Monday, 10 November 2008

PNY Transcontinental 2009: Driving From Paris To New York

In what seems like a Ewan and Charley adventure, an international team will set out next year on a world first expedition. Their aim: An intercontinental drive from Paris to New York. The 43,000km (26,718 mile) journey will be made in three modified Jeeps with large floats and special swimming tires (below) and aims to be entirely CO2 neutral.

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Monday, 28 July 2008

Freecom Mobile Drive XXS: World’s Smallest, Lightest 2.5" External HDD

Freecom has announced their new Mobile Drive XXS which takes the title of both the world’s smallest and lightest 2.5-inch external USB 2.0 hard disk drive. It weighs just 155g and is 27% smaller than its nearest competitor.


The sleek casing is covered in a form-fitting rubber sleeve to help prevent the drive slipping from your fingers and features a native, bus-powered USB connection to reduce its size and cable clutter (no power adapters required).


With storage of up to 320GB, it is a long way from Seagate’s recent 1.5TB drive, but will be more than enough storage for most of us and at a very reasonable price.

The drive is available now and will set you back $93/£47/€60/ for the 160GB, $120/£60/€75/ for the 250GB and $143/£72/€90 for the top 320GB model.

Sources:
PhotographyBlog
RegisterHardware

Thursday, 10 July 2008

Seagate Unveils World’s First 1.5TB Hard Drive

Seagate today announced their new Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drive which marks the largest single jump in capacity for hard drives in 50 years. The drive uses perpendicular magnetic recording technology to achieve the breakthrough.


Seagate was beaten to the 1 terabyte level by Hitachi at the start of 2007 and were not about to let that happen again with the next milestone.


The drive stores data over four platters and uses the SATA 3GB/s interface to achieve top sustained data transfer rates of up to 120MB/s.

The drive is set for an August release this year for an unspecified price.

Sources:
Seagate
Via: SlipperyBrick

Monday, 26 May 2008

Samsung Creates 256GB Solid State Drive

Samsung has announced at their fifth annual Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei, the development of one of the thinnest, highest speed and largest capacity solid state drives to date with 250GB of storage.

Most PCs and laptops today, including the new MacBook Air, have only 64GB Solid State Drives.

The 2.5-inch drive is based on NAND Flash memory and has a sequential read speed of 200 megabytes per second (MB/s). It also has a fast sequential write speed of 160MB/s leaving Samsung claiming some of the fastest transfer rates for SSD data – 2.4 times faster than ‘a typical HDD’. Despite this performance increase, the drive still only consumes 0.9 Watts in active mode.


The drive is only 9.5mm think, making it the world’s thinnest SSD. A 25% improvement over the former leader.

Intel is also planning to announce high-capacity SSDs later this year which would provide some serious competition for Samsung. It has also been reported that Google has been testing Intel’s SSD technology for possible use in their expansive data centres.

Both companies will utilise multi-level cell (MLC) technology combined with a high-speed Serial ATA (SATA) II interface.

“With development of the 256GB SSD, the notebook PC is on the brink of a second stage of evolution. This change is comparable to the evolution from the Sony Walkman to NAND memory-based MP3 players, representing an initial step in the shift to thinner, smaller SSD-based notebooks with significantly improved performance and more than ample storage,” said Jim Elliott, Samsung Semiconductor’s vice president of memory marketing.

Samsung is expected to begin production of the SSD by the end of the year. A 1.8-inch version of the drive is also expected to be available by then.

Photo credit: Gizmodo