Flooding in Thailand is expected to lead to a shortage in hard drives, since some of the top manufacturers of hard drives and components are located in that country. The shortage could drive up the costs of hard drives temporarily — and some PC makers are already talking about raising computer prices as a result. Cens reports that Acer chairman…

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The number of top tier hard drive and solid state disk makers shrinks by one today, with the announcement that Western Digital is acquiring Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. The deal is worth about $4.3 billion, and it gives Hitachi Storage’s parent company (Hitachi Ltd) a share in Western Digital and two seats on the company’s boards. What does this mean…

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Sure, solid state disks are all the rage these days. But you know what’s still cheaper? Hard drives. So while the new Active Media 1.8 inch SSDs announced yesterday top out at 128GB, Toshiba has just announced a new line of 1.8 inch hard drives that will come in sizes up to 220GB. These little guys probably won’t be sold…

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Solid State disks offer a lot of benefits over traditional hard drives. They have no moving parts, so they tend to be quieter and harder to break. Many are also significantly faster than hard disks, since platters don’t need to spin for your computer to find the data it’s looking for. Solid State disks also use less power than hard…

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Netbooks and notebooks are continuing to get thinner and thinner. The $450 Dell Vostro V13, for examplem, is just 0.65 inches (about 16.5mm) thick. But in order to make thin computers you need thin components. And Seagate is doing its part to help move things along with a new 7 millimeter thick hard drive called the Momentus Thin. Seagate will…

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Toshiba’s latest hard drive is both really big, and really small. On the one hand, it can hold up to 320GB of data, which hardly makes it the highest capacity hard drive for mobile devices. But it’s better than the 160GB and 250GB hard drives that come with most netbooks. But at just 1.8 inches, the 1.8 inch hard drive…

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Samsung has reportedly halted development of 1.8 inch hard drives. And while Digitimes reports that this could “hamper” the shipments of netbooks and ultrathing notebooks int he short term, it could be a good thing in the long run. Because let’s face it, 1.8 inch hard drives are kind of crappy. Sure, they smaller than your typical 2.5 inch laptop…

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