Wave Systems Corp. (fka WAVXQ)

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Storage device news highlights

http://www.yec-usa.com/blog/?p=89

Posted in December 2nd, 2008 by rwinters in Uncategorized

Just a quick overview of some of the more interesting events going on in the storage technology world:



Western Digital purchases Fujitsu’s HDD division, and now owns roughly 25-30% of the 2.5 inch market.

SSD’s continue to grow in performance, with OCZ, Intel, MTron, and Samsung leading the way. But at the same time many major issues still remain, especially issues with fragmented free space. Causing these drives to slow down by 80% after only six months of use. Many software companies such as Diskeeper are scrambling to create defragmenting software that can allieviate these issues.

FDE (Full Disk encryption) hard drives have been around for some time, but recently seagate began providing Dell with new generation FDE drives that Dell will offer in it’s notebooks. These drives will be near impossible to recover if the user forgets the password, or the firmware becomes corrupted. While these drives do make your data safe from notebook theft, it makes your data less safe from HDD failure.

Many new Hitachi GST drives are coming with drive stickers that do not cover the center lid screw. This means that you can remove the lid without any trace of doing so. This is bad for Hitachi and for data recovery companies. This means that any user, or low quality data recovery company can open these drives and wreak havoc upon them and as long as there is no visual damage no one would know. Hmmmm.

Intel and Hitachi GST announced that they are jointly developing SAS and Fibre channel enterprise SSD drives that are planned to ship in 2010.