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I generally tell folks to purchase the hard drive capacity they need for data, redundancy and hot spares taking into account their storage growth over the next 12-18 months. In some situations, such as when one is working with large RAID 6 arrays or ZFS-based systems, you need to carefully plan how and when you add capacity to storage systems. Read the full story

Many users have been finding themselves with brand new Sandy Bridge motherboards and the hard drive industry’s now affordable 3TB drives only to see that the new drive only has 746GB available in even 64-bit Windows. I receive questions about why this happens on Hitachi, Western Digital, Seagate, and Samsung drives on a regular basis so I think this is a fairly common issue. I myself fell victim to not following best-practice and seeing this issue manifest itself recently when I was benchmarking a new drive. As a result, I decided to make a guide so other users can easily fix the problem. Read the full story

As many industry observers expected, the two major pending storage deals, Western Digital – Hitachi and Seagate – Samsung are attracting antitrust scrutiny. Regulators in the US are looking at the deals, and now the European Union is looking into the industry consolidation as reported this week.  Read the full story

This week saw OCZ accused of fraud, a big storage merger announced and divergent earnings reports from EMC and Western Digital. Read the full story

Seagate today confirmed rumors aired by the Wall Street Journal yesterday (and predicted by ServeTheHome last month after the Western Digital – Hitachi GST announcement) when it announced its plans to purchase Samsung’s hard drive business for $1.375B. What does this mean to the industry? Read the full story

Today the Wall Street Journal reported that Samsung was mulling the sale of its hard drive unit. Seagate has been rumored as a potential buyer which makes a lot of sense. With the pending Western Digital – Hitachi tie-up  it makes sense. As ServeTheHome noted at the time of the Western Digital – Hitachi GST announcement: Read the full story

As someone who worked on the Seagate-Maxtor merger a few years ago, I was  a bit worried to see this morning the news that Western Digital bought Hitachi GST for $4.3 billion. See the press release here.

My basic thoughts are that if Western Digital uses Hitachi technology, this is a win for consumers. If it uses a similar strategy to Seagate, then we can expect the great Hitachi GST drives that are currently on the market wane and new generations built on Western Digital technology. Read the full story

Internal hard drives usually carry a manufacturer’s warranty, commonly three years. Personally, I believe that after three years, one wants to replace drives due to the fact that failures start to occur at a greater rate after three years. One other way to source internal drives for the average consumer is to purchase an external drive and to liberate it from the OEM external enclosure. Generally this means voiding any warranty provided for the drives by the manufacturer.  The question is, can purchasing external drives and voiding warranties be less expensive than purchasing internal drives with warranties.

One interesting data point before this article continues, major OEMs (HP, Dell, Apple, and etc.) and storage firms (EMC and NetApp) purchase drives without warranties and receive discounted pricing. Read the full story

This weekend I woke up one morning and decided that I wanted to know if retail packaged drives had a lower DOA rate than OEM drives from Newegg. In all fairness, I think I was just trying to put off a 5am Saturday morning gym trip for a few hours. I ended up filtering Newegg’s hard drive category by internal drives of 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB in capacity. I then went through each result and recorded the quantity of reviews for each of Newegg’s awesome egg-scale along with a few other parameters. It turns out that Newegg did not have as much information on retail packaged hard drives as I had wanted, but I found some interesting results nonetheless. Anyone can do this survey, but hopefully this saves some time. For the most up-to-date information see Newegg.

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