Defragment All Hard Drives

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IFD-iV Flash Drives Masquerade as ATA
Hard Drives

IFD-iV Flash Drives Masquerade as ATA
Hard Drives 07/15/2004 08:59 AM

For embedded computing hackers, mass storage (like hard drives) is often the most frustrating piece of the puzzle, as the fragile and power-hungry spin of the hard drive is usually the last non-solid-state part in the whole deployment. And while most engineers will just use a Compact Flash card, sometimes the only option is an ATA (hard drive) connection; that's where the IFD-iV flash memory parts from IO Data Device Corporation come in. Basically just flash memory drives, the defining feature of the IFD-iVs (besides fairly rugged operating specifications) is that they use the standard ATA connection of a hard drive, meaning they can be deployed in place of hard drives when necessary. Models up to 2GB in capacity will be available for around $2,100 -- maybe we'll just deal with the fragile hard drives instead.
Read - Flash memory ATA hard drive [TechJapan]

Update: Reader Tom Lee brings up a much cheaper option for hackers on a budget (after the jump.)

Keep Your Confidential Data Confidential
With Biometric Fingerprint Flash Drives
and Hard Disk Drives

Keep Your Confidential Data Confidential
With Biometric Fingerprint Flash Drives
and Hard Disk Drives 02/01/2005 09:13 PM
Now you can have safe, secure, portable storage of your confidential business and personal data with the biometric fingerprint ClipDrive Bio USB Flash Drive and the Outbacker USB biometric fingerprint Hard Disk Drive. The devices are non-operational until a validated fingerprint or password is received. [PRWEB Jan 21, 2005]

Hottest Hard Drives

Hottest Hard Drives 03/20/2003 01:05 PM
In 20 years, the hard disk drive has progressed from an IBM PC luxury add-on to an indispensable part of any computer, and finally to a component so inexpensive it can be upgraded on impulse. What are today's hottest hard drives, and what is on the horizon for this vital technology?

Arg! Memory, XP, and hard drives...

Arg! Memory, XP, and hard drives... 03/06/2004 01:53 AM
Ok... Sorry for the delay in posting anything. "ultra" - my main box, has had some issues during the last...

Next-Generation Hard Drives

Next-Generation Hard Drives 11/07/2003 11:04 AM

Hard Drives the unsung Hero

Hard Drives the unsung Hero 05/27/2004 12:28 PM

I had to smile today. Sitting on my shelf of memorabilia is a 65 meg RLL Hard-drive that I payed $465.00 for back in the mid 80's. I was the top dog on the block and all of my buddies and I marveled at how we would every fill it up. Little did I know that in 1993 I would layout $1056.00 for a 1.6 Gig drive.
I have been kicking myself in the butt every since. But luckily the days of over-priced hard-drives are long gone. The history of the Hard-Drive is an amazing one. [CNet]

New Hard Drives to Expand DVR Capacity

New Hard Drives to Expand DVR Capacity 04/28/2004 09:30 PM
San Jose Mercury News Apr 29 2004 1:42AM GMT

Hitachi to bring 1TB hard drives soon

Hitachi to bring 1TB hard drives soon 04/05/2005 04:32 AM

New Hard Drives to Expand DVR Capacity
(AP)

New Hard Drives to Expand DVR Capacity
(AP) 04/28/2004 08:10 PM
AP - The power of the U.S. cable and satellite TV industries rests on the 85 million households they count as subscribers. But the influence of Hollywood, which controls the entertainment flow, is even more formidable.

External FireWire Hard Drives

External FireWire Hard Drives 10/29/2003 01:13 AM
180 Gigabyte QPro ICE 7200 RPM FireWire & USB External Hard Drive Regular price $279.99, now take $15 off with Q-Pon Code "EXTHDD"

Archos 20GB Portable FireWire Hard Drive ***PRICE DROP TO $99.99!!!*** FREE SHIPPING with Q-Pon Code "SHIPHD"

Exp. 11/03 More deals inside...

Tiny Hard Drives Need New Plug

Tiny Hard Drives Need New Plug 09/09/2004 04:59 PM
Portable consumer electronics and handhelds need a smaller more efficient interface for hard drives, so Intel and others are working to define a new spec, CE-ATA.

New Technology for More Spacious Hard
Drives

New Technology for More Spacious Hard
Drives 03/20/2003 01:05 PM
An old adage in the computer industry holds that you can never be too rich or have too much space on your hard drive. That may be difficult to believe now, considering that the hard drives in many personal computers sold today can now store the digital equivalent of several complete sets of encyclopedias. And leave plenty of room to spare.

