Linda posted on December 22, 2009 13:36
Last week saw two important announcements related to hard drive technology.
First, Seagate announced a thin 2.5-inch hard drive aimed at the netbook and ultra-thin notebook market. This new drive is 25% slimmer than typical 2.5-inch drives at only about a quarter of an inch thick. This is particularly important for netbooks where price definitely matters and SSDs and 1.8-inch drives are just too expensive.
You can read this piece by Pete Steege that explains why Seagate has been working on this technology, and check out this piece from Information Week for their take on the announcment as well.
Western Digital also chimed in with an announcement about their Advanced Format technique that enables 7-11% greater capacity on hard disk drives. I found this article on HotHardware that explains how WD takes advantage of changes in drive sector sizes and consolidation of overhead information to increase the capacity of their drives. This article is on the technical side, so I don't recommend it for light reading!
According to a Western Digital white paper, the Advanced Format technology paves the way for the drive industry to continue to increase areal density and develop higher capacity drives. Drives using this technology are optimized to work with newer Windows 7, Windows Vista and Mac operating systems. There is software available for free download that makes the drives work properly for users of Windows XP.