Gadgets and Devices | Data Storage Technologies from West Coast Midnight Run

Seagate has been providing PC data storage solutions for decades. Over the years, this group along with recently acquired Samsung and Maxtor have been steadily innovating on more demanding data storage solutions for the mobile platforms markets. Driven by demand from the consumer for more reliable and sturdier drives on the go, that can handle workloads just like the office-bound desktops, Seagate has increased the capacity of its traditional magnetic electro-mechanical drives upwards of 6 TB, unheard of just a few years ago, and has slowly unveiled solid state memory drives (SSD) that are quieter, cooler and less susceptible to shocks, bumps and other every day hazards for sensitive electronics.

Our offices are primarily equipped with systems that run traditional HDD, mostly from Panasonic, Fujitsu, and Hitachi. We decided on equipping our laptops with Seagate internal drives for testing their endurance, and long term reliability. Our laptops were originally equipped with 60 and 120 GB drives and when they started giving us funny noises on bootup, we acquired our first test units at 250 GB, 320 GB and 500 GB. Because the physical size of each drive remains the same, as the stated capacity increases, the density of data packed on the same magnetic space increases making data corruption and surface pitting (physical damage) more likely from routine RAM scans and use of software applications.

While SSD technology started out with small data storage companies catering to video game enthusiasts, larger manufacturers moved into this market only three to four years ago and most SSD drives are several folds pricier and much faster than their conventional counterparts.

Our review focused on the older technology as the mechanical drives have far more storage capacities to offer to the consumer. We kept the size of each of the sample drives we tested small (GB) as these storage capacities configurations are more proven than the new TB monsters. As a rule of