200 Gig Hard-Drives on sale at CompUSA

200 Gig Hard-Drives on sale at CompUSA 10/28/2003 11:07 PM
There are a few good things about being on travel I have a chance to spend a little extra time...

Green Tea Good for Hard Drives

Green Tea Good for Hard Drives 04/29/2004 05:00 AM
The same tannins in green tea that cause stains to form on your mugs and teapots could save the hard-drive manufacturing industry some serious dough, says a team of researchers. By Amit Asaravala.

FBI Picks Up Some Novelty Hard Drives

FBI Picks Up Some Novelty Hard Drives 07/23/2004 03:08 PM
With all of the security problems in Los Alamos these days, apparently secrecy is no joking matter. The Black Hole Surplus Store and Museum apparently had some hard drives behind the counter with "secret" labels on them. They're not for sale, but are really just there to generate conversation with tourists. The FBI apparently wasn't particularly thrilled with this explanation and have confiscated the hard drive which the owner of the surplus store insists was a joke. Who knows what goes through some people's minds, but does it really seem likely that someone walking out of Los Alamos with classified info is going to hand it over to the local surplus store?

Toshiba's new tiny hard drives

Toshiba's new tiny hard drives 12/15/2003 11:35 AM
Toshiba's new hard drives are the size of a nickel and can store over a gigabyte of data.

The 0.85 inch diameter disk is believed to be the world's smallest hard disk drive that can store about 2 or 3 gigabytes worth of information, company spokeswoman Midori Suzuki said Monday.

Link (via Werblog)

A new handshake for mini hard drives?

A new handshake for mini hard drives? 09/09/2004 06:09 PM
Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba and others propose CE-ATA, a new interface for miniature hard drives used in consumer electronics.

Not-So-Clean Hard Drives For Sale

Not-So-Clean Hard Drives For Sale 06/08/2004 11:40 PM
Slashdot Jun 9 2004 4:16AM GMT

FireWire Hard Drives and The Future of
the TBU

FireWire Hard Drives and The Future of
the TBU 06/12/2004 06:49 PM

I bought a FireWire hard drive enclosure the other day, and I'm awfully happy with it. It cost about $45 and I filled it with an old 40GB hard drive I had lying around. It works beautifully — plug it into a FireWire port and you get a G: drive.

It makes me wonder what'll happen to the venerable tape backup unit (TBU). I have a TBU on my server, but it's old, slow, cranky, and only holds 20GB. Furthermore, 20GB tapes are like, $30 while hard drives are running less than a dollar per gigabyte these days.

Right now, I can think of no reason why I would use my TBU for anything anymore. Am I missing something? I imagine that tapes are physically pretty durable, certainly more so than a hard drive, but is there anything else?

I'm using this portable hard drive for off-site backups. Once a week, I'll bring the drive in, copy the latest backups onto it, and take it home where it will sit on my bookshelf for a week until I bring it in again to refresh the backups.

FireWire hard drives, incidentally, are fast as lightning. I have a small RAID Tower which runs via FireWire. You'd never know it wasn't an internal SCSI drive. In fact, I installed a very CPU- and I/O-intensive server process on it once and it ran beautifully. Again, the simplicity is amazing — plug it in and you get an F: drive, end of story.

I'm so impressed with the utility of these things that I'd go so far as call them mandatory equipment for your PC. The enclosure will cost you $45. I found a 40GB Maxtor drive on Froogle for $32. I bought a FireWire card and cable on eBay last year for $15. That's $92 for 40GB of removable storage that you can throw in a fanny pack — tough to beat.

On my next PC, I'm going to physically separate the operating system from my data files. I'll keep all my data on an external FireWire unit, and only keep the OS and program files on the internal IDE unit. I'd love for my PC to be essentially disposable. If I have a problem, just pave and reload it knowing that all my data files are safe and secure a few feet away on the external unit. Perversely, I may mirror them on the internal drive just for redundancy.

For the record, I bought the Metal Gear Box from NewEgg. It was rock simple to get running — find a hard drive, physically screw it into the unit, plug it two cables, then plug it into the PC.

I'm not thrilled with look of the thing — it's all brushed aluminum and black metal grating. (Kind of makes me feel like a 40-year-old man driving around in a lowered Civic with a big wing on the back.) Additionally, when you put it down, there's no padding or rubber stops, so it kind of clanks against the desk, which makes me a little nervous.

Anyway, the theory is valid. External hard drives: good. FireWire: great. Go get one.

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Other News: WiFi Hard Drives

Other News: WiFi Hard Drives 04/12/2004 10:04 AM
Hooking up hard drives to wireless networks may shortly become easier.

