Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips
B&H has the WD 4TB Elements Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive for $79.99 (reg. $109.99) as one of its Deal Zone deals for today only. Check it out here at B&H Photo.
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A week ago, I wrote about the new 12TB drive from Seagate that was a single 3.5″ drive. But check this out; Western Digital also announced a 14TB 3.5″ drive, the HGST Ultrastar Hs14. The new HGST drive was actually announced last week as well (thanks Oberoth).
The storage industry is scaling like crazy. Every time a new barrier is passed, I can’t help but reminisce about my first Gateway 2000 computer with a 4GB hard drive from 1998. Of course, everyone that had a home computer in the 90s thought that we would never fill all the space on a 4GB drive.
Don’t expect the 14TB capacity to stand at the top of the mound for long though. Seagate has an 16TB planned for 2018 and expects to launch 20TB drives in 2020. As we continue to shoot higher resolution images and video though, we’ll fill these up faster than we would have previously expected.
You can geek out on all the specs for the new Hs14 here on Extremetech.
B&H has the WD 4TB My Book USB 3.0 hard drive for $109.95 (reg. $129.95) through Saturday, July 22. This is compatible with Windows and Mac computers. Check it out here at B&H Photo.
B&H has the WD 8TB My Book Thunderbolt Duo for $479 (reg. $549) through Jan. 27. Check it out here at B&H Photo.
These Thunderbolt Duo drives can be configured in RAID 1 but the big payoff is RAID 0, which provides speeds up to 300MB/s. You can also read my first impressions of the WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo drives with real world speed tests.
Western Digital has released a new 3.5″ format 10TB hard drive in the HGST Ultrastar He10. The new 10TB adds to the HelioSeal line of drives that are helium-filled for more efficient operation (56% more efficient that traditional air-filled drives).
The Ultrastar He10 is preceded by 6TB and 8TB versions and is the third-generation in the enterprise line. HGST’s spec sheet rates the data transfer speeds at an impressive 249MB/s for the new 10TB model (up from 225MB/s in the 8TB model). With an annual failure rate of 0.35%, it includes a 5-year reliability warranty.
No word yet on pricing but the 8TB model currently runs $599, so expect it to come in north of that mark when it hits shelves soon.
Online backup service Backblaze continues to post an enormous amount of data concerning its experience with over 40,000 hard drives from all the major manufacturers. This data is unique in that it demonstrates the real world failure rates from hard drives that are being pushed on a daily basis. That’s something I can’t do in a review of a single hard drive. [Read more…]
The WD 8TB My Book Duo external hard drive is one of the bigger dual drives in the My Book line (but there’s also a 12TB version). It can be configured in RAID 0, 1 or as a JBOD drive.
It is a USB 3.0 interface and comes pre-formatted in NTFS for Windows. However, I use it in a Mac environment and it was very simple to reformat it for Mac OS X. [Read more…]
Backblaze just posted its data on failure rates of hard drives that it uses in its data center. At the end of 2014, it had 41,213 drives active for storing all of the data in its unlimited backup service.
It uses a variety of hard drive capacities across HGST (formerly Hitachi), Seagate and Western Digital. There is everything from 1.5TB to 6TB drives in operation. [Read more…]
Western Digital has announced the My Passport Pro, a new RAID 0 portable hard drive packing two 2.5″ drives inside. The drive is bus-powered over the Thunderbolt connection and delivers impressive speeds up to 233MB/s.
The My Passport Pro is available in 2TB and 4TB sizes – with dual 1TB or 2TB drives inside, respectively. The 2TB drive retails for $299.99 and the 4TB drive retails for $429.99. Check them out here at B&H Photo.
Photographers are data hogs. We go through terabytes upon terabytes of storage as our cameras continue to produce higher image quality. And, if you work with video, it gets even worse. [Read more…]