Seagate is joining the helium-filled hard drive trend before the opportunity floats away. The company is shipping 8 terabyte and 10TB 3.5-inch drives for the enterprise market, called Seagate Enterprise Capacity drives. There’s no official MSRP yet, but a drive is listed on Amazon for $695, which may or may not reflect official pricing.
Western Digital started selling helium-filled drives to the consumer market earlier this year, two years after WD subsidiary HGST started selling such drives to the enterprise market. Seagate, Western Digital’s primary competitor, has been absent from the helium market until now. While prices aren’t specifically known, but these drives will likely be the most expensive that Seagate sells, Anandtech is reporting.
It may sound silly, but filling a hard drive’s enclosure with helium reduces friction. This reduces wear and tear, and also slightly lowers energy usage. Spread over tens of thousands of drives in a data center, these savings add up, but this technology requires drives be hermetically sealed in order to work.
Seagate is aiming squarely at the server market with its helium-filled Enterprise Capacity line. The drives will feature a 256MB multi-segmented cache and platters that rotate at 7200RPM. Seagate claims burst transfer rates will be up to 600 megabytes per second; sustained transfers max out at 243MBps.
These specs are all in line with HGST’s offerings, but there’s one notable problem: energy usage. Seagate edges out HGST while idle, with 4.5W of usage compared to HGST’s 5W, and while reading, with 6.5W to HGST’s 6.8W. But Seagate’s drive uses 8.5W while writing, compared to HGST’s 6.8. That’s going to hurt the drive in a server environment.
Seagate’s drive, like HGST’s, is warrantied for five years.
Seagate is in on the helium game now, and that competition will surely prompt new innovations. And the research done at the enterprise level is likely to trickle down to consumers eventually, in the same way HGST’s offerings eventually came to the market as a Western Digital consumer drive. Users have a lot to look forward to.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.