You can simply upgrade and replace the drive with a larger one, or you can tack on some external storage, but disk drives—both internal and external—are yesterday’s technology. Another solution is to embrace the cloud and store your data online where the only limitation to your storage capacity is how much money you want to spend.

There are many benefits that make cloud storage an appealing option.

The rise of tablets and ultrabooks is driving a trend that makes cloud storage not only appealing, but required. Tablets use flash storage that is generally limited to 32GB or 64GB, and ultrabooks that use SSD drives have 256GB, or even a mere 128GB of storage. In exchange for convenience and portability, you sacrifice storage capacity and the logical solution is to connect to the cloud while you’re on the go.
Benefits

The three primary benefits of cloud data storage are unlimited capacity, virtually ubiquitous access, and backups. Upgrading your drive, or expanding your storage with external drives are both temporary Band-Aids. No matter what size drive you use, odds are good you will one day fill it up.

There isn’t any risk of you filling up the cloud. Granted, more capacity will cost you more money. But, with cloud storage you can generally just subscribe to a higher capacity plan and add storage space immediately when the need arises. You can also add capacity temporarily to fill a short-term need, and then roll back to the storage plan you normally use without being saddled with drives you no longer need.

With cloud storage, you have access to your data from anywhere in the world that you can connect to the Internet. You can travel with confidence with your tablet or ultrabook, knowing that you have your data “with you” at all times.

Most cloud storage services also provide ways to share access to files with others, or even collaborate on the files in real-time over the Internet. Having data in the cloud provides you with opportunities to work more efficiently and be more productive than you can with data anchored to your PC.

Another benefit of using cloud storage is that the cloud service provider most likely has redundant servers, storing data on redundant drives, mirrored to redundant data centers. When the data is stored on your PC, or an external drive, it can be lost or stolen, or get corrupted, and if you haven’t backed it up recently you’re out of luck. But with the cloud, the backups are a benefit that come more or less automatically.

Drawbacks

There are two obvious downfalls to cloud storage: cost and availability. When you buy a hard drive it is a finite, one-time investment. But, cloud storage–beyond the 5GB or 25GB you might get for free with some services–requires an ongoing monthly subscription cost.

The cost per month is less than what a drive would cost, so initially the cloud service seems significantly cheaper. Eventually, though, those monthly fees will add up to more than what the drive would have cost you, and you will still have to continue paying them each month.

Availability is an issue because you are dependent on a stable, high-speed connection to the Internet in order to access your data. If the cloud storage provider suffers an outage of some sort you also won’t be able to get your data. Some services, like Box, provide a local folder that stores data offline and syncs with the cloud when connected, so you at least have the means to ensure that the crucial data you are working on right now will be available even if the cloud is not.

Another concern is security. Along with the benefit of being able to share your data with virtually anyone comes the drawback that virtually any unauthorized user might also potentially gain access to your data. You need to make sure your data is encrypted–both in transit, and at rest in the cloud–to prevent any exposure or compromise.

I am a fan of the features and capabitlies Box has to offer.

Choosing a Cloud Storage Service
I don’t believe there is a “best” cloud storage provider. Personally, I use Box, but there are unique pros and cons to each, and the one that works best for you may be dictated by the mobile devices and platforms you use, the types of data you need to store, or the services used by people you need to share and collaborate with.

For example, if you work in a Windows-centric world, and you use a Windows Phone smartphone, it makes sense to look more closely at what you can do with Microsoft’s SkyDrive. If you rely on Google products and services, and you use an Android smartphone, the seamless integration makes it appealing to use the online storage offered with Google Docs.

Both of these solutions are limited, though. They offer a generous amount of storage space for free, and provide a means to share files with others, but if you are trying to extend your available storage space to the cloud, you need a more comprehensive service that offers capacity more equivalent to the hard drive you would buy if you weren’t using the cloud.

The options are many, and the list is growing. Take a look at Box, DropBox, SugarSync, and others. To choose the one that works best for you, make sure you consider whether the cloud services has a client or apps available for the operating systems and mobile devices you rely on, and that the businesses or individuals you work with will be able to access files if you share them out.

