First seen by our friends at The MacObserver, the $25 iSchmutz Air Filter For Mac Pro earns our favor merely for bringing Yiddish to the world of Apple accessory names. Lucky thing it’s also useful, filtering dirt, dust, and pollen to keep your Mac Pro in tip-top shape.

Apple’s new Fusion Drive is pretty nifty. It sets out to give users the capacity of a hard drive along with the speed of a solid-state drive. Fusion Drive works as advertised for what most of us do, most of the time.

As seen in our Speedmark 8 performance tests of a BTO Mac mini, the Fusion Drive, made up of a 120GB SSD and 1TB hard drive, was on par with standard SSD speeds in photo imports, file duplication, and unzipping of files.

But what happens when you push the limits of the Fusion Drive? To find out, we set up a test that copied twenty 10GB files, one at a time. We tracked the time it took to move each file from internal storage to external storage, and from the external back to the internal. We copied files and tracked the speed until the copied completed, or in the case of the SSD, until it reached full capacity. We then ran a similar test with twenty 10GB folders, each containing 7421 individual files.

We used a Promise Pegasus six-drive RAID 5 as our external drive, connected via Thunderbolt to a 2.3GHz quad-core Core i7 Mac mini with a Fusion Drive. We ran the tests using the Fusion Drive, and then we separated the 120GB SSD and the 1TB 5400-rpm hard drive that comprise the Fusion Drive and ran the tests on those drives individually. What we found was that the Fusion Drive kept up with the SSD in these sustained tests—right until the SSD portion filled up.

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To guess at the kinds of storage options Mac buyers will likely have in 2013 and 2014, you just have to look at the storage industry as a whole. That’s because Apple is relatively conservative when it comes to storage: It doesn’t break new ground in the same way it does in, say, displays.

The SSD roadmap

Solid-state drive prices, which had been decreasing steadily for years, plummeted in 2012, falling over 50 percent in the first half of the year and bringing the cost per gigabyte well under one dollar. It’s not uncommon now to see 512GB SSDs selling for under $400. Prices will continue to fall over the next 18 to 24 months, and a 512GB SSD will likely retail for under $200 by the end of 2014. It’s important to note, however, that those are retail prices. Apple charges $500 more for the MacBook Air with 512GB of flash storage than it does for the model with 256GB.

In the next 24 months, the maximum storage capacity for MacBooks will probably double, but the speed of that storage will not. Current-generation SSDs are already pushing the limits of the 6-gbps SATA 3.0 interface in today’s computers, and—aside from SATA Express, which uses PCIe channels—no higher-speed SATA specification is planned for the next two years. There is, however, some progress to be made with small random read and write operations, the operations that make a computer feel fast when you’re not copying large amounts of data. Manufacturers will focus on improving those functions rather than ramping up sustained read and write speeds.

All SSD, all the time?

SSDs will likely become standard equipment on all MacBooks; the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro with Retina display are already solid-state-only and will stay that way. But storage quantities will probably increase.

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Western Digital today introduced a new version of its My Book Studio desktop drive for Mac OS X systems that offers USB 3.0 connectivity and as much as 4TB of storage capacity in a single drive.

Drives with USB 3.0, also known as Super-Speed USB connectivity, are coming out in droves even as computer systems with 480Mbps USB 2.0, called Hi-Speed USB connectivity, cannot take advantage of the additional I/O bandwidth.

The My Book Studio drives come pre-formatted for Mac OS X, but users can reformat them for use with Windows systems and the file allocation table (FAT) file system.

Other WD drives

In August, WD released the My Book VelociRaptor Duo desktop backup drive with 10Gbps Thunderbolt I/O connectivity and the My Passport for Mac with USB 3.0.

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There are plenty of great Mac accessories that we don’t cover in standalone articles. Our Mac-accessory roundup gives them a home—and gives you the latest info on stuff to make your Mac more useful.

Just Mobile: This vendor of accessories is known for its variety of aluminum stands, and the company has announced two new models, the $50 AluBase and the $60 AluRack. The AluBase, made from a single piece of aluminum, is a small cradle that holds your laptop upright for closed-lid use (while connected to an external display) at a desk. Soft-plastic inserts let the AluBase fit any current MacBook model. The AluRack (shown at the top of this article) mounts to leg of your iMac, Thunderbolt Display, or Cinema Display and holds either a closed MacBook or a hard drive behind the display. The two-piece AluRack is made of aluminum with an “anti-scratch TPR” cradle, and it attaches securely to the cable hole in an iMac or Display’s leg.

Logitech: This vendor of all things that send input to, and produce sound from, your computer has debuted the $200 Broadcaster Wi-Fi Webcam, a Wi-Fi-enabled webcam that broadcasts your live video to Ustream and can be controlled and previewed from your Mac or iOS device. Included software even lets you stitch together dual-view video from the Broadcaster and your Mac’s built-in webcam. The camera features 720p video capture (with H.264 compression) with digital zoom and digital pan and tilt, as well as a built-in microphone and an input for using an external mic. It also sports a lamp for illuminating your subjects. The camera is just 118mm long, 47mm wide, and 28mm thick and weighs just 97 grams (including the two-hour battery); the included base adds 161 grams. The camera can also be used as a standard webcam for FaceTime, iChat, and Skype video chats and for recording video using QuickTime or Photo Booth. Logitech says the camera ships this month.

