Storage

SanDisk has been toying with this for eons, but it seems the pieces finally fell in place for the firm to kick out its very first write-once memory card. The cleverly titled WORM (Write Once Read Many) SD card will predictably be aimed at industries where unalterable content is vital, such as police investigations, court testimony, electronic voting, etc. According to SanDisk, there is “no physical way to alter or delete individual recorded files,” but we’d wager that hackers at large would have a thing or two to say about that. Nevertheless, said units tout a 100-year archive life when kept under appropriate storage conditions, and while a 128MB iteration is the only one available now (more capacious versions are forthcoming), you’ll have to “inquire” to see just how inflated the pricing is.

Father Time isn’t slowing things down anytime soon, so it’s good to see that Fujitsu is doing its best to keep up. Merely two months after taking the HandyDrive to 400GB, the firm has introduced an all new, totally marvelous 500GB iteration. Featuring the “world’s highest capacity 2.5-inch external hard disk drive (likely the MHZ2 BT),” this bus-powered unit hasn’t changed a bit in design, but it will hold a half-terabyte of information (in case you missed it the first go ’round). Grab it later this month in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for €229 ($364).

[Via Pocket-lint]

Looks like Tom’s Hardware fessed up and apologized for their slip-up in that recent controversial power test, which found SSDs consuming more juice than their spinning-platter counterparts (or, well, not exactly). We’re giving ‘em a pass, not just because we’ve always had a fond place in our heart for Tom’s, but because they did another comprehensive SSD test (this time under more consistent conditions) which basically confirms that many newer SSDs are, in fact, power savers in most usage scenarios. Not all drives and scenarios, but many. Tom’s also namechecks OCZ’s Core SATA II SSD (a Samsung in disguise) as the clear winner by a longshot, having “unmatched” power efficiency. Sold.

[Thanks, Chuckles and SNP]

This week’s Ask Engadget question is a bit on the specific side, but it’s one we’ve heard asked time and time again. Thus, we figured it was time to finally get it out in the open for you readers to debate.

“I have an extensive DVD library that I would like to archive on a network drive and be able to access via my PS3, menus and all. I am currently using TVersity to stream videos from my PC to the console. I’ve seen walk-throughs for archiving DVDs, but I haven’t seen anything that will present these via a DLNA server (to my PS3) with their original menus intact so that you can access special features such as commentary tracks and featurettes. I am not even sure that it is possible to navigate the menus via the PS3 remote. Any recommended solutions out there?”

Can’t you just hear the hopelessness in poor Ron’s voice? Throw the guy a bone, will ya? And while you’re at it, throw our highly sophisticated email sorter a question of your own at ask at engadget dawt com.

You know, we’re not actually certain we want to trust 1.5TB of our precious precious NES ROMS invaluable work data to a single drive, but that doesn’t mean Seagate’s latest Barracuda isn’t droolworthy regardless. The jump from 1TB to 1.5TB is the “largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives,” according to Seagate, and the perpendicular-recording drives should begin shipping in August. There are also a pair of Momentus 2.5-inch 500GB notebook drives coming in Q4 in 5400 and 7200RPM speeds, but like big brother, pricing is unavailable — we’ve got a hunch you might want to start saving those pennies, though.

[Thanks, Dave]

Remember the day you drooled all over your keyboard when Hitachi introduced a 1TB internal hard drive? Yeah, like a year and a half ago? The outfit’s most recent HDD announcement isn’t likely to have nearly the same effect, but those who skipped the first-gen version in order to get a more refined product the second go ’round will surely be delighted. Today marks the debut of the 1TB Deskstar 7K1000.B, which goes down as “the world’s most energy-efficient 7,200RPM one-terabyte hard drive.” Said drive features a new three-disk design which improves idle power consumption up to 43% over its 1TB predecessor, but unfortunately, there’s no telling how long you’ll have to wait to actually buy this currently unpriced overlord of storage.

[Via PCLaunches]

Good news on the SSD front. Announced back in January, Samsung is now mass producing its 1.8- and 2.5-inch SSDs in both 64GB and 128GB capacities. And since these SATA II SSDs are based on MLC — 64 MLC NAND flash chips of 16 gigabits each in the 9.5-mm thick 128GB SSD — you can expect them to be cheap by comparison to SLC-based SSDs and faster by comparison to traditional laptop hard disk drives while lasting about 20 times longer than the expected 4-5 year life span of that mechanical spinner. We’re talking 70MB/s writes and 90MB/s reads and power consumption rated at just 0.2-watts idle or 0.5-watts when active — far less than any of the models (including the SSDs tested by LAPTOP) tested by Tom’s which should help put any battery consumption concerns to rest. Heaping happy on top of good, Samsung tells us to expect the 256GB SSD to go mass production by the end of the year. Clap clap clap.

Despite its shortcomings, we were pretty into the original Drobo when it was launched about a year ago. Not only is it crazy easy to set up and get running, but being able to swap out drives and continuously expand your storage pool without completely replacing your array is obviously advantageous compared to traditional RAID arrays. So it kind of goes without saying that we were stoked to hear Data Robotics was launching a new Drobo, which promised FireWire 800, and quieter, faster operation.

