Western Digital announced their 2nd quarter 2012 results, with sales of $2bn, compared to $2,5bn from a year earlier. The mere 20% decrease in sales is quite remarkable considering how badly WD’s manufacturing plants were hit during last year’s Thailand floods. In fact, WD did indeed ship almost half the hard drives shipped in the same period last year, with 28.5 million drives in Q2 2012 compared to 52.2 million drives in Q2 2011. Despite this, increase in prices and gross profit margins lead to profits of $145m, compared to $225m last year.

While discussing these earnings call, WD’s CEO, John F. Coyne was asked about ultrabooks and what medium storage will be used in them, given the heavy push from Intel and other OEMs. “I expect ultrabooks to have both hard drives, traditional hard drives and hybrid hard drives and SSDs. So I think there will be, depending on the specific version of ultrabook, you will see all 3 solutions and even in certain models, choices between those solutions in the same model, ” said Coyne (via transcript at Seeking Alpha).

“And we think that the SSD penetration profile will be in very low single digits in a mature ultrabook environment. And then we see an emerging position for hybrids a little early to develop a view on exactly what percentage of penetration, but we see hybrids as a very compelling alternative on the performance side to solid state on bang for the buck. And we anticipate that in large capacity environments, traditional hard drives will continue to be the compelling solution.”

One of the biggest reasons we don’t find Seagate’s Momentus XT in many notebooks as a default, or even optional HDD is because Seagate is the only manufacturer making hybrid drives; nobody else in the industry is making them. The critical mass for hybrid drives hasn’t been achieved simply because there is only one supplier in the market. With WD entering the foray of hybrid drives, the landscape for traditional hard drives could change very soon.

You can check out our review of the latest Momentus XT drive to see how fast it is compared to traditional HDDs vs SSDs.

Size does matter, especially in the world of gadgets. Bigger screens, smaller phones, larger capacity drives – it seems everything around me is either expanding or shrinking. So I was rather nonchalant when I received the Belkin Surf N150 USB Wireless Micro Adapter for review. The device is a little bigger than my thumbnail, so I was interested to see if this little gem could live up to the task of being my wireless interface for the day.

Installation is very simple and is just a matter of popping in the supplied CD and then plugging the Belkin adapter in. I disabled my laptop’s Wi-Fi and instantly the Belkin Wireless Adapter kicked in with a flashing blue light, and Windows prompted me to connect to my home network. The device is compatible with most forms of wireless security such as WPS, WPA and WEP. Once I was connected, performance was quite good with streaming videos off my network drive, and I found that I was able to continue surfing upstairs in the guest bedroom where I previously wasn’t able to pick up a Wi-Fi signal. But strangely enough when I walked out into the garden, the signal suddenly dropped to just one bar, even though my router was just a few feet away behind a wall. I never had any issues with using my onboard Wi-Fi outside, so this was a bit peculiar.

The true beauty of the N150 Wireless Adapter is surely its size. Measuring just 18mm x 15mm, you can plug it into your laptop or desktop and completely forget about it. It’s almost flush with the side of my laptop, so it doesn’t cause any problems at all when I slide my laptop back into its carrier case. If you do decide to take it out, I suggest putting it someplace safe as it nearly disappeared into the depths of my bag!

Speeds using the Belkin N150 were overall satisfactory. It took me 14 minutes to transfer a 1.67GB file from my laptop to my network drive and just over 12 minutes to copy the same file with my onboard Wi-Fi. Apart from the issues with wireless coverage outside, I was able to stream comfortably from my media centre as well as YouTube without any interruptions. The only downside is that this is a Windows-only device (Ubuntu was able to detect it as a Belkin wireless adapter) and will not work on a Mac.

If you’re looking for a quick wireless replacement for your Windows based laptop or want to add some Wi-Fi to your desktop PC, then this little gem is for you. Its easy installation and ridiculously small footprint will charm most users, though be wary of the device’s drop in performance if you wander into the great outdoors.

In a recent study by NPD In-Stat, some interesting predictions were made about the current display interfaces used for computers around the world. Right now the global market is dominated by the VGA and DVI ports. If you have a mid-range card or higher from the last year or two, all you’ll see are DVI and HDMI ports. More recently, high-end cards have just one DVI port with multiple combinations of HDMI and DisplayPorts.

According NPD In-Stat, both HDMI and DisplayPort interfaces will take over the ageing VGA (introduced in 1986) and the still young DVI (introduced in 1999) within the next 5 years. Both Intel and AMD will be dropping support for the old interfaces by 2015. After which motherboard and graphics card manufacturers will have to provide these old interface via converter cables (most likely) at their own expense, similar to how VGA-to-DVI adapters are bundled with some graphics cards.

“The DVI interface was developed and went through one minor upgrade cycle, but its road has now ended,” said Brian O’Rourke, research director at NPD In-Stat. ”HDMI and DisplayPort are being continuously upgraded and will replace the older interfaces going forward, especially as PCs, tablets and smartphones get thinner.”

As HDMI and DisplayPorts, especially their ‘mini’ variants, are found in an increasing number of tablets and smartphones, NPD In-Stat predicts devices with these two display interfaces, along with DVI, to pass 2 billion by 2015.

“Though DisplayPort and HDMI are different in nature and compete at a certain level, both can coexist and make significant strides in different market segments,” O’Rourke said. “DisplayPort is a digital, packet-based technology, making it a fit for PCs. HDMI is a mixed-signal, streaming technology, making it less optimal for PCs and more for consumer electronics,” he said.

The Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drives are one of those special drives that many people desire, but haven’t had much experience with. They’re like VelociRaptors, just the name sounds cool enough to want one. But it’s the promise of high performance for relatively low cost that attracts everyone. In the case of the Momentus XT, the low costs are relative to Solid State Drives, which are still prohibitively expensive for many.

So today I’ll be looking at the second generation Momentus XT hybrid drive that promises more capacity, more performance and better reliability than the first generation drives. Unfortunately this performance and capacity increase also comes at a cost of $100 (AED 370) extra.

As you can see, the NAND Flash that’s used to cache frequently used data has doubled to 8GB from the original Momentus XT. The obvious benefit here is that larger capacity for cache means that more of your programs will be running at maximum capacity (of near SSD speeds) most of the time.

Despite the size increase, though, it seems that the Momentus XT still won’t be able to achieve its maximum potential. The reason is that Seagate doesn’t allow any data to be written on the 8GB NAND while in use; only read. Essentially that means that read heavy applications, such as iTunes or any video game will see a lot of benefit as data is mostly read. For those who’ll be working on heavy editing applications, such as Photoshop or Sony Vegas, will still be bound by the write speeds of a 7200rpm drive, albeit at SATA III speeds.

I guess if both real-time read and write access was given to the NAND Flash, perhaps a bigger size would be needed. So these limitations seem more in line with keeping the costs down, rather than technical issues. That said, Seagate has mentioned that they will be releasing a firmware upgrade for these    2^nd generation Momentus XT drives that will, in fact, allow data to be written to the 8GB NAND. So far we haven’t had anything, so this review looks at performance you’ll be getting from units straight of the packaging.

One of the key features of the Momentus XT is the ‘Adaptive Memory Technology’ that’s basically a self-learning algorithm that notice your most used programs and stores their data on the cache. So every time you run those programs again, they will be loaded as quickly as an SSD since the data is being read directly from the 8GB NAND Flash.