Macally: Looking for something to protect your MacBook Air that doesn’t take away from its svelte figure? Macally’s new $50 SlimFolios (website not yet updated), to be available for both 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air models, are form-fitting covers that clip onto your MacBook Air, letting you use the laptop without removing the cover. But unlike form-fitting plastic shells, the SlimFolio looks like a folio-style, metallic case. Each case features a soft lining and is available in four brushed-metallic finishes: black, silver, blue, or purple.

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Apple has quietly extended its iMac 1TB Seagate Hard Drive Replacement Program through April 12, 2013. Last year, Apple acknowledged that certain Seagate drives in 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs could fail, for 1TB models sold between May 2011 and July 2011.

Now, however, Apple is broadening the window of affected iMacs: Any 1TB iMacs sold between October 2009 and July 2011 could be affected, the company says. The Replacement Program was due to conclude back in July of this year, but Apple has now extended the eligibility window for customers to obtain their free replacements until April 2013.

You can paste your iMac’s serial number into a form on Apple’s website to confirm whether your Mac is subject to the recall. Apple says it will perform the drive replacement free of charge for affected customers, and urges customers to take advantage of the offer “as soon as possible.” Of course, you’ll want to ensure your iMac’s data is backed up first, since the fix involves replacing your existing hard drive.

If you already replaced your drive before learning it was eligible for Apple’s Replacement Program, the company says you should contact Apple for a refund.

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Editor’s note: This story is excerpted from Computerworld. For more Mac coverage, visit Computerworld’s Macintosh Knowledge Center.

Three years ago, I wrote a story comparing hard disk drives to solid state drives (SSDs) based on capacity, performance and cost. A lot has changed in three years. For one, laptops are quickly being eclipsed by tablets, which have NAND flash memory embedded on their motherboards. In addition, operating systems have been optimized to take advantage of SSD I/O performance. SSDs today are far more reliable, have greater endurance and perform better (in some cases, two to three times better) than in 2009.

There are also new SSD categories. For example, hybrid drives combine NAND flash cache memory with a spinning disk in a hard-drive form factor. In addition, in adherence to Intel's new ultrabook computer specifications, manufacturers are beginning to produce laptops with two drive slots, one for a hard drive and the other for a low-capacity cache SSD which works with hard disk drives to speed up boot and application load times.

Perhaps the single biggest change, though, is price. In 2009, SSDs cost around $3 per gigabyte. That meant a 120GB SSD cost more than $300. If you were paying $700 for a laptop, it wasn't reasonable to expect to pay almost half that for a new drive.

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Seagate Technology, known mainly for its hard-disk drives, continued to build its solid-state storage portfolio by announcing Monday that it will take a stake in DensBits Technologies.

DensBits, located in Israel, has a controller technology called Memory Modem that enables reliable data transfers to NAND flash storage. Memory Modem includes error-correction and data management features at the controller layer to ensure smooth and quick data transfers. The error-correction features include Error Correction Code (ECC), which is also used in some DRAM modules and microprocessors to reduce data corruption.

Seagate and DensBits will develop technologies for reliable, low-cost and fast solid-state drives, the companies said in a joint statement. Seagate will use DensBits' technology in a range of products including consumer and enterprise SSDs.

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Cloud? What cloud? There’s still a market for standalone storage devices—big devices, judging by the newest drive from Other World Computing.

OWC has unveiled its Mercury Electra Max, a 960GB internal 2.5-inch solid-state drive (SSD) compatible with Macs and other PCs; it’s the highest-capacity drive ever offered by the company. And that big storage capacity comes with a hefty price tag: $1270.

The SATA drive promises to play well—and speedily—with your Mac, with read speeds of up to 254 MBps and write speeds of 250 MBps.

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Drobo on Thursday announced a new form factor for its backup storage array, and for the first time you can carry this one around. It also announced the Drobo 5D array, with up to 20TB capacity and six times the performance of its predecessor.

Along with two new data backup devices, the company announced support on its products for the Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 external device interconnect specifications.

Drobo’s first portable array, the Drobo Mini, holds up to four 2-in. to 5-in. drives and weighs only about 2.5 pounds. It can store up to 3TB of data. The Mini will retail for about $599 without drives and support both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0.

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On Wednesday, hard drive manufacturer Seagate announced that it will acquire a controlling interest in LaCie. Seagate has agreed to purchase 64.5 percent of LaCie's outstanding shares, according to a LaCie press release.

The acquisition is the latest in a series of mergers of storage companies. Last March, Western Digital finalized its acquisition of Hitachi GST. In December of last year, Seagate acquired Samsung’s hard drive business.