We were kind of hoping they’d get it over with and build in Ethernet (or at least WiFi) connectivity instead of continuing to charge an extra $200 for the DroboShare add-on — that it comes without left us with some mixed feelings. But then again, this new model doesn’t cost any more than the first-gen product ($500), so we can’t hold it too much against ‘em — and as we found, it is a fair amount faster (and significantly quieter) than its predecessor. Read on for more.

We won’t dwell much longer on the fact that Drobo still doesn’t have its own network connectivity (and if we were gamblers, our money would be on integrated DroboShare whenever the third-gen device comes out), but if you’re not planning on connecting your device directly to your computer, be prepared for the extra cash outlay. The upshot, however, is that the DroboShare will soon be able to host on-board applications and servers (”DroboApps”) that make use of your Drobo’s storage pool, potentially giving your whole setup a great deal more value. That is, assuming the developer community puts some weight behind the recently released SDK (more on that here).

Now, before we get to our experiences with the device, we feel obligated to take a moment to note that our unit suffered from a strange series of random, somewhat jarring reboots. Data Robotics seems to have narrowed the issue down to a pre-production power Y-connector from our early DroboShare that was causing power shorts on the new device. We haven’t seen the issue pop up again since they replaced the connector, and Data Robotics assured us that they’ve tested their hardware and software extensively, never having seen the issue we experienced — so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Anyhow, if you’re just in it for the speed, we found the new Drobo does deliver — although maybe not on the same levels demonstrated by Data Robotics. Their tests show fairly consistent speed increases of over 2x on writes and between 60-100% on reads using AJA Kona. We did all our tests using Xbench, which showed more conservative improvements over the first-gen device. Using a set of four varied SATA drives, we got somewhat smaller speed increases over USB, usually in the range of 10-20%. Occasionally we got up to 100% on some operations (like 4k block uncached random writes) — but on other operations the new Drobo was actually a slight bit slower (like 256k random uncached reads).

Over FireWire 800, the gains were sometimes much more pronounced — over 100% faster than first and second-gen Drobo’s USB 2.0 when performing 256k random uncached reads, for instance. But with numerous results stuck within a window of 10-33% faster than USB 2.0, often our FireWire tests weren’t completely explosive. Simple, large (1.25GB) file copy tests showed that USB 2.0 transfers were about 9% faster in the second-gen Drobo, and an encouraging 49% faster over FireWire 800. If you’re working with huge amounts of data, that kind of speed can really tend to add up. (Although it’s also worth mentioning that if you’re looking for blinding throughput for doing things like editing huge full-HD video streams, you’re probably not after a device like the Drobo or competing storage / NAS enclosures anyway, and should likely looking for something a little more on the enterprise / workstation-class end of the spectrum.)

If it fits the bill for what you’re looking for, the second-gen Drobo is still our favorite home and prosumer storage device in this class. The new interface and speed increases are easy to appreciate, but even if you trade those in for slower access over a network-attached DroboShare, you still stand to take advantage its forthcoming DroboApps and unusually simple auto-mounting system. And running four hot 7200 RPM drives — which should be fairly high up on the device’s thermal envelope — the new model is indeed noticeably quieter than its predecessor, even despite the unfortunate loss of the previous model’s jet engine exhaust motif. Dropping $500 on a device with no included drives (or even network access) is still pretty tough to swallow for many buyers, but the benefits of having a dynamically expandable, redundant, easy to manage storage pool are still as strong an incentive as ever to be a little spendy — if not on a Drobo, than perhaps on a ReadyNAS with X-RAID. It’s your data, after all, so treat it right.

For those whose major complaint about the Drobo was its lack of FireWire 800, today’s your day. The new version of the virtualized-storage device features the much requested interface (and a second port for daisy-chaining), but despite the fact that it still lacks built-in Ethernet / WiFi, it does come equipped with an upgraded processor to better take advantage of FireWire 800’s higher throughput, as well as a much larger, quieter case fan. Data Robotics claims their new model can achieve data transfer speeds of more than 2x over the original model, as well as outperform ReadyNAS and LaCie models (in RAID 1/5) when tested with identical drives.

The price stays the same at $500 for the device itself, and (as before) you can buy it bundled with two 1TB drives (for $900) or four 1TB drives (for $1,300). For those waiting for the price to dip even lower, Data Robotics is also clearing out inventory on its earlier model; until they sell out, first-gen Drobos will be going for $350, or $750 and $1,075 bundled with two and four 1TB drives, respectively.

So LAPTOP magazine published a report confirming what most people already believe to be true about SSDs (that is, before last week when SSDs supposedly hit the fan): they use less power than traditional drives. Apparently they got up to 20 minutes more battery life when testing an SSD against a platter-based drive in an Eee PC and Gateway T-6828 (which jibes with our own experiences using SSDs in laptops), but if you ask us, the discussion seems a little moot. SSDs perform way faster and are far better suited to portable computing where drives are moved, bumped, and jostled — the power savings is great, but the speed and reliability are still our top two reasons for going SSD.