HDDs are a dying breed these days as SSDs have clearly emerged as the preferred choice for the next generation of storage, but when it comes to providing a ton of storage at a relatively low cost today, HDDs still retain an edge.

In a recent announcement Seagate is capitalizing on this fact with the announcement of three new HDDs which deliver 12TB of capacity each for desktop and NAS applications.

 

Seagate BarraCuda Pro

For the desktop, Seagate is introducing the 12TB BarraCuda Pro HDD. The BarraCuda Pro is a premium 3.5-inch formfactor desktop HDD designed for enthusiasts, gamers, and creative professionals looking for a high performance and [...]

Following Synology’s massive launch of no less than five NAS systems, Synology is announcing yet another in preparation for the holiday season.

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The new NAS is a 4-bay NAS Synology calls the DiskStation DS418Play and it’s a slightly upgraded variation of the DS418 which was recently released. [...]

In preparation for the holiday shopping season, Synology is announcing no less than five new NAS systems ranging from a two to six bays. According to the announcement, the new NAS systems include the DS218+, DS418, DS718+, DS918+ and the DS3018xs.

 

Synology DS218+ and DS718+

The Synology DS218+ and DS718+ are two bay NAS systems designed for the home and business.

The Synology DS218+ is powered by an Intel Celeron J3355 dual core processor, 2GB DDR3L RAM (Expandable up to 6GB) and features one Gigabit LAN port for networking.

The Synology DS718+ is powered by an Intel Celeron J3455 quad core processor, 2GB DDR3L RAM (Expandable up to [...]

As prices of last generation servers continue to decrease, internet speeds continue to increase, and NAS systems become much more feature rich, many people are now opting to setup their own home servers or NAS systems.

If you don’t own your own home server or NAS system, here are five top uses for a home server or NAS.

 

Network Storage

The most common use for a home server or NAS is using it as a network storage. After all, the acronym NAS itself stands for Network Attached Storage.

Typically referred to as a “shared drive”, network storage typically employs the NFS (Network File System) or SMB (Server Message Block) [...]

Torrents have gotten a bad rap over the years as a platform for sharing illegal movies, music, TV shows, and software, but they have quite a few legitimate uses as well. For example individual developers, content creators and non-profit organizations can simply set up a Torrent, share it with a couple people and let it self propagate, significantly reducing the cost overhead of purchasing file hosting or content delivery.

However, unlike traditional file delivery methods such as through HTTP/HTTPS or through FTP, in order to download a Torrent file, a Torrent client is needed and of course not all Torrent clients are created equal. As such, today we’ll be sharing [...]

Synology has recently announced the release of Surveillance Station 8.1 Beta, a new upgrade to the Surveillance Station software included in their popular NAS systems.

The new update brings some much needed improvements and some new features to surveillance station including HTML5 support, a new home mode feature, intercom camera integration, GPU acceleration, remote recording archiving, and POS integration.

Those with a newer Synology NAS with support for Surveillance Station 8 can now download and test the beta. More information about the update as well as instructions on accessing the beta is available at the Synology website here.

Those looking for the absolute highest capacity HDDs for their NAS without breaking the bank will now have an option of purchasing the WD Red and the WD Red Pro in up to 10TB capacities.

In order to reach the new capacities, the new Red and Red Pro drives utilize WD’s HelioSeal technology where WD seals the drives and fills them with helium in order to cram more platters into the drive. This is a technology that has already been utilized on WD’s enterprise class drives, however, is now making its way into WD’s NAS drives for the first time. In addition to HelioSeal technology, the new drives will also include several NAS optimized features such as [...]

Synology has released updates to their five and eight bay NAS units, the DS1517+ and DS1817+. Launching in parallel with the new NAS units is the Synology M2D17 M.2 SATA SSD adapter and the DX517 expansion unit.

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In order to accommodate the M2D17 adapter, the new DS1517+ and DS1817+ NAS units now feature a [...]

In a recent announcement, iXsystems launched the newest version of the highly popular open source NAS OS, FreeNAS. Previously named FreeNAS 10, the name has been promptly renamed to FreeNAS Corral on launch. According to Brett David, Exectutive VP of iXsystems, “The Corral name represents the next generation in enterprise grade services contributed by iXsystems to the Open Source community. Only a new name could do justice to such a giant evolutionary step.”

FreeNAS Corral is one of the most highly anticipated FreeNAS releases in a long time as it has been completely re-written from the ground up with big improvements in its enterprise storage [...]

AMD hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) Q&A thread on Reddit to celebrate the launch of their new Ryzen CPUs and address some key concerns. Participants included Dr Lisa Su (AMD CEO), Robert Hallock (CPU Technical Marketing), and James Prior (CPU Business Development). We’ve sorted through the thread and extracted the important bits.

 

Q: Is gaming performance something you will work towards going forward with the Zen architecture? (Reddit user Makkarikock)

Lisa Su: Absolutely! You should expect gaming performance to only get better with time as the developers have more time with “Zen”.

AMD had also recently announced a [...]