laptop, it won’t show up as a separate drive that you can drag and drop data onto. Instead, the OCZ Synapse solid-state drive (SSD) works in conjunction with the computer’s regular hard drive, automatically tracking application use patterns and caching the most frequent operations, such as loading the OS or opening Adobe Photoshop. The goal: to boost performance. “We see caching SSDs becoming a much bigger market,” said Alex Mei, OCZ’s chief marketing officer. OCZ is using the same Dataplex caching software on the Synapse as in its recently  [ Read More ]

Western Digital is not known as a leader in the desktop, mobile, high-capacity enterprise and consumer markets for hard drives for nothing. Just recently, the company announced that it has commenced volume shipments of its WD Scorpio Blue 9.5 mm, 2.5-inch mobile hard drive with 1 TB capacity. Designed for mainstream notebook computers, the new WD Scorpio Blue 1 TB hard drive utilizes 500 GB-per-platter areal density and is now available in the highest capacity for 2.5-inch hard drives in the industry-standard 9.5 mm, two-platter (2-disk) form factor. WD Scorpio Blue mobile hard drives are designed with ruggedness, reliability and  [ Read More ]

There are more backup options than ever before, yet plenty of smaller companies still roll the dice with their data. You’ve seen all of the related surveys and stats, like this one conducted by Symantec that found 57% of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) have no disaster recovery plan. There are plenty of others like it, such as a Carbonite poll back in July that found around half of very small businesses have experienced unrecoverable data loss. “Smaller businesses especially have so much going on, and backup is one of those things like insurance that you don’t want to think  [ Read More ]

From earthquakes to tornadoes to heavy floods, there has been a seemingly constant run of news about natural disasters this year. In these types of unfortunate situations, the first concern is clearly loss of life, destroyed homes, and cities and towns left in shambles — natural disasters obviously take a tremendous human and personal toll on all affected. Businesses also suffer after a natural disaster — not only due to physical damage, but many times because of the disaster’s effect on companies’ valuable data systems. Data disaster recovery has always been a concern for CIOs, but the 9/11 terrorist attacks  [ Read More ]