Laptop Data Loss situations :

•  Physical Hard Drive Failures
•  Accidental File Deletions or Human Errors
•  Disk Reformatting and Overwritter Files
•  Virus Infected and Corrupt Partions
•  Software Corruption and Disk Failure
•  Physical Damage from Fire or Flood

Recent reports from Western Digital and other companies indicate that hard drive production is beginning to pick back up, following the flooding in Thailand, which impaired a lot of the world’s hard drive production. Even though operations are starting back up, it will be months before production is where it was before the flood, and could be another year before inventories are back at normal levels.

Western Digital CEO John Coyne said last night that this week the company completed its first batch of “post-flood” sliders (the part of the drive that contains the read-write head) at its facility in Bang Pa-In, Thailand. This is important because, in general, sliders are the component that seems to be in shortest supply. Coyne expects that in the June quarter of this year, the hard drive production across the industry should approach pre-flood numbers. However, pent-up demand caused by shortages on top of the usual increase in demand in the second half of the year means that the hard drive inventories won’t be at normal levels until the first half of 2013.

Western Digital was the hardest-hit of the four remaining hard drive makers, the others being Seagate, Toshiba, and Hitachi Global Storage. (Western Digital plans to acquire Hitachi GST in the next few months, subject to various approvals.) Coyne projects WD itself will reach its pre-flood capacity levels in the quarter ending in September.

The update Western Digital gave yesterday—a gradual improvement, perhaps a bit faster than seemed likely a few months ago—was echoed by many of the other hard drive experts I’ve talked to lately.

Western Digital estimated that the industry as a whole shipped 119 million drives, including 11 million from inventory before the flood, in the December quarter. That’s within the range the hard drive makers had been estimating, though less than some researchers forecasted and far below the 180 million or so predicted before the flood.

A number of analysts, such as Gartner’s John Monroe, point out that the actual number of petabytes shipped was impacted even more than the number of drives, as drive makers moved some production to drives with fewer platters.

Gartner is currently projecting the industry will ship 135 to 145 million drives this quarter, 160 to 170 million in the second quarter, and 170 to 190 million in the third quarter. In that scenario, production in the second quarter will actually be close to normal demand, but not enough to make up for the pent-up demand.

Virtually everyone agrees that hard disk drives will continue to be primary media for storage as a whole for the foreseeable future. (Tape is too slow, and there isn’t anywhere near enough flash storage capacity.) Toshiba recently cited statistics that the amount of content created and replicated in 2012 will exceed two zettabytes (two trillion gigabytes).

However, it’s likely that we’ll see more “tiered storage”—combining multiple kinds of storage in both the enterprise and consumer markets. Such tiering is commonplace in today’s storage area networks. We’re also beginning to see more machines combining hard drives with NAND flash on the motherboard or the drive itself, as a hybrid hard drive.

Additionally, everyone I have talked to expects to see more 7mm tall hard drives, the size needed for thin notebooks, such as the ubiquitous Ultrabooks.

A postal worker found the hard drives and other computer devices in a green garbage bag stuffed in a mailbox in the nearby suburb of Langford on Tuesday.

Also in the bag was a note, apparently from the thieves, that said the information in these bags was not copied, distributed or exploited.

“We want no part of everyday people living in fear that their personal information is being used against them to take their hard-earned money. Criminals are human before they were criminals,” said the note.

But police aren’t buying those lines, saying most of the information on the hard drives was wiped clean, and the most important hard drive that contained most of the personal information was not recovered.

The computer hardware containing unencrypted banking information and social insurance numbers of up to 13,000 current and former UVic employees was stolen earlier this month from a campus administration building.

Police say they believe at least two cases of bank fraud may have been linked to the theft.

They have urged anyone who was on the university’s payroll between January 2010 and 2012 to call their bank immediately and change their passwords and account numbers. Authorities are also advising people call credit bureaus so that their file can be red flagged for any suspicious activity.

