X-bit labs

February 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 11)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 02/23/2004 | 06:37 PM ]

Hard Disk and Optical Drives

It seems like ordinary 3.5” hard disk drives for desktop PCs have finished their evolution. Well really, what can you offer to the user after those 250MB models? 300GB? But what for?

That’s why there is no news in this area at all. Capacities remained the same, they only discuss interfaces. First versions of Serial ATA II Gen1x and Gen2x specifications will be shown at the February IDF, where “x” denotes external devices. That is, external drives will connect to the computer across Serial ATA as they do across FireWire and USB 2.0 now. Theoretically Serial ATA may oust the competitor interfaces due to its higher bandwidth (1.5 and 3Gb/s, respectively). External Serial ATA drives are not perfect, though, as there’s no unification in connectors and power with the internal Serial ATA HDDs and they also need to use an external power supply.

The speed is not that high as it seems, too. At least, even the 3Gb/s Serial ATA II is no record-breaker, as Hitachi has already reached 4Gb/s with their FCAL against the standard 2Gb/s for this interface. So the race continues, although FCAL is exclusively a sever technology, unlike Serial ATA.

The untiring Fujitsu was prominent in January continuing its series of mobile Serial ATA II Phase I HDDs of the 2.5” form-factor. The company announced new devices from this series – the MHT20xxBH line of 40, 60 and 80GB capacities. The parameters are no worse than those of “grownup” devices: 5400rpm, fluid dynamic bearings, 8MB cache. They are expected to come as soon as April.

A curios trend: no news about 3.5” models, some news on 2.5” HDDs and a heap of news about 1” and smaller drives. First, Cornice SE announced a 2GB 1” hard disk drive (the previous model had a storage capacity of 1.5GB), so we’re waiting for the player from iRiver, which is a client of Cornice. Second, Toshiba showcased its 0.85” HDDs at CES 2004; these are the smallest for today, but have capacities of 2-4GB! Shipments are expected to start in the fall. Another prominent figure in this area, the Chinese Magicstore, also plans to ship samples of its own 0.8” drives in the fall.

To end up with hard disk drives, let’s have a glance at their external versions. LaCie surprised everyone with a tremendous capacity of up to 1TB (the secret is simple – several standard HDDs in one casing). Design and accessories are also things to play with: the same LaCie showed external drives designed by Porshe Design, while Western Digital offers a 250GB external HDD with an integrated 8-in-1 card-reader.

Transcend took to producing external hard disk drives and started with a case with the USB 2.0 interface or USB 2.0/FireWire, which may sell by itself or with preinstalled 30-80GB drives. Quite an interesting approach.