HGST, formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company has announced that it has started shipping the industry’s first 4TB enterprise-class 3.5-inch hard drive, the Ultrastar 7K4000.

The SSD market has been healthy lately especially since the dilemma of the HDD market due to last year’s Thailand flooding. Although still significantly priced higher than traditional HDDs, prices of SSDs are now dwindling down and it looks like Intel’s consumer line of SSD, the 330 series will not differ with the rest of the competition.

Western Digital has formally announced the availability of the new My Passport series of 2.5-inch external hard drives. The new series now features the higher 2TB capacity, a redesigned shell and new colors including white, black, silver, blue, and red.

Seagate has announced its latest achievement and that is becoming the first hard drive manufacturer to reach the milestone storage density of 1TB (1 trillion bits) per square inch through the use of Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), the next- generation recording technology.

Western Digital has announced the availability of the My Book Thunderbolt Duo storage system that takes advantage of the latest Thunderbolt interface which gives out a maximum bandwidth of 10Gbps.

Seagate is now preparing a 9mm thin FreeAgent portable hard drive that packs a 500GB 7200 RPM hard drive. This model is an update to last year’s 320GB model which also featured a 7200 RPM hard drive and the same USB 3.0 USB connectivity interface that the new one also carries.

ADATA Technology announced the availability of the DashDrive Durable HD710 portable hard drive series that incorporates military-grade shockproof and waterproof (IPX7) construction making it ideal for those who are always on the road or field but have to keep with them their data wherever they go.

Thermaltake has announced the Max series of SSD and HDD accessories that incudes that Max 5G 2.5-inch hard drive external enclosure and the Max Duo (SSD & HDD) rack with USB 3.0 ports.

Hitachi has announced that it has begun shipping its Travelstar Z7K500 series of 2.5-inch HDDs to its partners. The new  Travelstar Z7K500 HDDs are only 7mm in height and acts as more portable, thin and light replacements to the current standard 9.5mm 2.5-inch HDDs.

Just like with Sandy Bridge, Intel will also be including SSD caching to the Ivy Bridge platform and since the chip giant will be releasing new chipsets for it, it makes sense to also release a new series of SSDs specifically tailored to work with the company’s SSD caching feature.

After the delay late last year, Intel finally announces the availability of its 520 series solid state drives that feature the latest SATA 6Gbps interface. All 520 series SSDs are powered by an LSI SandForce Flash Storage Processor with an Intel co-defined and validated firmware release and are currently Intel’s fastest client/consumer solid-state drives to date.

OCZ has announced the release of its firmware update for its Octane SATA 3.0 Series SSDs that significantly improves the random write performance of the said SSDs, even doubling it for some models. This gives owners of the said series of SSDs the chance to push their storage devices further with this free performance enhancement from OCZ.

Western Digital has stated that the company is expecting to restore production levels of HDDs back to their pre-flooded state by the month of September this year. That means until then, shortages of HDDs will most likely still persist.

Kingston has now started shipping its latest V+200 solid state drives that act as good performance upgrade for budget conscious individuals. The solid state drives feature the second-generation high-speed SATA 6Gbps interface and equipped with the SandForce SF-2281 processor.

OCZ, known for its high-performance solid state drive and Marvell, a worldwide leader in silicon solutions has jointly developed the latest innovation in solid state drive solutions, the Z-Drive R5 that makes use of the native PCI-Express interface to deliver high bandwidth capabilities beyond what any traditional SATA SSD will be able to offer.

Intel’s announcement that the main reason for the company reducing its expected profit for the year, is due to the HDD shortage taking effects on the whole PC industry is not entirely true at least according to Nomura Equity Research investment firm.

Hitachi has announced what it claims to be the current fastest 2.5-inch 10K RPM hard drive in the market, the Ultrastar C10K900 HDD.

OCZ has announced that in the following weeks, its new Petrol SSDs based on the Indilinx Everest platform will be available for retail. The new SSDs are said to reduce SSD deployment costs by thirty percent while still featuring all the features of the Indilinx Everest platform.

Intel has recently revised its expected revenues for the fourth quarter of the year not because their products are not that attractive to consumers but because of the persisting HDD shortage that is affecting the market particularly the PC makers.

Earlier, it was reported that Hitachi’s 4TB Deskstar hard drive was seen retailing in Japan. There was no official word from Hitachi by then but now, the company has officially announced their product and apparently, it does not come alone as there is also a 4TB external version dubbed as the Touro.

Hitachi’s 4TB 3.5-inch hard drive has now been spotted to be currently available in retail at least in Japan. The hard drive carrying model number HDS5C4040ALE630 and branded as Desktar 5K is currently the world’s first 4TB hard drive. The branding suggests that the hard drive features a rotational speed of 5900 RPM and that it belongs to the CoolSpin series.

Intel initially planned the release of its 520 series SSDs, codenamed Cherryville to the market this last quarter of the year but now it seems that the chip giant has pushed the new products to Q1 of 2012 for reasons still unknown.

Transcend answers to the demand for better storage solutions with the introduction of its StoreJet Cloud, a portable wireless HDD that provides extended storage space for Wi-Fi enabled devices.

After many weeks of having to deal with HDD supply drought, it seems hope is finally here as several factories that closed down in the wake of the flood in Thailand have started resuming their operations.

It seems Intel is finally bringing the long awaited TRIM support for SSDs in RAID 0 to all end users at least according to the information that was published on StorageReview. Apparently, the release notes of the Rapid Storage Technology (RST) 11.5 Alpha version have revealed the plan to include full TRIM support for RAID 0 in the next version of RST.

Corsair gives birth to its new Performance Pro series performance SSDs that makes use of a Marvell SATA 6Gbps controller and provide impressive real world 515MB/s sequential read and 440 MB/s sequential write speeds (based on ATTO disk benchmark).

Kingston has announced the availability of its SSDNow V200 solid state drives that acts as the successor to its V100 series of solid state drives. Like its predecessors, the V200 series of solid state drives are entry-level budget SSDs that aim to offer value and performance to consumers that are looking for an affordable upgrade to their aging old mechanical hard drive.

Sharkoon has announced its latest external storage connectivity solution, the QuickDeck Pro USB 3.0 SATA HDD Dock that provides a quick and easy way to extend storage capacity. It lets hard drives dock in a laying down position instead of the traditional upright position and can accommodate both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch hard drives.

OCZ has launched the RevoDrive 3 Max IOPS and RevoDrive 3 X2 Max IOPS solid state drives that are designed to deliver maximum throughput in multithreaded applications featuring 4KB random write performance of up to 245,000 IOPS and increased transfer rates of 1900MBps reads and 1725MBps writes.

StarTech is proud to announce its latest addition to its hard to find connectivity product list, the SATA 1:3 Hard Drive Duplicator Dock (SATDOCK4U3RE) that enables sector-by-sector duplication of a SATA hard drive into three others simultaneously. The dock works on its own meaning there is no need to connect it to a host computer to perform the duplication process.