This week we may well be paying more attention to hard drives more than any other sort of Apple-related product announced during MacWorld, and Western Digital is never one to disappoint. The WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo is first up, it working with the Thunderbolt port on your newest MacBook devices. This external harddrive utilizes your 10 Gbps Thunderbolt to access two 3.5-inch hard drives in a RAID O striped array – and wouldn’t you know it, it’s fast!

This external hard drive will deliver your data to and from it as fast as 2 Gbps (250 MBps), this not quite as speedy as the Thunderbolt technology allows, but certainly as fast as WD’s hard drive technology allows. At that speed though, you’ll still be able to sent a full HD movie to your hard drive in 30 seconds or less. You can’t even get a Jimmy Johns sandwich that fast!

This drive will easily pull the wings off any USB 2.0 drive out there today, and will certainly sit well with video professionals whose job it is to move files back, and forth, and back, and forth all day long. You’ll be able to pick up this still slightly unrevealed beast up in 4TB and 6TB capacities relatively soon – price and release date have still not been released, nor has a press image of the device itself. Instead what you’re seeing is the My Book Live Duo, a device that will certainly look similar to this newest device when it eventually pops up.

Seagate’s warranties on certain drives will be reduced as of Dec. 31, and WD will follow beginning Jan. 2. All drives shipped prior to those dates will continue to carry the current warranty term associated with the products.

The warranty period reductions, first reported by The Register, mean some of Seagate’s and WD’s most popular drives for desktops and laptops will no longer carry three- or five-year warranties.

In an email response, Seagate said it was reducing warranty periods as a way to standardize its terms “to be more consistent with those commonly applied throughout the consumer electronics and technology industries.

“By aligning to current industry standards, Seagate can continue to focus its investments on technology innovation and unique product features that drive value for our customers,” the company said.

In other words, Seagate is redirecting money previously spent on upholding longer warranties in order to invest in product development.

Seagate is even cutting back the warranty on its hybrid drive, The Momentus XT, which combines NAND flash-based solid state storage with spinning disk.
Seagate’s new warranties apply to internal hard drives designed for laptops, desktops and consumer electronics devices. Seagate said there is no warranty change to “mission critical enterprise drives,” such as its Cheetah line, or Seagate external drives.

Seagate said it is reducing its warranty periods from five years to three years for nearline products, such as the Constellation 2 series. Even Seagate’s new hybrid drive, the Momentus XT, is seeing its warranty period cut from five to three years.

In a more radical move, Seagate will also be changing its warranty policy from five years to one year for certain desktop and notebook drives, such as the Barracuda and Barracuda Green 3.5-inch drives and the Momentus 2.5-inch (5400 and 7200rpm):

Seagate’s nearline drives, the Constellation 2 and ES.2 drives, are moving from five- to three-year warranties.

A WD spokesperson, meanwhile, said the company “is continually evaluating the best mix of product and service features that benefit our customer base as a whole.”

WD would not give a reason for its warranty change, but the spokesperson denied it had anything to do with flooding in Thailand, which has severely affected the company’s ability to manufacture products.

WD is reducing the warranties on its Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue drives from three years to two.

“Standard PC warranties are one year. Even so, WD will continue to maintain five-year warranties on its premium desktop/notebook products, including the WD Caviar Black, WD Scorpio Black and WD VelociRaptor products,” a spokesperson wrote in an email reply.

The company is also expected to begin charging for extended warranties, according to a WD distributor’s letter to customers.

The success of the redesigned MacBook Air has come with “fortuitous timing” in the face of the hard drive shortage, analyst Rob Cihra with Evercore said in a note issued to investors on Monday. He believes Apple is largely insulated from the ongoing component constraints, caused by flooding in Thailand that has affected hard drive makers Western Digital and Seagate.

Apple’s MacBook Air features only NAND flash for storage, relying on solid-state hard drives rather than traditional spinning hard disk drives. NAND memory has been unaffected by the floods in Thailand, which have put more than 600,000 people out of work.

