Founded back in 1970, Western Digital Corporation is one of the largest hard drive manufacturer, but this Lake Forest-based company is also a semiconductor maker, involved in more than simply "hard drives". One of the less known facts about them is that Western Digital platters were sold to other hard drive manufacturers, including Seagate, the world's leader. I said "were sold," because Western Digital just changed this...


Obviously, they will simply cease to sell platters to the competition. Basically, the Komag company that is specialised in manufacturing of platters, is owned by Western Digital, so they decided to stop selling platters to the others, as well as change Komag's name into "WD Media."

Don Blake, WD Media's vice president and general manager, said "This action sizes our media and substrate operation to the current demands of a single customer-WD's hard drive business. It efficiently streamlines our media and substrate operations while enhancing focus on the development of future manufacturing technologies to support media and substrate requirements resulting from continued success in our hard drive business."

Now, we should see how the rest of the industry reacts to this move, but I wouldn't worry, especially since the classic hard drives are getting near the end of their existence, and I am sure Komag wasn't the only hard drive platters manufacturer...

After Imation and Intel announced their first solid state drives for notebooks, OCZ comes into the spotlight by announcing its next-gen drives, and if "next-gen" is not enough, then let me say they claim these new drives to be twice as fast as their predecessors! Now, that's pretty interesting, don't you think?


For this second-generation SSDs, OCZ moved from SATA-I to SATA-II, to accomodate the transfer speeds of these new drives of 120 MB/s read and 100MB/s write speed. OCZ's previous SSDs were only available in one model - a 64GB SATA drive, priced at $1200, while the new ones will be available in 32GB and 64GB, and the same 2.5-inch form factor.

Pricing looks pretty good already, and rumors say they should go down 50% in the next 9 months, but for now, OCZ's second-generation SSDs are priced at $499 - the 32GB one, and $1099 - the 64GB model.

Only a day after Imation announced its upcoming SSD drives, another big company announced its formal entry into the SSDs market, and this time we're talking about a real giant - Intel!


In fact, Intel is already present on the solid state drives market, but its offer is limited to single chip SSDs for pocket devices, with capacities of 2GB and 4GB. Anyway, things are about to change in the coming months, with Intel's SSDs for notebooks...

The semiconductors giant confirmed its intention to come up with a line of SSDs for notebooks during Q2 2008. These drives will be available in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch sizes, having capacities between 80GB and 160GB.

Unfortunately, no technical detailes have been made public yet, but during a recent meeting, Mooly Eden, Intel's Vice President and General Manager Mobile Platforms Group, said their SSDs will be 10 to 50 times faster than the Seagate Momentus 7200.2 HDD with SATA-300 interface.

Since the above doesn't say much, I guess we'll have to wait for a later time to find some really useful details about Intel's future SSDs performance...

The solid state drives market is still smaller than the "traditional" hard discs one, but things will change in a few years, that's no guess, it's something obvious. Anyway, until that moment comes, we'll slowly see new producers joining the crowd of SSD manufacturers, and today the time has come for Imation...


Widely known for its optical and tape storage media, announced today a few SSDs that are going to be sold under their own brand name. Imation's SSDs are build using drives of the South Korean Mtron Company, a SSD pioneer. For now, Imation's available SSD models are the MOBI 3000 for end users, and the PRO 7000 series, mainly targeted at the enterprise and corporate market.

The Imation SSD MOBI 3000 offers maximum read speeds of 100MB per second, write speeds of up to 80MB per second, while the random access time is as low as 0.1ms, making it the fastest SSD available for the consumer market.

At last, the PRO 7000 series is even faster, with read speed of up to 120MB per second, write speeds as high as 90MB/s, and random access time even lower than 0.1ms. Just as a side note, this product's MTBF is greater than 1 million hours!

Obviously, these products don't come cheap yet, since the MSRP is $699.99 and $1,159.99 respectively for a 32GB model, made in 2.5 inch form-factor, while 16GB and 64GB versions will also arrive pretty soon.

As we all know, laptop sales are going slowly up, and the market share of portable computers recently surpassed that of the desktop computers. Obviously, this tendency is not going to fade, and so hardware for portable computers gets faster and cheaper with each day...or bigger, when we talk about internal storage.


Today, we're going to note that Fujitsu just announced its first 500 GB hard drive for laptops, making it the third producer to join the "500 club", when talking about drives for laptops, because those for desktop computers have reached 1TB already...

Following Hitachi and Samsung, Fujitsu announced a 500GB capacity becoming available for portable computers, with the help of a three-platter design. The 500GB drive from Fujitsu uses 3 platters with a 170GB capacity each, and is 12.5 millimeters thick because of that (most laptop drives are 9.5 millimeters thick).

The new 2.5-inch 500GB Fujitsu drive will use the SATA interface and only 4,200 rpm, with announced seek/write times of 12/14 milliseconds. Pricing was not announced yet, since the drive will arrive in stores in May, so there's still a pretty long wait until then...