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News

• Hard drive shortage expected to hurt consumers most

  Flooding in Thailand is wreaking havoc on hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers.

• Thai floods hit Q4 hard drive production, says research firm

  The devastating floods in Thailand will cause a 28 percent quarter-on-quarter drop in hard disk drive (HDD) production in the fourth quarter, potentially affecting notebook production in early 2012, research firm IHS iSuppli said on Monday.

• EC approves Seagate acquisition of Samsung drive business

  The European Commission approved on Wednesday the acquisition by Seagate Technology of the hard disk drive (HDD) business of Samsung Electronics, after concluding that there will still be enough players in the market after the acquisition.

• NAS shoot-out: Iomega StorCenter px6-300d

  The six-bay Iomega StorCenter px6-300d is the largest array you can get from Iomega before you venture into rack-mount servers, and it's just the kind of box you'd expect to see in a remote office or small to medium-sized business. Considering Iomega's parent EMC is a leader in the enterprise storage market, I had high expectations for this solution.

• Western Digital extends suspension of operations in Thailand

  Western Digital said its primary manufacturing facility in Thailand was flooded over the weekend, with its secondary site also at risk, raising the possibility of a global shortage of hard disk drives (HDD) in the current quarter.

• Western Digital's new drives expand laptop storage to 1TB

  Whether you have a Windows- or OS X-based laptop, one glaring flaw in either genre (and in laptops in general) is the capacity of the hard drive. A year ago, it became possible to pump up a desktop computer with a 3TB drive, but your laptop hit a wall at 750GB. And if you are a true media maven, even 750GB could be a bit confining at times for everything you want to store.

• Thailand floods may affect global electronics production

  Severe floods in Thailand have disrupted production of electronics including hard disk drives and semiconductors, with a number of factories suspending operations.

• Western Digital halts hard disk production in Thailand

  The production of hard disks at Western Digital (WD) facilities close to Bangkok, Thailand, has been halted following severe flooding, the company said on Wednesday.

• Seagate, Western Digital merger deals face EC probe

  Moves by Seagate and Western Digital to acquire hard-drive companies are being probed by European regulators because of "competition concerns", the European Commission said on Monday.

• Hitachi GST expands portable storage drives to cloud

  Hitachi Global Storage Technologies on Tuesday introduced new Touro storage offerings that package local and online storage so data can be accessed locally or through the cloud via smartphones and tablets.

• Western Digital to buy Hitachi's disk storage division for $4.3B

  Western Digital announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST), the disk drive arm of Hitachi Ltd., in a cash and stock transaction valued at about $4.3 billion.

• With Hitachi buy, Western Digital moves further ahead of rivals

  If its proposed acquisition of Hitachi GST is successful, Western Digital will immediately gain status in the hard disk drive (HDD) enterprise market, where it has been striving to grow for the past couple of years.

• Rack-mount QNAP storage server packs a wallop

  There's an area of the NAS landscape where the lines between consumer and corporate use are blurred. While high-end NAS arrays cost plenty of money, they also provide essential features like redundant power supplies and superior performance. At the lower end are the truly consumer-grade devices that might seem like they'll work in a corporate environment but fall short of meeting the essentials critical to infrastructures. They are, however, very cheap.

• Protecting data on portable drives

  It is almost mind-boggling how much data can be stored on a portable drive or USB thumb drive. As convenient as it is it to be able to carry 1TB of data in your pocket, though, portable drives are also easily lost or stolen, and gallivanting about can take its toll on the data. It is important to protect the portable drives and the data they contain.

• Computer History Museum to highlight storage

  Computer History Museum to highlight storage