As of June 30, 2019, Backblaze reports the 2019 best hard drives available. They had 110,640 spinning hard drives in our ever-expanding cloud storage ecosystem. Of that number, there were 1,980 boot drives and 108,660 data drives. This review looks at the Q2 2019 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers. We’ll also...
Hard drive manufacturers have been using helium to help boost hard drive storage capacity for several years. Now a team of Canadian researchers has made a major storage breakthrough thanks to another element. Scientists at the University of Alberta have successfully used hydrogen atoms to store data. The atoms were applied to a silicon chip roughly half the size of a fingernail. To write...
Seagate displayed the world’s fastest hard drive today at the Open Compute summit and announced that it has surpassed industry reliability standards with its new HAMR HDDs. The new drives use Seagate’s Multi-Actuator technology, which we’ve covered in depth, to deliver twice the performance of a standard hard drive. Seagate has branded the new actuator technology as “Mach.2” and set a new record for...
Western Digital has begun to ship its WD Gold HDD with 12 TB capacity to partners and large retailers. The 3.5” drive relies on the same platform as the HGST Ultrastar He12 launched this year, and will initially be available to select customers of the company. The WD Gold 12 TB is designed for enterprise workloads and has all the performance and reliability enhancements...
Five months ago, Western Digital completed its acquisition of SSD and NAND flash manufacturer SanDisk, adding consumer SSDs and more enterprise SSDs to their existing portfolio of hard drives and HGST enterprise SSDs. WD is now introducing two families of WD-branded consumer SSDs, each derived from existing SanDisk product lines. The WD Blue SSD is based on the SanDisk X400 SATA SSD with minimal...
Seagate today announced a new line of hard drives with up to 10TB of capacity for desktops computers, network-attached storage (NAS) and surveillance systems. The high-capacity drives, dubbed the Guardian Series, represent a 2TB increase over the capacity of previous Seagate hard drives in the consumer and small business category. The Guardian series consists of the BarraCuda Pro desktop drive, the Seagate IronWolf for NAS...
At Backblaze we now have 34,881 drives and store over 100 petabytes of data. We continually track how our disk drives are doing, which ones are reliable, and which ones need to be replaced. I did a blog post back in January, called “What Hard Drive Should I Buy?” It covered the reliability of each of the drive models that we use. This month...
When it comes to technology, it is almost impossible to stay on the forefront. You will drive yourself nuts, and empty your wallet, chasing after every new thing. Got the newest and most expensive graphics card? Yesterday's news within months. The newest iPhone? You can make that claim for one year at best. Hard drives are no different and are probably the longest-running way...
Seagate and LaCie have gotten friendly before — the former company's drives are in the LaCie 2big Thunderbolt HDD, for instance — but the storage makers are about to get even cozier. Today, Seagate announced its plans to buy a 64.5-percent share in the French company, which is currently valued at $186 million. The acquisition will combine the two outlets' product portfolios and, according...
The 2.5-inch MK6461GSYG drives will be available in capacities ranging from 160GB to 640GB and are not only destined for enterprise notebooks and mini-PCs, but could also end up in copiers, printers, and point-of-sale systems. The inclusion of the latest version of Wipe Technology allows users to have hardware encryption keys invalidated, or all data automatically erased when the drive’s power supply is turned...
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