Tag: hard drive

US spooks hide in hard drives

spyIf you own hard-drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba all your data could have been seen by US spooks.

According to Kaspersky Lab, the US National Security Agency figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, IBM, Micron and Samsung.

Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists, Kaspersky said.

The Russian outfit did not name the US as the country behind the software, but said it was closely linked to Stuxnet, which was a NSA-led effort.

A former NSA employee told Reuters that Kaspersky’s analysis was correct, and that people still in the spy agency valued these espionage programmes as highly as Stuxnet. Another former intelligence operative confirmed that the NSA had developed the prized technique of concealing spyware in hard drives.

Kaspersky published the technical details of its research on Monday, a move that could help infected institutions detect the spying programs, some of which trace back as far as 2001

The announcement could lead to a backlash against Western technology, in countries such as China, which is already drafting regulations that would require most technology suppliers to provide copies of their software code for inspection.

Kaspersky said the spies made a technological breakthrough by figuring out how to lodge malicious software in the obscure code called firmware that launches every time a computer is turned on.

Disk drive firmware is viewed by spies and cybersecurity experts as the second-most valuable real estate on a PC for a hacker, second only to the BIOS code invoked automatically as a computer boots up.

The information was news to Western Digital, Seagate and Micron who said it was the first they had heard of it. Toshiba and Samsung declined to comment and IBM just ignored hacks requests.

Seagate releases 8TB hard drive

Seagate  has decided that the world needs hard drives which can store 8TB.

The 8TB HDD comes five months after Western Digital had released the first ever 6TB HDD, so the company clearly thinks we are running out of space.

Apparently the 8TB HDD comes in the 3.5-inch form factor and  features a SATA 6Gbps interface and multi-drive RV tolerance which makes it suitable for data centres.

At this point it is not clear if the drive uses PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.

Seagate vice president of marketing Scott Horn said that as the world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data.

“This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centres,” he said.

He thinks the new drive will support the demand for high capacity storage in a world bursting with digital creation, consumption and long-term storage.

Unfortunately, Seagate did not announce the retail price for its 8TB HDD though the company claims that the new hard drive has “the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry.” In otherwords while the drive is expensive it will be cheaper than owning two 4 TB machines.

Hard drive sales slow down

hdd-hugeShipments of mechanical hard drives are steadily declining, confirming what everyone in the industry knew already – the PC market is losing steam.

Seagate saw its Q2 shipments drop 3.2 percent over Q1, to 53.9 million drives. Toshiba lost some market share and shipped 19.6 million units. Western Digital shipped 59.9 million drives, 0.4 percent less than in Q1.

Shipments of mobile drives were also down 0.4 percent and the average drive size remained at 610GB. Hybrid drives are not taking off as expected by some punters.

Desktops fared even worse, with an 8.3 percent decline from the first quarter. The slump may cause some inventory concerns in Q3 and beyond. The average capacity of desktop drives shipped last quarter was 1TB, no changes there.

There is some good news to report as well. The enterprise hard drive market is recovering. It was up 12 percent last quarter. Shipments of hard drives for consumer electronics were also up, 0.8 percent according to IT Wire

Although there’s plenty of room for improvement, the hard drive market won’t recover anytime soon.

Cheaper SSDs and hybrid drives are also starting to make a mark, but HDDs are still the cheapest option and the darling of OEMs and consumers alike.

WD rolls out anorexic 1TB drive

westerndigitalWestern Digital has announced the world’s thinnest 1TB 2.5-inch drive. The new Blue series drives are already shipping and they are available in capacities ranging from 320GB to 1TB.

However, it’s not the thinnest thing around. Both WD and Seagate are making a lot of noise about their new 5mm drives, but they max out at 500GB. The 7mm drives are designed for mainstream notebooks and other thin and light systems, including All-in-Ones.

WD VP and general manager for client storage Matt Rutledge said consumers with huge content portfolios need not worry about getting a thin and light notebooks.

“This most compact 1TB hard drive to-date offers manufacturers of systems an upsell path for their customers who will now be able to choose systems offering both sleek design and high capacity,” he said.

Intel and Acer are also talking up the new drives, which are showing up just in time for Intel’s Haswell refresh. The new 1TB Blue drive comes with a two-year warranty and it’s priced at $139.

Hard drive market shrinks, again

hdd-hugeEuropean outfits don’t seem to be gobbling up nearly as many hard drives as they should. According to consultancy firm Futuresource, shipments have gone from bad to worse over the past two years.

The total capacity purchased last year dropped year-on-year for the first time in history and there are no signs of recovery yet.

A multitude of factors contributed to the slump. The disastrous Thailand floods in 2011 pushed prices up for several consecutive quarters, and just as supply started to improve, the tablet craze and PC slump hit hard, compounded by the ever increasing popularity of cloud services. The fact that SSD prices are tumbling did not help, either. Hard drive shipments peaked in 2010, with 28.1 million units, but they dropped to 25.9 million in 2011 and 21.5 million in 2012.

Mats Larsson, senior market analyst for Futuresource, told The Guardian that he doesn’t expect the market to recover to 2010 levels anytime soon.

“We think this year shipments will show between 5% to 10% growth – likely about 7%,” Larsson said. So although some growth is expected, it’s not nearly enough to come close to 2010 levels.

The other issue is the size of drives purchased last year. While it is still growing, it is not keeping up with the drop in unit sales. As a result, the total capacity dropped from 25.4 petabytes in 2011 to 23.6 petabytes in 2012.

Larsson said some retailers held back on buying drives last year, in the hope that distributors would drop prices. That didn’t happen. Hopes that increased demand for tablets would result in higher NAS shipments were also quashed. Shipments of NAS systems in 2012 dropped to 1.12 million units, down from 1.27 million units in 2011.

Copy machines pose unlikely security threat

copycatEvery office has them and although paperless offices are the new black, copy machines will probably be around for years to come. However, thousands of old copies stored on hard drives will also stick around.

Most copy machines built in the last decade have a hard drive and can store thousands of documents scanned, copied or emailed using the machine. Some hard drives are big enough to store 60,000 to 100,000 pages of data, so these benevolent dinosaurs are in fact massive security threats lurking in the corner, next to the water cooler.