Sanyo Electric has developed a signal processing LSI compatible with playback and recording of HD DVDs, current DVDs and CDs. The company says the chips will bring lower costs and reduce the size of HD DVD drives and HD DVD player hardware. Sanyo plans to release the component in the second quarter of 2006. HD DVD is currently battling Blu-ray to replace the DVD standard.
Western Digital has released a 400 GB Caviar RE2 RAID hard drive, aimed at enterprise applications, with a technology called Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward which optimizes performance in vibration-prone systems. The HD runs at 7,200 rpm, integrates 16 MB of cache and has average seek times of 8.7 ms (read) and 9.8 ms (write). WD offers a five-year warranty. Retail price is USD 289.
Following the steps of rivals such as Maxtor and Seagate, Western Digital increased warranty periods on its enterprise drives to five years and on desktop and notebook products to three years. New terms apply to HDs bought through official channel partners since the first day of June. According to WD, the change is meant to align with warranties offered by PC makers and to meet customer expectations.
Cornice announced a new 4 GB model as part of its 1-inch Storage Element HD line. The drive, designed to be used in MP3 players, cell phones, personal video recorders and other devices, is said to sustain 1.5 meter drops onto concrete with properly designed enclosure. Average transfer time of the 4,400 rpm unit is 5.5 Mb/s. The 4 GB Storage Element will cost OEMs USD 65 in 10,000-unit quantities.
Maxtor announced that it is shipping Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives. The technology, mainly targeted at servers and workstations, allows SAS and cheaper SATA HDs to be configured in the same enclosure. According to the company, Atlas SAS drives are currently in qualification with global OEMs and system vendors. The products are expected to go into retail before the end of the month.
Seagate will start shipping next year HDs sporting a new security to difficult data theft. The technology, called Hardware-Based Full Disc Encryption (FDE), automatically encrypts all data written to the drive. According to a company executive, FDE is based on Triple DES, a widely used industry standard. The company will initially offer the extra protection on 2.5-inch Momentus 5400 notebook units.
Maxtor added a new product to its OneTouch II external hard drive lineup with a FireWire 800 interface. The standard offers data transfer rate of up to 800 Mb/s. The HD, aimed at Mac users, spins at 7,200 rpm and integrates 8 MB or 16 MB buffer. It includes DriveLock security technology and EMC Dantz Retrospect Express backup software. The OneTouch II FireWire 800 is available in 200 GB (USD 259.95) and 300 GB (USD 329.95) versions. A 500 GB model will be shipping later this year.
Toshiba has managed to make its 1.8-inch hard drives aimed at multimedia devices such as the iPod even smaller. The new 20 GB and 30 GB models measure just 0.19 in height and weigh 1.8 ounces. The 40 GB and 60 GB are 0.31 in height and weigh 2.1 ounces. All HDs have a 2 MB buffer and spin at 4,200 rpm with 15 ms average seek time.
Hitachi Maxell and Mitsubishi Verbatim plan to start selling HD DVD-R discs in the first half of 2006. That is about the same time manufacturers such as Toshiba expect to launch recorders and PCs with built-in drives based on the format. Rival next-generation standard Blu-ray is already available in recorders and rewriteable discs, but not in write-once units, which currently account to almost 90% of all recordable discs sold worldwide. Following the HD DVD announcement, Sony said that Blu-ray-R discs will be abailable until December.
Seagate unveiled plans to release the industry’s first 2.5-inch notebook HD based on perpendicular recording technology in the fourth quarter. The Momentus 5400.3 will spin at 5,400 rpm and store up to 160 GB. Next year, the company will launch a 7,200 rpm version, dubbed the 7200.1. In related news, Seagate said it will release until December the Momentus 5400 FDE, which sports Full Disc Encryption, a technology that allows the user to encode all data written to the disc with a secutiry key.
Maxtor will start shipping new 3.5-inch 7,200 rpm hard drives with capacities of up to 500 GB in the third quarter. The move will span the QuickView, MaXLine, DiamondMax, Shared Storage and OneTouch product families with SATA II and ATA-133 interfaces. Earlier this year, Hitachi announced a 500 GB Deskstar HD.
BenQ plans to launch soon a new line of portable optical disc burners. The products support USB On the Go, meaning that users can plug USB devices directly to the drives, with no need to use a computer. There will be models for CD (PW100), DVD (PW200) and Blu-ray (PW300), but they will require less common 3.2-inch discs. The drives will read Compact Flash, Memory Stick, MultiMediaCard, Secure Digital (SD) and MiniSD cards. The PW100, priced at USD 179, will be launched in September, while the PW200 (USD 249) should arrive next February. The PW300 is planned for the third quarter of 2006.
HP has reached agreements with more than a dozen new companies, including Panasonic and Pioneer, to let them use its LightScribe technology, which allows users to burn labels directly on specially designed discs. After data is recorded on one side the same laser is used to etch images and text on the other. HP claims that 2.5 million LightScribe-enabled drives have been shipped since January.
While the format war moves on, TDK claims to have developed a recordable 100 GB four-layer Blu-ray disc, which doubles the capacity of current 50 GB dual-layer media. It also provides far more storage room than rival HD DVD discs. The 100 GB BD raises writing speed to 216 Mb/s (6x) and sports Durabis protective coating. There is no timetable to actual release of the product.
Western Digital started to ship a 250 GB SATA II hard drive offering maximum data transfer rate of 300 MB/s. The new Caviar SE16 HD integrates 16 MB of cache and runs at 7,200 rpm. The company promises extremely low noise level with its WhisperDrive technology. Users who order the new drive through WD’s online store before May 31 will get a free SecureConnect cable. Suggested price is USD 200. In related news, WD announced a redesigned Extreme Lighted Combo external hard drive with 320 GB capacity, offering a variety of color settings. The product, equipped with USB 2.0 and FireWire interfaces, is based on a Caviar SE drive rotating at 7,200 rpm with 8 MB buffer and is priced at USD 299.
