As Samsung had said earlier in April, its profits would rapidly shrink in the company’s winter quarter results. The hard drive segment is considered to be one of those responsible for poorer results and seems to have been a permanent source of losses for the company. The cited source stated that continuing to produce conventional rotating drives would not be a successful strategy and could be stopped without much trouble.

Apple has been partly blamed for the losses, as it is considered the world’s largest consumer of flash memories and is made responsible for determining a shift away from the use of mini hard drives to flash memories in media players. The phenomenon has also had an impact on computers. The iPad is entirely based on flash memory and has been thought responsible for causing a complete reorganization at Acer when its share started collapsing quickly because of promoting conventional notebooks, which have for a time maintained interest in using hard drives. The success Apple experienced in driving all-flash storage in the MacBook Air is also well known.

The storage business has seen consolidation as an increasingly common trend, as many companies have been eager to sell their businesses. For instance, Hitachi’s team has been bought by Western Digital in March. Other companies, such as Fujitsu, faced tough competition from the dominant players in the industry, Seagate and Western Digital.

No comment has been made by either Samsung or Seagate on the above mentioned topic.

LaCie’s new drives offer support for Mac and Windows; with most USB 3.0 hardware will only work optimally with a full native link. Both drives are, however, backwards-compatible with USB 2.0’s 480Mbps peak speeds. The Rikiki hard drive is priced at $100 for 500GB of capacity, while the Minimus costs about $129, but with a doubled capacity – 1TB.

The product line includes the Radical, having a retro Skin-branded printed logo design on a black top and a vivacious yellow base, but also the Red Hot, which has a Skin Swipe logo onto a red top and a black base, and the Knock Out, a gothic-themed drive, with a silver top and a black base.

The three new drives have Iomega’s Protection Suite preinstalled; this includes backup and also anti-virus software, but also 2GB of online storage. Iomega’s Skin Drives are already available in the USA, being priced at $120.

The new 1TB and 640GB models use 5,200RPM drives. The enclosure ships with a USB 2.0 port, two FireWire 800 ports, a FireWire 800-400 converter cable and an eSATA port. Prosoft Engineering Data Backup, Intech SpeedTools and Carbon Copy Cloner are also included.

The OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro mini range comes with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Prices of the new devices are as follows: $300 for the 1TB model and $190 for the 640GB, $850 for the 200GB SSD model, while the high performance 500GB model with 7,200RPM is $190.

CLON is pocket sized and weighs about 4.8oz. It is rugged and resistant to shocks, scuffs and fingerprints. The device comes with automatic backup software installed and is currently available in four versions, with capacities of 250, 320, 500 or 640GB of storage.

InSight is another portable USB hard drive and sports an integrated LCD display, which can show a personalized name permanently, even when the device is disconnected from the computer. The amount of free space is automatically calculated and is also displayed in order to allow the user to know permanently how much space is available. Included software provides functions such as full system backup or restore. Optional password protection is also available. InSight comes in two versions, with 320 or 500GB storage capacity.

Users choosing MyClone will receive a palm-sized hard drive that has USB Turbo Speed for better performance over USB 2.0 and preloaded backup software. Storage capacities associated with exterior colour are 250, 320, 500 and 640GB for black versions or 320 and 500GB for those models coming in blue or red.

The Titan XS, the fourth member of the line, is at the same time the smallest of all. The device is equipped with a rubber enclosure and has an internal anti-shock mechanism that protects the data during eventual impacts. The Titan XS is scheduled to be released in February and will come in three versions, with 320, 500 and 640GB of storage capacity.

Brando created the enclosures from aluminum to help dissipate the heat better and will sell along with the enclosures a USB 2.0 power cable, a USB 3.0 cable, a screwdriver that will help users install the hard-drives and a small pouch. The USB 3.0 enclosures are sold at a price of $49.

Rikiki is compatible with Mac OS X, as well as with Windows PCs. Despite this, only Windows users can benefit from integrated USB Boost software, which can speed up the transfer by up to 33%. Another included software, LaCie Backup Assistant, can be used by both Windows and Mac users and helps in file safeguarding.

The new hard drive from LaCie is available in various models – 250GB, 500GB and 640GB – each with a price of $75, $110 and $150, respectively.

Users having JBOD and RAID systems will benefit from a 20% speed increase, if they use the new Hitachi HDDs, as the company stated.

The 16-disk UltraStor’s write speed has reached 702MB/sec, tested with the 2TB disks; it has also proved better energy economy. The prices for the new 2TB disks haven’t been made public yet.

The new formatting technique should launch with the low-power Caviar Green line’s updated version and will expand to its line-up in the next weeks. Operating systems like Linux, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X do not need any special procedures to recognize the new formatted drives, while Windows XP , which has limited file format support needs a special software and perhaps jumper changes in some cases to re-align sectors and be able to use the extra space.

Both of the drives, that are SATA II-capable, will be unveiled at CES in early January next year. There is still no information available on whether or not the drives will ship immediately or maybe later. Seagate has officially claimed that the 7mm hard drives are meant for use in extra-thin notebooks that previously had no alternative but to use either lower capacity drives or solid-state drives which are much more expensive.