Grim times for hard drives

Grim times for hard drives 05/28/2004 06:14 AM
ZDNet UK May 28 2004 9:49AM GMT

Labs look beyond today's hard drives

Labs look beyond today's hard drives 07/21/2004 09:37 AM
ZDNet Jul 21 2004 2:09PM GMT

Seagate to Market Mini Hard Drives

Seagate to Market Mini Hard Drives 06/13/2004 06:34 PM
AP via Newsday Jun 13 2004 10:08PM GMT

Serial ATA for Mini Hard Drives Planned

Serial ATA for Mini Hard Drives Planned 09/11/2004 09:24 AM

Seagate announces new consumer hard
drives

Seagate announces new consumer hard
drives 06/14/2004 08:11 AM
Seagate Technology today announced it has expanded its line of personal computing hard drives, unveiling new internal and external hard drives with 400GB capacities, a new small footprint portable external hard drive with up to 100GB capacity, and what they say is "the world's first pocket external hard drive."...

Iomega intros new external hard drives

Iomega intros new external hard drives 03/17/2005 04:02 AM
Iomega Corp. on Wednesday added two new series of hard drives to its line-up: a new Iomega Portable Hard Drive in capacities as high as 100GB and the External Hard Drive Silver Series, with as much as 250GB of storage. The diminutive Iomega Portable Hard Drive draws power over a USB 2.0 port and uses a 2.5-inch disk that spins at 4200rpm. It comes with Iomega Automatic Backup and MusicMatch Jukebox software and is compatible with all versions of Mac OS X. 40GB (US$119.95), 60GB ($149.95) and 80GB ($199.95) capacities are available now while the 100GB ($299.95) version will ship during the second quarter.

Product Wirelessly Connects Hard Drives
(AP)

Product Wirelessly Connects Hard Drives
(AP) 06/17/2004 08:29 AM
AP - External hard drives need no longer be tethered to a single computer. A new product from Linksys allows such devices, which are commonly used as supplemental or backup computer storage, to be wirelessly connected to a home network, so multiple users can tap into the data bank like a central library.

Hard Drives Get Faster, Smarter (PC
World)

Hard Drives Get Faster, Smarter (PC
World) 08/02/2004 04:29 AM
PC World - NCQ technology allows drives to prioritize a PC's data requests.

Seagate to Market Mini Hard Drives (AP)

Seagate to Market Mini Hard Drives (AP) 06/13/2004 04:56 PM
AP - Eyeing consumers' voracious appetite for digital media storage, Seagate Technology LLC will soon have a slew of new products to capitalize on the booming demand for mini hard drives.

Seagate to use 'perpendicular'
technology for hard drives

Seagate to use 'perpendicular'
technology for hard drives 04/15/2005 12:39 AM
Computerworld Apr 15 2005 4:02AM GMT

A Geek Newbie review of ATA Hard-Drives

A Geek Newbie review of ATA Hard-Drives 11/10/2003 11:39 PM
Some of you are well aware the speed advantage of ATA hard-drives. Many people have new computers with ATA compliant...

Coming soon: External SATA hard drives

Coming soon: External SATA hard drives 01/10/2004 12:27 AM
External hard drives offer easy and practical storage, but they aren't as speedy as the internal models - yet. Vendors working on a new technical specification say that the first fast, new models of external drives could ship by midyear.

Toshiba delays 1.8-inch hard drives

Toshiba delays 1.8-inch hard drives 08/05/2004 01:52 PM
"Late summer, early fall" now means "fourth quarter." Which means "late in the fourth quarter."

New Lubricant Leads To Faster Hard
Drives

New Lubricant Leads To Faster Hard
Drives 08/29/2004 05:39 PM

HP to ship first servers with smaller
SAS hard drives

HP to ship first servers with smaller
SAS hard drives 03/14/2005 06:24 PM
InfoWorld Mar 14 2005 6:25PM GMT

One-Inch Hard-Drives 'Next Year'

One-Inch Hard-Drives 'Next Year' 12/08/2003 11:37 AM
The move could herald a move to a smaller form-factor for Apple's market-leading iPod music player. By Martyn Williams (Macworld UK via MyAppleMenu)

Product Wirelessly Connects Hard Drives

Product Wirelessly Connects Hard Drives 06/17/2004 11:39 AM
AP via Daily Press Jun 17 2004 4:04PM GMT

Panther problem eats some hard drives

Panther problem eats some hard drives 10/31/2003 03:50 AM
ZDNet UK Oct 31 2003 3:25AM ET

Notes and Tips: Huge Hard Drives

Notes and Tips: Huge Hard Drives 02/16/2004 12:04 PM
A query Friday brought some interesting information about monstrously large hard-drive storage systems.
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Defragment All Hard Drives

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