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3.5-inch

Hey, what's wrong with a small iPhone?

Is a bigger iPhone a better iPhone?

The iPhone rumor du jour this week was about a big screen. In fact, "iPhone 5" rumors going way back almost invariably cite a bigger screen. Sizes run the gamut from 4-inch screens to 4.2-inch to, now, 4.6-inch.

The iPhone currently has a 3.5-inch screen.

And that's just fine with me. A smartphone should be as small as possible. Certainly not BlackBerry Curve small but not so big that it isn't compact. It's a phone, after all.

The brave new big-honking-iPhone world that Reuters claimed is coming (… Read more

Toshiba to acquire Western Digital's 3.5-inch HDD manufacturing equipment

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Western Digital (WD) announced today a mutual and definitive agreement of property divesting between the two.

Under the agreement, Toshiba will acquire from WD manufacturing and related intellectual property for 3.5-inch hard drives (HDDs), used in desktop PCs and consumer applications, and near-line HDDs for server applications. Near-line storage is a type of data storage supporting larger capacity and with higher reliability than HDDs for desktop PC applications.

"The purchase of part of Western Digital's 3.5-inch HDD manufacturing equipment and with it the capability to produce 3.5-inch HDDs for desktop … Read more

Seagate ships Window XP-friendly 3TB hard drive

Back in June 2010, Seagate shipped the first 3TB hard drive, the Barracuda XT, which was only available in external storage options, such as an external hard drive or the BlackArmor NAS servers. Today the company announced the first standalone version of the same drive that consumers can buy and use with their desktop computers.

Seagate has a good reason for the delay, however. The company says it wanted take time and find an easy way to make the hard drive support Windows XP, which is still popular, including using the drive as the system's main hard drive. Prior … Read more

Sony delivers floppy disk's last rites

The days of the 3.5-inch floppy disk are now officially numbered.

Sony, which boasts 70 percent of the anemic market, announced Friday that it would end Japanese sales of the ancient storage medium in March 2011, according to a report in the Mainichi Daily newspaper.

The 3.5-inch floppy was a ubiquitous and necessary component for storing and transferring files between personal computers for nearly three decades. Sony pioneered the 3.5-inch floppy disk in 1981, eventually replacing the 5.25-inch floppy disk that had previously been the popular storage format.

However, as the size of files and programs … Read more

G-Tech refreshes high-speed, high-capacity external storage lineup

It's not hard these days to find external storage devices that offer 2TB or even 4TB of storage. However, most of them use low-power and relatively low-performance internal hard drives, such as the My Book series from Western Digital or the FreeAgent series from Seagate. If you are looking for top speed and top capacity form external storage solutions for your Mac, G-Tech has some news for you.

The company announced Monday that it now incorporates Hitachi's 2TB, 7,200rpm, 32MB cache buffer SATA hard drives across its entire 3.5-inch product line, offering different storage solutions from … Read more

Hitachi to ship high-speed 2TB hard drive

Hitachi joined the 2TB hard drive club Tuesday with the Deskstar 7K2000, an all-new hard drive it claims offers both capacity and performance for desktop computers.

While this is not the first 3.5-inch 2TB hard drive, it's indeed the first consumer hard drive that boasts the spinning speed of 7,200 rpm. Western Digital released its first 2TB hard drive back in April, the WD RE4-GP, which is a low-power and low-performance hard drive that doesn't have rpm specifications.

There are lots of factors that would affect a hard drive's performance. However generally, the higher rpm … Read more