Hard Drive Disks News and Reviews

Seagate Ships 160GB Laptop Drive

Hard drive uses perpendicular recording technology to boost storage space.

Seagate Technology has begun shipping a 160GB hard drive for use in laptop computers, it said this week.

The drive, which is the highest capacity 2.5-inch drive on the market according to the company, was promised last year.

It is Seagate's first laptop drive to use perpendicular data recording. This involves standing the magnetic fields that represent data bits upright. In most current drives these fields lay flat on the disk surface. Standing them upright means they take less space, enabling more to be packed on the disk and the storage capacity to be increased.

World's Fastest NAND Flash

Geneva - February 6, 2006 - STMicroelectronics today unveiled details of an advanced 4 Gigabit NAND Flash memory that achieves a world record throughput of 36MB/s, some 50% greater than the best results achieved to date.

The device, which is to be described at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in a paper authored by researchers from STMicroelectronics and Hynix Semiconductor, incorporates a powerful embedded error-correction processor that can detect and correct up to five errors per page to ensure high reliability and fast data throughput while simplifying the design of the memory system.

Current practice with NAND Flash memories is to implement the error correction as an algorithm executed by the system processor. However this typically results in a throughput penalty that is typically several megabytes/s. The ST device employs a radically different approach in which a sophisticated ECC processor is embedded within the Flash memory.

The dedicated processor implements the error correction technique called BCH (Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem) that is widely used in WLAN applications where multiple data transmission errors need to be reliably detected and corrected. The embedded ECC processor is based on an innovative architecture that optimizes the ECC computations for byte-oriented, serial readout memory applications such as MP3 players and USB keys, minimizing silicon area, latency and power consumption. As a result, the ST device achieves a read throughput rate of 36MB/s, significantly greater than the best previously reported rate of 23MB/s before error correction.

War of the Disks: A Close-in Analysis of the Hard Disk Drive vs. the Solid State Disk

Much has been written about solid state disks (SSDs) becoming the next big thing1 in the IT industry. But as to whether or not we have enough knowledge of how it will revolutionize the industry is a different question. How much do we really know about SSDs? If we are to ask people on the streets, it wouldn't come as a surprise that they dont know much of what an SSD is. Even if they do know, most probably it would be limited to a USB pen drive, a CompactFlash or a Secure Digital card, which are more on the consumer side of the storage industry.

Technically speaking, they are not wrong. Most web definitions describe an SSD as a high-performance plug-and-play storage device that contains no moving parts. Therefore, given that most of the aforementioned mobile disk storage devices contain no movable parts, they can certainly be categorized as SSDs.

But then again, there's more to SSDs than being a non-volatile device. The purpose of this article is to give readers a clearer picture of what an SSD is, its usage as well as its difference when pitted against the predominant data storage device at present - the hard disk drive (HDD). More than its non-volatility, this article will reveal how much potential SSDs have in optimizing the performance of the computing system. 500 Shoes Brands

Memory, RAM, ROM, Flash

The amount of memory a phone has can actually result in multiple, different answers, and to make things harder a lot of web sites confuse the different types. In general, these are the types of memory a phone can have:

- ROM: This is non writable memory, containing the basic operating system of the phone. When you do a hard reset and format the memory of the phone, what's on the ROM is what stays and why your phone can always be reset to factory settings. The amount of ROM a phone has is irrelevant since you can't add things to it.

- Flash / internal memory: The amount of internal memory, or flash memory, is the space inside the phone where programs reside and where you can store messages, contacts and files. It's usually the number you see when you look at a phone description and it says, for example, that the Nokia 6620 has 12 Megs of memory. Note that if you are trying to save data such as a game on your phone and your phone complains about memory issues, this is probably what it needs.

- RAM: This is the temporary memory used to run programs. It must not be confused with the flash, since it can't be used to store data. The memory is cleaned every time the phone is turned off. This is very rarely written in descriptions, but it's very important since it dictates how many programs you can run at once. Some tools can tell you the number, such as FExplorer for S60 phones. The 6620 has 26 Megs. Note that when trying to run a program, if it complains of memory issues, this is what it needs.

- External memory: This is simply the external flash memory cards that can be added to the phone. Many phones have extension slots now, but you need to be aware of the maximum size they support (128 Megs, 512 Megs, 1 Gig and so on), and also the type (MMC, RS MMC, MiniSD, and so on). There are not a lot of differences between the various types other than physical size and power consumption. Some recent models also introduced some DRM (copy protection) capacities.

When shopping for a phone, especially a smart phone, it's important to have all the numbers. For example a Nokia 6682 has less RAM than a 6620, and will have more problems running multiple applications. Finally one last type of memory you may encounter is SIM memory for GSM phones. This is simply a very tiny amount of memory on your SIM card to store contacts and messages. The only benefit is that it stays with your SIM instead of in the phone. home