Cihra thinks the ongoing hard-drive shortage will create an influx of MacBook Air copycat Windows-based machines with solid-state drives in 2012. In particular, he sees PC makers gravitating toward Intel’s struggling Ultrabook design specification, which aims to capitalize on the popularity of Apple’s thin-and-light MacBook Air.

But Cihra expects Apple to counter with a refresh of its MacBook Air lineup in the first half of 2012. He also believes that the company’s cash hoard will allow it to leverage “some unique NAND engineering/supply vs. vanilla (solid-state drives).”

Recent rumors have suggested Apple will add a 15-inch model to its MacBook Air lineup in early 2012. The company is reportedly looking to expand the lineup as the ultraportable notebooks now represent 28 percent of Apple’s notebook shipments.

As for Macs featuring traditional hard drives, Cihra also thinks Apple is in a strong position there as well. He believes Apple was the quickest hardware maker to react with hard-drive suppliers, putting it in an advantageous position in the supply chain.

His take comes just a few days after AppleInsider was first to report that build-to-order iMacs with 2-terabyte hard drives have an estimated shipping time of 5 to 7 weeks. The apparent shortage of high-capacity drives for Apple’s all-in-one desktop could be the first sign of the company being hit by a lingering global hard drive shortage.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook expressed concern about the hard drive shortage during his company’s quarterly earnings conference call in October. While he was “certain” there would be an industry-wide shortage of disk drives, Cook said he was “not sure” at the time how the situation would affect Apple.

Hybrid hard drives combine high-density, large capacity platters with NAND flash memory. This allows it to combine the fast access speeds of NAND with the cheap bulk storage of magnetic media while keeping costs under control. However, the secret sauce is in the NAND flash controller and the firmware; if either is not up to par, the entire drive will underperform.

Seagate is one of the few companies in this market, and is releasing today their third generation of hybrid hard drives. The Seagate Momentus XT is a 2.5 inch 750GB hard drive paired with 8GB of Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND flash.

Seagate’s first attempt at a hybrid hard drive was the Momentus PSD in 2007. That product was a disastrous flop. It had only 256MB of NAND flash, far too small to be useful. Its 5400RPM platters led to lackluster access times. The NAND controller and firmware were problematic, and costs were high. The resulting low performance kept customers away.

The company tried again last year with the all new Momentus XT. A 4GB SLC cache, new proprietary controller, and rewritten firmware showed off a whole new direction. The NAND was used as a fast cache, with new adaptive algorithms powering the drive to near SSD performance levels. In many ways, this is the strategy used by Fortune 500 companies which have adopted tiered storage solutions. SSDs are used to cache frequently accessed data, while much cheaper hard drives store long-term data.

The second generation Momentus XT doubles the SLC cache to 8GB, while dual platters provide 750GB of storage. This will be the only version of the drive, as capacity trumps cost in this segment. The 500GB Momentus XT accounted for over 90% of sales in the first generation, and will continue to be sold.

A proprietary NAND flash controller has once again been used, but it incorporates evolutionary improvements made by Seagate. This combined with improved “Adaptive Memory” firmware has led to boot speeds comparable to current generation SSDs. There is no TRIM support, but the NAND controller provides a similar function during its garbage collection. The magnetic storage portion itself has a dedicated 32MB DDR2 cache, but we were unable to get details on the NAND controller’s RAM. A 6Gbps SATA connection is needed for optimal performance thanks to an improved data burst speed.

The 2.5-inch drive has a height of 9.5mm, which will limit its use in netbooks and tablets. The drive come formatted for the Advanced Format 4K (4096-byte) sector size, and will require a clean installation for best performance.

The original price was supposed to be set at $189, but was raised in the middle of last week to $199. Now the price has been set at $245 due to extreme demand. Seagate has been shipping in volume for the last week, but the huge demand has caught the company off guard. Normally the company would be able to increase production, but resources are strained due to component shortages caused by the floods in Thailand.

The drive is available today in volume at online retailers Amazon, Canada Computers, CDW, Memory Express, NCIX, Newegg, and TigerDirect. Channel orders have been high, with many e-tailers expecting these drives to be used as performance upgrade alternative to a new laptop due to tough economic times.

