Seagate today began shipments of the industry’s most elegant, easy-to-install 3TB desktop drive – the Barracuda® XT hard drive – a product that eliminates the need to purchase extra hardware or software to overcome the 2TB barrier. The Barracuda XT hard drive delivers the highest available capacity for home servers and workstations, high-definition video editing and production systems, high-performance PC gaming systems and desktop PCs.

Legacy PC BIOS designs and device drivers and older operating systems such as Windows XP are incapable of using hard drive capacities beyond 2.1TB. The upshot is that existing desktop drives with more than 2.1TB of storage capacity must be deployed with additional software or hardware and may also require extra device drivers to overcome this limitation.

The Barracuda XT hard drive with free Seagate DiscWizard™ software is a complete, easy-to-deploy solution. DiscWizard software makes it simple to configure the computer operating system and device drivers to access the full 3TB of capacity on legacy systems using Windows XP and PC BIOS and on personal computers equipped with newer versions of Windows or the new UEFI BIOS. The new DiscWizard software is available for free download at www.seagate.com/beyond-2TB.

Add a comment

Intel Corporation announced today the next in a line of new solid-state drives (SSD), the Intel® Solid-State Drive 510 Series. The new Intel SSD 510 features fast SATA 6 Gigabits per second (Gbps) performance to take full advantage of Intel's transition to higher speed SATA bus interfaces on the recently introduced 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ processor-based platforms. Supporting data transfers of up to 500 megabytes per second (MB/s), the Intel SSD 510 doubles the sequential read speeds, and at up to 315MB/s more than triples the sequential write speeds of Intel's current 3Gbps SSDs, to transfer more data in less time. This makes it ideal for demanding gamers, media creators, performance-intensive workstation users and any technology enthusiast.

The Intel SSD 510 offers the fastest sequential read and write speeds of any consumer SATA SSD available today, providing industry leading performance that beats a traditional hard disk drive (HDD) by more than 50 percent. In addition to better overall system responsiveness when compared to a mechanical hard drive, SSDs have no moving parts so are more rugged, consume less power and run quieter and cooler than HDDs. SSDs reduce boot times, launch applications and files faster and recover from sleep mode quicker, resulting in noticeable improvement. Conventional HDDs are also unable to effectively take advantage of 6Gbps platform technology, since HDDs fail to maximize even the current 3Gbps SATA interface.

Add a comment

Fidelity Electronics is an award winning company that delivers digital memory products and electronic accessories under the Fidelity brand, and under private label for leading manufacturers and retailers.

The USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface was introduced in 1996 to facility efficient data transfer between a host computer and peripheral devices. The USB 2.0 protocol replaced USB 1.1 in 2001, and today runs on 6 billion devices worldwide. The USB 3.0 interface is currently being introduced as the next leap forward in flash storage innovation.

“While the actual rate of performance depends on the various operating systems and media, write speeds should prove +30% faster, and read speeds should more than double”, says Alex Bukengolz, Fidelity Information Technology Manager.

Add a comment

Active Media Products, a world leading manufacturer of DOMs and small form factor SSDs, today launched a server class 2.5" SATA-III SSD that delivers transfer speeds up to 410MB/sec. This SSD is fully downward compatible with SATA-II and SATA-I standards, and is a drop-in replacement for virtually any SATA HDD or SSD.

The Predator V3 is a SATA-III (SATA-3) SSD supporting the lightning fast new 6Gbps host interface. Based on the new Marvell "Van Gogh" 88SS9174 SATA-III controller, the Predator V3 also supports very impressive random read and write speeds, reaching up to 20,000 IOPS. This combination of both sequential and random read and write performance means that boot up, application load, database, video rendering, shutdown, and other disk intensive events will occur substantially faster than with a SATA-II drive.

Add a comment