MCE Technologies offers OptiBay hard drives for the owners of the new unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro, with prices that start at $190 depending on capacity. Some people think they no longer need optical drives and prefer to replace that empty space with another hard drive, which far from being a bad idea. The second hard drive is installed internally and offers to users the option for RAID performance, for example. You can choose between the following storage capacities: 250GB/5400rpm, 320GB/5400rpm, 320GB/7200rpm and 500GB/5400rpm.

Seen on Akiba Watch, the special offer of the day in Akihabara for storage peripherals. It’s a SATA 1.5TB internal hard drive (32MB of cache) for a price of 11,970 yen, or $130. As for RAM, prices fall and it’s good to consider new possibilities on our desktops.

Seagate Technology, Western Digital and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies will develop affordable 2.5-inch hard drives for netbooks and PCs of the next year, and the price would be 40-50% cheaper than existing 2.5-inch entry models. It’s great news, although you can expect a decrease in performance with regard to new models, but anyway the netbooks are not designed to be super-powerful, but for occasional use. You can expect to see the first affordable hard drives for netbooks on the market at the second half of next year, global recession or not.

IO Data announced in Japan a new SATAII hard drive (7200rpm) with 1.5TB of storage, the HDI-SAH7. Nothing really surprising you’ll tell me, especially a capacity of 1.5TB has become rather common these days, but what surprised the most here is its price: 30,600 Yen ($320)…
It is simply twice more expensive than the SEAGATE ST31500341AS hard drive of 1.5TB: 14,800 yen ($155).

Here is the MK5055GSX, a 2.5-inch SATA hard drive with a speed of 5400rpm, a density of 576.4Mbit/mm2, for only 25dB.

In short nothing more technically speaking, but we know that our hard drive is also available in several versions, with models ranging from 120, 160, 250, 320 and 400GB.

Seagate announced a hard drive that could well be the fastest in its category while remaining the most eco-friendly. The Savvio 15K.2 hard drive is primarily for companies and will be offered in 73 GB and 146 GB. With the SAS 2.0 interface (Serial Attached SCSI), the hard drives have a rate of up to 6 Gbps. These internal hard drives spin at 15 000 rounds per minute and have a size of 2.5-inch.

Since 2003, Western Digital is the only one to offer Serial ATA hard drives running at a speed of 10,000 rpm. Reserved to SCSI hard drives, even reaching 15,000 rpm, this speed can reach a stage of additional performance compared to conventional hard drives running at 7200 rpm.

The Raptor history began in February 2003, with the 36 GB version, and then doubled its capacity 7 months later. It then took until December 2005 to see a new generation arrived, which provided a capacity of 150 GB, the NCQ and a doubled cache of 16 MB. Western Digital is up today on the front of the stage with the spiritual son of the Raptor, the Velociraptor.

Fujitsu announced two new 500GB internal hard drives. They are designed to fit not only laptop computers, but also desktops. The MJA2 first, with a thickness of 9.5 mm, SATA 3.0Gbps, 5400rpm, and 1.4 watts of consumption during reading and writing. The second hard drive, the MJA2 CH, is a little more interesting, as it is emerging as the first model of its kind to be compatible with the 256-bit AES encryption system. The two hard drives are planned for the first quarter of 2009. We only expect the prices.