By Martyn Williams
January 26, 2009 (IDG News Service) Fujitsu Ltd. plans to end production of read/write heads for hard disk drives as part of a wider review of its HDD business, it said today.
The company will exit the head business at the end of March. The move will affect about 360 employees at its factory in Nagano, Japan, who will be reassigned to other operations within the Fujitsu group, the company said in a statement.
More than 20 users have posted to a thread on Seagate’s official Community Forums reporting that their 1 TB 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda desktop drives have failed. The drives failed soon after purchase, from as little as 2 weeks to as long as seven months; several users reported the problem to be the drive becoming undetectable to the BIOS. Users reporting failed drives on the thread also said the drives had been manufactured in Thailand.
Freezing problems were previously reported for the 1.5 TB version of the 7200.11. Seagate issued a firmware fix for those drives in late November.
Seagate officials did not comment when contacted by Storage Soup today.
December 31, 2008
2008 will go down in history as a year of extraordinary financial upheaval, but for storage users, it was also a year of major technological change, as technologies such as solid state drives (SSDs), data de-duplication and pNFS entered the mainstream, while the economic backdrop had users clamoring for any technology that could help them make better use of their storage environments.
Symwave is expected to show off the specification for transferring data to and from external storage devices at CES in January
By Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek, December 31, 2008, 9:40 AM
Symwave Inc. claims that next month it will become the first to demonstrate the use of the new SuperSpeed USB 3.0 specification for transferring data to and from external storage devices.
Symwave plans to showcase the new spec at the Consumer Electronics Show, which runs Jan. 8-11 in Las Vegas. The semiconductor company said in a statement that the demonstration would highlight “streaming data to and from external storage devices at speeds previously unattainable.” The demo is being done in collaboration with test, cable, component, and hard-drive manufacturers.
The latest products’ multi-interface support simplifies file sharing for designers collaborating on projects from different systems
By Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek, January 5, 2009, 7:00 AM
Hardware manufacturer Verbatim Americas on Friday launched two external, quad-interface desktop hard-disk drives.
The drives, one 500 GB and the other 1 TB, offer Mac and PC users “plug-and-play” support for the leading interfaces, USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA II, the company said. The drives are aimed at digital content professionals, consumers, and small businesses looking to store audio, video, photos, and graphics files.