Seagate Says Future is Hybrid HDD, Not Pure SSD

Seagate's placing bets that people still want big, capacious HDDs, not just pure SSD speed.

When Steve Jobs debuted the new MacBook Air laptops last week, he said that the new products were what Apple felt were the future of the notebook. Likely he meant that laptops would be shipping with SSD rather than HDD storage.

We love SSDs and we think that they're quite at home inside mobile computing devices, but Seagate doesn't see the industry moving to full solid-state storage.

During a Seagate conference call, CEO Steve Luczo, said that he doesn't see SSDs as being the future. While that sounds funny coming from the leader of a storage company, remember that Seagate isn't heavily invested in SSD technology as some other companies who have feet deep in flash memory.

Luzco also said that he owns a previous-generation MacBook Air with an SSD, but he's frustrated at the lack of storage capacity inside the machine.

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Gigabyte Crowns An Overclocking Champion For 2010

Gigabyte's GO OC finals came to a conclusion over the weekend. Europe's dominance of the overclocking scene was retained, while a Hong Kong native came up short. Check out how using obscene amounts of LN2 can bring you a couple thousand dollars.

Gigabyte’s six-month effort to find and crown a champion came to a conclusion in Taiwan this weekend during the Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship 2010 (GO OC). What came between the 15 hopefuls who made it to the finals and the first prize? Several hours of liquid-nitrogen overclocking action.

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Gartner: The bell tolls for Windows XP

Computerworld - ORLANDO -- There are a number of IT trends users will see in coming years, but one that's expected to rise to the top will be the need to migrate off Windows XP and Office 2003 as the end of support nears.

In its annual list of the top 10 trends in infrastructure and operations, IT research firm Gartner detailed at its Symposium/ITExpo conference here the shrinking of data centers as users shift more work to cloud services, for one (see the full list below), but the standout issue for many will be the pending end-of-support dates for the Microsoft products.

Support for Window XP and Office 2003 ends in April 2014.

Although desktop operating system migration ranked No. 7 on the list, Gartner analyst David Cappuccio indicated that it would prove to be a more critical issue to some people.

"You may find yourself in a situation where these migrations become the dominant projects in your organizations over the next few months," Cappuccio said. "It's just a fact of life that we can only milk a cow for so long," he said, of the still widely used operating system.

Matt Holmes, systems manager for Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kan., said the Windows migration is "definitely" an issue.

"Over the summer we just had a round of 'firefighting' where we had a bunch of Windows XP SP2 machines that had to get upgraded to Service Pack 3 because of end-of-life support," said Holmes, who was at the conference. "I think it kind of snuck up on the desktop support folks."

The college plans to migrate to Windows 7, he said.

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WD Announces New 3 TB External HDD

Monday brought rumors that Western Digital (WD) was gearing up to introduce a 3 TB hard drive, however the company made it official on Tuesday. The announcement trails behind Seagate's own 3 TB GoFlex Desk external hard drive released back in July, the first of its size to hit the market.

According to WD, the new 3 TB drive will be part of the company's My Book Essential line of external drives consisting of both dual USB 3.0/2.0 and cheaper USB 2.0-only models. The dual-interface 3.0/2.0 models will offer a choice of 3 TB, 2 TB and 1 TB capacities, whereas the USB 2.0-only models will offer capacities of 2 TB, 1.5 TB, 1 TB, 750 GB, 640 GB, and 500 GB.

Tuesday Western Digital also said it added a 500 GB USB 3.0 model to its My Passport Essential line of portable drives. Consumers can choose between five “fun” colors-- Midnight Black, Cool Silver, Real Red, Pacific Blue and Arctic White.

The company also added two USB 3.0 drives to its My Passport Essential SE line offering 750 GB and 1 TB capacities. The drives will be offered in stylish black, silver, metallic blue and metallic red colors...

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