HDDs

There are couple of games ruffling feathers in the world of PC gaming right now: Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield, both of which require that you have them installed on an SSD. For the three-year-old Cyberpunk 2077, the change comes on the back of an overhaul to the system requirements in anticipation of its Phantom Liberty expansion, while Starfield is, well, Starfield.  Some are quick to claim HDDs are dead, or flock to complain about how Starfield is the first game to require an SSD (spoiler alert: it’s not). If you…

Are you still hanging on to that giant 8TB spinning HDD for your PC game installs? Well, it’s starting to look like SSDs will become the new minimum spec for modern PC games. While SSDs have shipped as standard in the latest and greatest PC gaming rigs and laptops, we haven’t seen game developers really push for SSDs as a minimum... until this week.Microsoft held its Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday and revealed that Bethesda’s first new IP in 25 years, Starfield, will require 125GB of SSD storage when it debuts on September…

Microsoft has released version 1.2 of its DirectStorage SDK and has a surprise addition that will help speed up old hard drives. While DirectStorage initially launched as a way to stream data from the latest speedy NVMe solid state drives to your GPU without a CPU slowing things down, Microsoft has heard from developers that improved support for legacy hard drives would also benefit games.Parts of DirectStorage have always worked on hard drives, but developers have had to use separate methods for NVMe devices and HDDs.…

US computer storage giant Seagate has been fined $300 million for shipping over 7 million hard disk drives to Huawei despite a Commerce Department ban prohibiting exports to the Chinese tech company. The fine marks the largest penalty lodged against a company for doing business with Huawei since it was added to the trade blacklist and comes amid a rapidly escalating tech war between the US and China.A Transformer Is Headed to the MoonThe Commerce Department claims Seagate sent 7.4 million hard disk drives (HDDs) to…

Back in the heady days of late 2021, your average 1TB SATA SSD would cost you somewhere north of $400. Sure, you could grab a 6GB/s HDD with 1TB of space for around $50, but in the world of computing, you get what you pay for. Then came 2022 and suddenly SSD prices are dropping. By how much are prices dropping, you ask? Well, you can grab a decent 2TB SSD for around $100 right now. The Teamgroup AX2 is a SATA-III SSD and is only $99 right now. Likewise with Level SSDs. Even Samsung’s excellent 870 EVO 1TB SSD is…

The Securities and Exchange Commission has fined Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (MSSB) for failing to protect its customers' personal identifying information (PII) over a five-year period. The SEC claims that Morgan Stanley not only did not destroy its clients' personal data from hard drives set to be decommissioned but also hired unqualified companies to do so. The SEC has discovered that Morgan Stanley did not properly dispose of storage devices containing its customers' PII dating as far back as 2015. The commission also…

Image: Getty Images/PannoniaSolid state drives (SSDs) are more reliable Hard disk drives (HDDs) at least for certain use cases, according to cloud storage firm Backblaze. But that may not actually make much of a difference when deciding what type of storage you should buy.The company this year was looking to settle a debate over whether HDDs or SSDs are more reliable. Backblaze provides a cloud backup service for laptops and computers and offers its B2 cloud storage to enterprises.It uses a mix of SSDs and HDDs as…

SSDs may be much better than HDDs if all you want are faster read and write speeds, but a new study shows that they may not be nearly as eco-friendly as their slower, less impressive storage siblings. According to the study, SSDs have a much larger environmental impact than HDDs. This just might be one of the last remaining reasons to choose an HDD over an SSD. But is it really as simple as that? University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of British Columbia The eternal dilemma of SSD versus HDD is still ongoing.…

Seagate is celebrating "May the 4th" with three Star Wars-branded external hard drives featuring Boba Fett, Grogu, and The Mandalorian. The HDDs, which are compatible with PCs and game consoles, are essentially rebadged versions of the company's FireCuda Gaming Hard Drives released last year. They're not fast, but they are reasonably priced for 2TB of storage space. Seagate's Special Edition FireCuda External Hard Drives are bus-powered external HDDs in special Boba Fett, Grogu, and The Mandalorian-themed enclosures with…