ICY News: Hard Drive Makers Will Continue to Limit Output to Sustain Margins – Analyst.

"Shipments of hard disk drives declined considerably in the first half of calendar 2013 due to slow sales of personal computer. While the pressure from underperforming PC market will remain, financial analysts see bright future for top hard drive makers, Seagate and Western Digital. Analysts believe that both companies will benefit from the rise of solid-state drives and growing sales of non-PC HDDs. Moreover, both will sustain margins by limiting output.

“We continue to believe the HDD industry bottomed in first half of 2013, consistent with comments from WD, Seagate, and other suppliers. The PC-related risk has faded in importance for the HDD stocks, since non-PC HDD sales are now eclipsing PC HDD sales led by double-digit unit growth for enterprise and branded drives. Seagate is well-positioned to outgrow the industry in FY14 driven by organic investments in hybrids, enterprise and client SSDs, and services,” said Joe Wittine, an analyst with Longbow Research, in a note to clients, reports Tech Trader Daily.

Traditionally, sales of hard disk drives in the second calendar quarter are up by 3% - 7% sequentially. However, this year the declining market of personal computers significantly affected the markets of PC components and the hard drive market contracted by 2% - 3%, to approximately 132 – 133 million of units in the quarter.

During the second quarter of 2013, Seagate sold around 53.8 million of hard drives, a decline of 1.9 million in the previous quarters. Western Digital managed to sell 59.896 hard drives in calendar Q2 2013, or about 280 thousand lower than in the previous quarter. Toshiba Corp. most likely shipped around 19 million hard disk drives during the quarter, which is around one million units lower than in Q1 2013."


Link to the Entire Article:  xbitslab: Hard Drive Makers Will Continue to Limit Output to Sustain Margins – Analyst.
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ICY DOCK Hard Drive Enclosure Selection Guide for Enterprise and Media Professionals

ICY DOCK Hard Drive Enclosure Selection Guide for Enterprise and Media Professionals

Technological advancements have considerably enhanced our generation’s standard of living, and as time progresses the significance of data storage becomes more imperative to both our work related and personal operations. Everyone needs storage space. Your HTPC needs a huge capacity HDD to store all your movies, music and photos collection, your gaming rig needs a SSD to quickly load up your software and games, and your backup/DVR system needs a drive with hot-swap function so you can quickly swap the backup drive with the new drive or access the drive with other systems. If you’re a designer you need an enclosure that keeps your drive cool to extend the drive’s life span and protect your work.

ICY News: Build a custom soild state drive using microSD cards

"Do you have a collection of old microSD cards sitting around collecting dust? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could actually put them to good use instead of giving them away or even worse, tossing them in the trash?  Well now you can thanks to this neat looking microSD SSD Creator Kit.

The kit arrives with what is essentially a solid state drive board without the memory. There are four slots available to plug in microSD memory cards (also available for CF cards). Simply connect the cards to the mainboard (max of 32GB per card, class 10 recommended and all cards need to be the same capacity) then connect the board to your computer."

Would you $80 for the converter kit or spend a little more for a real SSD? 

Entire Article: Build a custom solid state drive using microSD cards

ICY News: Understanding SSDs: Why SSDs hate write amplification

"In today’s solid state drives, the NAND flash memory must be erased before it can store new data. In other words, data cannot be overwritten directly as it is in a hard disk drive. Instead, SSDs use a process called garbage collection (GC) to reclaim the space taken by previously stored data. This means that write demands are heavier on SSDs than HDDs when storing the same information."

Read the entire article from TechSpot: Understanding SSDs: Why SSDs hate write amplification

ICY News: SSDs Protected From Data Loss Due to Power Failure by Innodisk Power Secure Technology

"It is an hardware and firmware-based power failure protection system, which helps ensure SSD data integrity after sudden power outages.

SSDs are more robust than traditional HDDs; they are faster, more durable, and have lower operating costs. However, all storage devices are vulnerable to potential data loss caused by a sudden shutdown due to external power failure. Power Secure offers a combined hardware and firmware power-down recovery system that reduces the probability of data loss or corruption.

Power Secure is integrated in the storage device and requires no user intervention. Therefore it is always ready to protect data, no matter what the cause of the unexpected power loss: power outage or brownout, power supply failure, battery exhaustion, and even inadvertent disengagement of a live drive."

StorageNewsletter: SSDs Protected From Data Loss Due to Power Failure by Innodisk Power Secure Technology