Western Digital Wrings Out $2 Billion in Revenue Following Thailand Floods

Western Digital's hard drive operations in Thailand spent part of the company's second fiscal quarter ended December 30, 2011 waterlogged after severe flooding ravaged the area, but if it was time to sink or swim, WD chose the latter. Remarkably, the hard drive maker still managed to ship 28.5 million HDD units during its second fiscal quarter, pulling in $2 billion in revenue and profiting $145 million.

Those numbers are down from one year prior when WD reported revenue of $2.5 billion, net income of $225 million, and 52.2 million HDD shipments, but the fact the hard drive maker was able to flip a profit is fairly amazing, considering the circumstances.

Attaching Numbers to the Hard Drive Shortage

Now is not the time to buy a mechanical hard drive, not unless you absolutely have to. As you know, the recent flooding in Thailand hit the hard drive industry pretty hard (from a technology standpoint -- obviously the biggest tragedy here is the impact it had on people's lives), and even just a 1TB hard drive is going to set you back about $150 street, almost triple what they selling for prior to the flood. Is the shortage really that bad?

It's certainly looking that way. According to DigiTimes, Seagate just lowered its fourth quarter 2011 shipment goals for hard drives to 41-45 million units. That's a 10-18

Your Next Ultrabook is Likely to Rock a Hybrid Hard Drive

If you've built or upgraded a rig recently, you probably struggled with whether to spend your money on oodles of storage (mechanical hard drive) or raw speed (solid state drive). You're not alone. Ultrabook makers find themselves in the same boat, and rather than choose one over the other, hybrid hard drives may provide the compromise between cheap(er) storage and fast performance they're looking for.

Sources in the supply chain apparently tipped DigiTimes that many next-generation Ultrabook models built around Intel's Ivy Bridge platform will sport hybrid HDDs. It's a cost cutting measure that "most vendors are expected to adopt" as they look at ways

Seagate Celebrates 1 Million Solid State Hybrid Drive Shipments

Do you go for oodles of affordable storage in your next PC build with a mechanical hard drive, or raid your son's piggy bank and splurge on an ultra-fast solid state drive? You could go with both -- SSD for the OS, HDD for storage chores -- but that's the most expensive option of all. There's somewhat of a happy medium available in Seagate's Momentus XT solid state hybrid drive, of which Seagate said it shipped 1 million units since last year. Market research firm IDC says that's just the beginning.

Seagate Ignites Enterprise with New SSD and HDD Solutions

Seagate this morning announced a slew of new enterprise storage solutions, covering all the bases in the process. These include two new members to Seagate's performance-oriented Pulsar solid state drive (SSD) family, two next generation Savvio 15K and 10K hard drives, and a high capacity Constellation ES.2 3TB HDD.

Hitachi Launches First 25nm SLC Enterprise-Class SSDs with Intel Inside

Mum's the word on what controller Hitachi has attached to itsnew enterprise-class Ultrastar SSD400S.B family of solid state and whether it skipped Intel's chipset in favor of something from SandForce, just like the Santa Clara chip maker recently did, but we at least know the new SSDs are rocking Intel-produced 25nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory chips, a fact both companies are quick to boast.

Hitachi Ships First Enterprise Class 3TB Hard Drive

Hitachi didn't win the race to 3TB, but it did blaze a new trail by introducing its new 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 hard drive. What makes this drive unique is that it's the first enterprise-class, 3.5-inch HDD to offer this much capacity. In addition, it's the only 7,200 RPM drive this side of the Milky Way to come rated at 2 million MTBF.

"From early-stage research to design and development to component selection and manufacturing, we have multi-layer processes in place to ensure that our customers receive the highest quality products throughout the entire life

Hitachi Rocks the Enterprise Storage Space with 10,000 RPM 900GB SAS Drive

After making waves by quietly launching the industry's first 4TB internal hard drive in Japan just days ago, Hitachiannounced it is now shipping its new Ultrastar C10K900 enterprise hard drive, which the company claims are the fastest 10K hard drives on the planet. According to Hitachi, C10K900 drives offer 18 percent faster sequential and 17 percent faster random performance than the nearest competitor.

Hitachi Rolls Out for 4TB Hard Drive for Enterprise Applications

HGST, the company formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, is wasting no time in showing new owner Western Digital how it rolls in the storage space by unveiling what it claims is the world's first 4TB enterprise-class hard drive family. The Ultrastar 7K4000 represents a new generation of 512e Advanced Format drives and offers up oodles of storage space for both traditional enterprise customers and the ever growing cloud/Internet market.

Big on storage space, the 4TB Ultrastar 7K4000 delivers 33 percent more capacity in the same 3.5-inch footprint as its predecessor, and it boasts 24 percent lower watts-per-GB to boot. Looking at the big picture, HGST says IT managers can get 2.4 petabytes in the same footprint as a standard 19-inch storage rack by stacking ten 4U, 60-bay enclosures.

Toshiba Adds 4TB Drives to MG Series for Enterprise

Toshiba this week announced that it's upping the storage ante for business customers by fleshing out its enterprise hard drive line with four new 4TB HDDs. The large capacity drives are part of Toshiba's MG Series and includes both SATA flavors -- MG03ACA400, MG03ACA400Y -- and SAS models -- MG03SCA400, MG03SCP400 -- all of which offer 4TB of capacity with varying feature-sets.

"Organizations of all sizes continue to be challenged by the exponential growth of big data and information they need to protect and maintain," said Joel Hagberg (PDF), vice president of marketing, Toshiba Storage Products Business. "Toshiba's new 4TB drives provide the high-capacity enterprise-class reliability required to keep up with rapid data growth."

Of the two SATA models, the MG03ACA400Y adds self-encryption to the mix with support for cryptographic-erase using the latest T13 SANITIZE crypto-scramble protocol and the older T13 ATA Security Erase command