"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size do you?" says Master Yoda himself. Some would probably disagree, but it looks like Seagate's about to convince us otherwise.

Seagate launches the Savvio line, which features nearly the same specs as its speedy Cheetah line but shot with a shrinking ray. It's 70% smaller than a 3.5" SCSI hard drives but boasts of a spindle speed of 10,000 RPM, 8MB buffer cache, and a seek time of 4.1 milliseconds.

The downside is that it had to compensate its small size with a small memory capacity. While other brands are racing toward the 300 GB storage mark, Seagate has opted to go mini, with some advantages though. "Savvio achieves the highest reliability rating ever with a 1.6 million hour Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF)." The Savvio will consume less power, will be less noisy, and will let you fit approximately three of them into the same space as one 3.5" hard disk.

The Savvio 10K.1 is currently available in 36 GB (retails around US$ 450) and 73 GB (around US$ 850).

We are all familiar with microtransactions. For all its worth, we could be seeing here the future of videogaming which is digital distribution. It would be remembered that back in July of last year, manufacturer Seagate patented HAMR or heat-assisted magnetic recording that could have drastic impacts to the industry.

HAMR, if you're not well familiar with it, is a technology based on nanotube lubrication to allow the read/write head of a disk to get closer to the surface and store more information. It allows a total number of 300 TB of information on a standard 3.5" drive and that would be roughly around 6,144 50GB Blu-ray discs.

Seagate disclosed that HAMR is just the first of a two part process. The company's head of Interfaces and Architecture, Eric Reider, explained:

HAMR helps with the writing process. Bit patterning allows us to create the media. Each bit is represented by an island of about 50 magnetic grains, but these patches are irregularly shaped, like ink on newsprint. By chemically encoding an organized molecular pattern onto the platter's substrate at the moment of creation, however, HAMR can put a single bit on every grain.

We quite honestly didn't catch most of that but in short, they've perfected the technology. They mentioned further that this technology is expected to become widely available by 2010 which is rather interesting because we're all expecting a batch of new gen of consoles by then.

What was it, only a few moments ago that we posted the "How to replace your HDD without voiding your warranty" scans from the PS3 manual? Well, the first thing some would do upon getting their hands on the PS3 for the first time is to load up a launch title and taste all that delicious PS3 gaming goodness. An intrepid PS3 owner, psmania, though, decided that the first thing she'd (yes she, maybe) do is swap out the 20GB SATA drive for, uh, she dunno, how about 120GB?

In her Korean-language post (yes, Korean) on Ruliweb.com she describes and pictures the HDD-replacement process. Now, we can't verify from here if she's done the real deal - not after an HDD capacity photoshopping bit cropped up on teh intarwebs - but by comparing these shots with the manual scans from earlier, we can be fairly confident that psmania just pimped her PS3 out big-time.

Enjoy the pictures of a PS3 enjoying six times its original disc capacity. The Read link below leads you to the Ruliweb in its original Korean post - hope you got a good web translator or a friend who knows Korean. And the userpic there's the reason we said she's a she (unless he's just using the pic to impress guys. Likely not).

   
  

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UPDATE: Next, GameWatch decided to do an HDD swap of their own: 60GB for 100GB. Not as impressive as psmania's six-times pimp-up, but GameWatch does the honor of writing down the specifications of their swaps. For example, the 20GB PS3 uses Seagate LD25.1 HDDs, and the 60GB HDD is Seagate's Momentus 5400.2 SATA. The 100GB GameWatch uses is from the same Momentus family: the 7200.1 SATA 2.5".

You can read more about GameWatch's HDD swap at their site here (you'll need a translator for it, though). Beyond that, Here are their pictures of their own HDD swap:

 

Today we have another great deal for all the gadget-loving computer techies out there, or just anyone that likes to store a huge amount of data. Now this hard drive may not be as cheap as the 4-port USB hub for $1.99 or the $16 1GB USB flash drive, but it is certainly on par with them on value for money. This hard drive isn't from a cheap manufacturer, this contraption is from SeaGate, who is well known for their hard drives.

As far as price per Gigabyte goes, you are paying just over $0.37 for 1GB of data. When you consider that the USB flash drive costs $16 for just 1 GB, the scope of this deal really comes to light. The SeaGate 750GB internal hard drive features:

• World's quietest 7200-RPM drives, with 8-Mbyte or 16-Mbyte cache, and the most advanced fluid-bearing motor.
• Award-winning DiscWizard software makes installation a snap.
• SeaTools diagnostic software continuously checks your hard drive for data safety and drive performance.
• Complete with cable, disc utility CD, quick-installation guide and mounting screws.
• Compatible with Windows XP, Me, 2000, 98SE, and NT; may be used with Linux, Mac OS and Netware.

