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 Seagate should be the second manufacturer to release a 1 TB hard drive during the first semester 2007. Like the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000, it will use perpendicular recording but unlike the latter, Seagate announced that they only used four platters to reach this mythical storage capacity (250 GB per platter instead of 200 GB for Hitachi). We remind you that so far, Seagate had the biggest PC hard drive with the Barracuda 7200.10 and its 750 GB. |
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 This is something that won't be to the liking of manufacturers in charge of the promotion of hybrid hard drives (hard drives featuring 256 MB to 1 GB of flash memory). Indeed, Lenovo's employees have expressed their opinion on the technology in this blog and have indicated that they are disappointed by the first generation whether if it is for performance improvements or battery life.
They do not tend to have a very high opinion of Intel's Robson technology either. This technology stores data that are the most regularly accessed in an additional Flash memory card connected to the system via PCI Express.
For now, Lenovo's employees recommend skipping this first generation of products and use the additional budget to invest in 2 GB of memory or 7,200 Rpm hard drive.
We need to point out though that there is something wrong in the fact that choosing a hybrid hard drive is equivalent to upgrading from 1 to 2 GB of memory as flash memory is much cheaper than RAM memory… |
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 After scheduling the release of the first 1 TB hard drive in 2006, Hitachi postponed the date to the first half 2007 and they kept their promises. The manufacturer has officially announced the release of the Deskstar 7K1000 at an MRSP of $399 approximately.
In fact this series include also a 750 GB hard drive with four platters (5 are required for the terabyte) of 200 GB instead of 160 to 170 GB for the previous generations. This density is of course reached thanks to perpendicular recording.
The 7K1000 are also available in PATA version with 8 MB of cache but also in SATA with 32 MB of cache! Access time is unchanged to 8.5ms reading and 14ms when noise level management is activated.
Despite the presence of 5 platters, the noise level announced as relatively low 29 dB in stand by, 32 dB during accesses and 30 dB with noise level management. Power consumption reaches 13.6 Watts in use with the 1 TB and it weights 700g.
We remind you that hard drive manufacturers do not base their calculations on the IT definition (1 KB = 1024 octets) used by our OS but on the officialised norm which is much more favourable to them (1 KB = 1000 octets). This is the reason why, the 1 TB hard drive will only be of 931.3 GB or 0,91 TB according to the softwares… |
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 If the official announcement took place last November 30 and was supposed to be immediately followed by the product availability, the first Quad FX platforms and dual core processors sold per pair have been released today. Be aware that current prices are much superior to launch prices whether if it is for the ASUS L1N64-SLI WS, $30 to $80 more expensive than the already very high MRSP of $350, or pairs of Athlon 64 FX-70 (599$), FX-72 (799$) and FX-74 (999$) which require the spending of an additional $100.
The cheapest configuration based on Athlon FX-70 costs $1,030. It will also require the investment in an expensive power supply and additional costly elements as we can't imagine seeing entry level components with this configuration. Considering the usual price gap between US and Europe, many won't regret the absence of this product in EU shops. This is all the more true considering the performance and heat dissipation gap between the Intel Core 2 Quad QX6700 platform and the future Core 2 Quad Q6600. |
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 Additionally to the four Athlon 64 X2 65nm launched last December 5, AMD will release two new 65 nm processors during the first quarter 2007: the Athlon 64 3500+ and 3800+. Like their 90 nm equivalent, they will be respectively clocked at 2.2 GHz and 2.4 GHz, have 512 KB of L2 cache per core and support DDR2-800 memory at best. The only difference will be a TDP of 76 Watts instead of 89 Watts for current products. This will probably lead to slightly lower performances.
About middle range products, the dual core 3800+ (2 GHz), 4000+ (2.1 GHz) and 4200+ (2.2 GHz) designed to work with a similar L2 cache than high end models will have a TDP of 35 Watts. The Athlon 64 P-Rating will change to 4000+ with a frequency of 2.6 GHz and a stable TDP at 45 Watts.
The four remaining models will be the Sempron 3400+ (1.8 GHz) and 3600+ (2 GHz) with 256 KB of L2 cache and the 3500+ (2 GHz) and 3800+ (2.2 GHz) limited to 128 KB of L2 cache. They will all have a TDP of 35Watts. The complete migration to 65 nm will take place during the last quarter 2007 and that will give some time to AMD and IBM to make some progress with 45 nm process |
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 One of the US memory manufacturers has presented during the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show the nth new fastest DDR2 memory.
Clocked at 1263 MHz, the PC2-10100 can be overclocked to 1302MHz with an nForce 680i Sli motherboard according to Patriot Memory. This is 63 MHz more than the Buffalo Firestix PC2-9600. The manufacturer hasn't however given any information regarding the latency, voltage, density or price…which is unfortunate.
If the Californian manufacturer wants to compete with Corsair and OCZ and convince overclockers, it will have to make more efforts on the communication side… |
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Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Toshiba announced during the Storage Visions Conference held in Las Vegas the creation of the Hybrid Storage Alliance which will promote the use of hybrid hard drives in laptop computers in particular.
The main benefits of these hard drives are: lower power consumption, higher performances but also better reliability, longer life and easier integration. Microsoft has already given its support to this initiative and reminded everyone that Windows Vista was fully compatible with hybrid hard drives.
IDC short and middle term previsions saying that 35% of laptops in 2010 will be equipped with hybrid hard drives, show that the price gap compared to standard hard drives will continue to exist. On the longer term, the lower power consumption could also incite some of the manufacturers to use cheaper batteries rather than increasing laptop autonomies as we have seen with the release of other components requiring less energy. |
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