Power consumption is one of the hot topics currently being discussed in today’s hard drive market. Manufacturers are looking at many ways to cut down on power draw; either by decreasing spindle speed or in some cases having aggressive parking. On drives that support these newer power modes, excessive head parking can occur under the

Hitachi went all in today on their commitment to 3TB hard drives after posting the Deskstar 7K3000 to their website last month. In addition to the 7K3000, Hitachi also announced the Deskstar 5K3000 and the Hitachi XL, a 3TB external hard drive. 

Seagate today announced its Barracuda Green hard drive, which they claim is the industry’s highest performance eco-friendly hard disk with a 3.5 inch form factor. The Barracuda Green was formerly called the Barracuda LP.

Toshiba has announced the MKx001GRZB family of enterprise-class SSDs. The 2.5" drives use 32nm enterprise grade single-level cell (eSLC) NAND flash memory from Toshiba and a 6Gb/s SAS interface. The SSDs will be available in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB capacities and boast random sustained IOPS of 90,000 read and 17,000 write and sequential sustained reads of 510MB/s

Seagate introduced the industry’s first 2.5-inch Enterprise-class hard drive with a 1TB capacity, the Constellation.2. The drive will be offered with 6Gb/s SATA or 6Gb/s SAS connections and as a Self-Encrypting Drive (SED).

This news bits roundup covers several new stories: OWC has announced its Mercury Rack Pro rackmount servers are available with up to 12TB of storage; Patriot announced its Supersonic USB 3.0 flash drive with up to 100MB/s read; lastly, the U.S. Military has released an order that bans removable media.

Western Digital has announced the addition of SATA 6Gb/s interface support to their Caviar Blue line of 3.5" hard drives. The new Caviar Blue drives come in capacities from 250GB to 1TB.

Hot on the heels of Kingston’s 96GB SSD announcement, Corsair has broadened their SSD line with 90GB (CSSD-F90GB2-BRKT) and 180GB (CSSD-F180GBP2-BRKT) capacities. The new F90 and F180 add more steps in the Force family that ranges from 40GB to 250GB capacities. The 90GB model is especially interesting as it fills the large capacity and pricing gap between the

This news bits includes a number of new network-attached storage (NAS) products; Plextor announced a four-bay 8TB model; QNAP introduced two new desktop-style NAS servers and additionally three new rack-mounted NAS servers; lastly, Western Digital added a number of software features to its WD TV Live family of products.