This future-proof beast of a hard drive is available from CompUSA.com for $279.99 with free shipping, but the offer ends September 23rd so get in quick! After buying it, we challenge you to fill it up with useful files - let's see if it'll take you a very long time!

First, no one really believes in that "size doesn't matter" crap. Oh, puleeease! It does matter! But we're here to tell you about Seagate Pocket Drives. Seagate Pocket Drive is one of those small wonders you wished you had back when "portable" HDDs were about the size of Liechtenstein.

This next-gen drives will fit in your pockets, hence the name Pocket Drives. Small, but big enough to hold 133 hours of music, 2560 photos, or eight hours of video materials (8GB model). This model also has the Secure Zone software for Windows, which allows you to add passwords to your sensitive documents. And it has a round shell that absorbs shocks in case you drop it.

Seagate Pocket Drives also feature:

• Powered by the computer, needs no power supply
• Built-in, retractable cable.
• Hot-pluggable USB 2.0 interface with up to 480 Mbps data transfer
  
• 3600-RPM drives with 2-Mbyte cache
  
• One-year warranty, plus free technical advice after warranty ends

 Seagate Pocket Drive (2.5GB, 5GB, 6GB and 8GB) rates start at $74.91

If you ask Seagate, news of the impending death of hard drives (caused by the impending domination of NAND-type flash memory chips) is grossly exaggerated. Otherwise, the company wouldn't have announced its big plan for 2007, which includes 60 to 120GB drives for handheld video devices such as Apple's iPod video.

In an interview with Business Week, Seagate expressed faith in hard drives despite prediction that HD technology will give way to high-capacity flash memory. The company cited that the big three NAND flash memory makers in the world (Samsung, SanDisk, and Toshiba) are investing big money on their respective disk-drive business with no plans of shelving them .

Seagate believes HD will be around for a long time because they are cheaper. Seagate CEO William Watkins said, "It will be a price-per-gigabyte battle...if they can make a 4-GB for $5, then it's $20 for 32 GB, and $40 for 64 GB. On the other hand... when we do a single-platter, 100-GB notebook drive, well it doesn't cost me very much to go to 200 GB. All I have to do is add another platter. It's very cheap for me to go up."

A few months back, Seagate announced that the company was in the planning stages of a project for mega-capacity hard drives for non-business consumers. Now, Seagate has patented its Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology that increases disk capacity by 10 times or one terabyte of data. HAMR technology includes nanotube-based lubrication to allow the read/write head of a disk to get closer to the surface and store more information.

Decreasing the size of the data-recording areas on a disk surface means more data can be packed together, increasing the capacity of the disk. The drawback in reading and writing ever-smaller bits is that the read/write head has to come closer to the disk surface. This means a tough lubricant layer on the surface that won't evaporate is necessary.

Seagate's new technology features a reservoir inside the disk casing containing the nanotube-based lubricant. The lubricant is regularly pumped out as a vapor and deposited on the surface of the disk, renewing the layer of lubricant that evaporated. The lubricant reservoirs will be built to last the life of the disk.

The new technology is expected to boost disk capacity by a factor of 10 making it possible to manufacture 600GB 1.8-in., 1.46TB 2.5-in., and 7.5TB Barracuda 3.5-in. drives.

Why wait for the fifa-world-cup/4337" id="tag" title="">FIFA World Cup every four years when you can have a World Cup match every day on your PC? Take a look at the PC case mod designed by obvious soccer fan and PC case artist, Butterkneter. If EA FIFA Case Mod doesn't cure a bad case of Football Fever during non-FIFA years, we don't know what can. The final specification of Butterkneter's wonder machine:

• Case: Origen X15e HTPC with touchscreen
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
• Mainboard: ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
• Graphics: GeForce 7900 GT
• RAM: Corsair 1GB Value Select
• Hard drive: Seagate Barracuda 250GB
  

    

   

Hybrid hard drives (HHD) will be a main requirement for mobile systems that carry the Vista Premium logo starting June 2007. This information was revealed by Microsoft's program manager for Windows Client Performance Matt Ayres over at TechEd 2006, Microsoft's largest annual customer conference for IT Pros and developers from around the world.

The announcement has already been reflected in the Windows Logo Device Program Requirements document 3.01, which was quietly launched by Microsoft last Friday. The description of storage requirement #0005 now read: Hybrid disk drives or systems that implement a hybrid disk drive must meet the requirements outlined here... This requirement will go into effect for premium mobile systems in June 1 2007.

The public reinstatement comes just a few days after Seagate confirmed it will offer hybrid drives for laptops. Together with Samsung, Seagate has committed to produce hybrid drives in high quantity. Manufacturers who are looking to get into the hybrid drive production were given some encouragement. According to Ayres,  Microsoft is helping to make introductions between prospective drive and Flash partners. We want to see Flash get into the platform in the right way.