Seven OEMs are in the process or have already qualified the Momentus XT. This is a bit surprising considering the conservative nature of OEMs, but DailyTech has been told by Seagate that these OEMs see the drive as a major competitive advantage in their designs for high-end gaming laptops, while keeping costs in control.

Seagate has sold over 1 million hybrid hard drives already, and has plans for a third generation Momentus XT using Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash. This will allow it to greatly increase the amount of NAND while keeping costs in check.

Nevertheless, Seagate’s outlook is looking strong. Seagate said that it will ship about 43 million units in the December quarter (fiscal second quarter) with revenue of $2.8 billion.

Wall Street was expecting revenue of $2.69 billion.

Seagate also said that its margins would be 150 to 300 basis points ahead of its historical range of 22 percent to 26 percent. Seagate’s outlook excludes the acquisition of Samsung’s hard-drive business.

For the March quarter, Seagate said that it expects to deliver revenue of $3.75 billion excluding Samsung. Wall Street was expecting revenue of $3.32 billion.
Overall, Seagate is poised to gain and appears to be the go-to hard-drive manufacturer amid tight supply. Indeed, Seagate on Tuesday launched its second-generation solid-state hybrid drive for laptops called the Momentus XT.

Due to the Thailand flooding, Seagate said that hard-drive supplies will be “significantly constrained for several quarters.” Seagate is expecting industry shipments of 110 million to 120 million units. From there, the industry’s ability to manufacture and ship hard drives will improve through 2012.
“While this may alleviate some of the unit demand shortfall, it is expected that some companies will optimize unit shipments by manufacturing lower-component-count/lower-capacity hard-disk drives; thereby, only modestly offsetting the growing petabyte shortage,” said Seagate in a statement. “Because demand is estimated to significantly exceed supply during this time, pricing is expected to remain stable.”

Worldwide hard drive shipments could suffer a 20 percent decline beginning in the middle of this month and extending well into the first quarter of 2012, according to a new IDC report.

In the first half of 2011, Thailand accounted for 40 to 45 percent of worldwide HDD production. As of early November, nearly half of Thailand’s production was directly affected by the flooding. While production at some factories was halted due to flooding, the industry also faces work stoppages due to poor access and power outages.

 The full extent of the damage to hard drive industry factories will not be known until the floodwaters recede, “although it’s already clear that there will be HDD supply shortages into the first quarter of 2012,” IDC stated.

John Rydning, a research vice president at IDC, reiterated what he told Computerworld earlier this month: That hard drive manufacturers will favour their high-margin products used in enterprise servers and storage systems. “But the HDD vendors can’t neglect their smaller customers, whose business will continue to be important once capacity is fully restored,” he said.

Prices for disk drives have already begun to skyrocket in some instances. Fang Zhang, a storage analyst with IHS iSuppli, said hard drive prices have increased significantly for system manufacturers and consumers, some by more than 30 percent.

IDC said the industry should be able to restore drive production quickly once the waters recede, but today’s shortages will continue to constrain supply for an extended period. Hard drive prices should stabilise by next June, IDC stated, and the industry should be back to normal by the second half of 2012.

Because a large portion of PC shipments have already taken place for this quarter, the decline in total shipments for the fourth quarter is expected to be “less than 10 percent,” IDC stated.

But in a worst-case scenario, total PC shipments could be depressed by more than 20 percent in the first quarter of next year.

IDC said there are opportunities for larger PC vendors to capture enterprise accounts from smaller competitors and accelerate industry consolidation, particularly in faster growth markets.

“The HDD shortage will affect smaller PC vendors and lower priced products most, including mini-notebooks (aka netbooks), emerging markets and entry-level consumer PCs. However, even the largest vendors are expected to face HDD shortages, particularly for portable PCs where the market is more consolidated,” said Loren Loverde, program vice president for IDC’s Worldwide Consumer Device Trackers. “Nevertheless, the shortage will relieve some pressure on pricing and margins, and present some opportunities for strategic share gains among the larger players.”