The Seagate/LaCie merger is on a smaller scale than those other two, but it’s still an interesting turn of events: Seagate mechanisms frequently show up in LaCie-branded drives. Seagate does have an external hard drive business, but its product designs are more industrial (or perhaps “traditional”) than LaCie's. The latter employs designers including Philippe Starck, Porsche Design, and Christofle to create consumer products that are, according to LaCie’s company profile, “beautiful and performance-driven.”

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About 100 peripherals based on the Thunderbolt connector technology will become available by the end of the year, a big jump from a fraction of the devices available today, if Intel meets its target, a company executive said on Monday.

The number of Thunderbolt devices in the market will grow as the connector technology expands from Apple computers to Windows PCs, said Kirk Skaugen, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group, at an event in San Francisco that was webcast.

“We have 21 Thunderbolt devices in things like storage and displays in the marketplace. We have a hundred targeted by the end of the year, and hundreds of Thunderbolt devices targeted by the middle or end of next year,” Skaugen said.

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Hitachi's former disk-drive division today announced what it said it the first enterprise-class 4TB hard disk drive. The drive has a greater areal density that offers 33 percent more capacity in the same 3.5-inch form factor at 24 percent lower watts-per-gigabyte than its predecessor.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), now owned by Western Digital, introduced the new Ultrastar 7K4000 line, which uses the new 512e Advanced Format.

The industry as a whole is moving to the Advanced Format standard because 4KB sectors on hard drives offer higher capacities and addresses current technological limitations with 512-byte sectors in some OSes, such as Windows XP. Laptop drives, or 2.5-inch hard drives, adopted the 512e Advanced Format in 2010.

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Seagate announced it is the first hard drive maker to achieve a density of 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) per square inch on a disk drive platter.

The technology used to achieve the benchmark, which Seagate said it would introduce in products later this decade, will also lead to the production of 3.5-inch hard drives with up to 60TB of capacity.

Seagate reached the areal density milestone by using heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which the company patented in 2006. At the most basic level, HAMR uses nanotube-based lubrication to allow the read/write head of a disk drive to get closer to the surface of a spinning platter in order to store more data.

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Western Digital on Thursday revealed that its new My Book Thunderbolt Duo, a two-drive desktop RAID array equipped with Thunderbolt connectivity, is now available for purchase for $600 (4TB capacity) and $700 (6TB capacity).

WD’s first Thunderbolt drive made its debut in January at the Macworld | iWorld show, but at the time, the company did not have details on capacity and pricing. The My Book Thunderbolt Duo looks very much like the drives demoed at the show, with a large silver case and a contrasting black grill. (WD no longer uses grills patterned with messages in Morse code.)

The My Book Thunderbolt Duo has two Thunderbolt ports, which gives you more flexibility when creating a Thunderbolt daisy chain—the types of devices, and placement of those devices in a chain, can affect performance. However, like other companies offering Thunderbolt devices, WD doesn’t include a Thunderbolt cable. The cable has a retail price of $49 (Apple is the currently the only provider), and companies are not including the cable in order to keep prices down. The My Book Thunderbolt Duo does not have FireWire, USB, or eSATA connectors.

The My Book Thunderbolt Duo houses a pair of drives than can be configured as a RAID 0, RAID 1, or as a JBOD. The drive comes pre-formatted for the Mac using HFS + Journaled, so it’s compatible with Time Machine right out of the box.

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Western Digital on Thursday completed the acquisition of the hard drive business of Hitachi, and set up two subsidiaries with separate brands and products, to meet the conditions of antitrust regulators.

The company said in a statement late Thursday that it completed the acquisition of Viviti Technologies, formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, effective March 8 for $3.9 billion in cash and 25 million shares of its common stock valued at about $0.9 billion.

Hitachi now owns 10 percent of Western Digital’s shares outstanding. Western Digital has paid about $392 million more in cash as part of an amendment to the purchase agreement. Western Digital will operate with WD Technologies and HGST as wholly-owned subsidiaries, with total revenue in 2011 of $15 billion.

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Monsoonal flooding in Thailand last year helped Seagate Technology recapture the worldwide lead in hard disk drive shipments in the last quarter of 2011, according to a new report from IHS iSuppli.

Seagate passed former market leader Western Digital, which suffered heavy losses in the devastating Thailand floods last year. Seagate claimed 38 percent of HDD market share, compared with Western Digital’s 23 percent, according to the iSuppli report released today.

Toshiba claimed 16 percent of HDD units shipping worldwide in the fourth quarter, followed by Hitachi GST with 14 percent and Samsung with 9 percent.

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Seagate Technology says that supply of hard disk drives will continue to fall short of demand this year, leading large customers to look to long-term agreements to ensure supply after devastating floods in Thailand.

Shortage of drives by the end of this year is likely to be about 150 million units, the company said.

The forecast by Seagate is more or less in line with those of research firms like Gartner which said last month that the major impact of the HDD shortage after the floods will be felt in the first half of this year, and even potentially continue through the year. PC shipment growth could be temporarily affected during 2012, Gartner said.

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As the name suggests, Seagate’s GoFlex series of external storage devices are all about flexibility. By using removable adapters, the GoFlex drives can connect to FireWire 800, USB 3.0, eSATA, to a network, to a TV, and now to Thunderbolt.

The new $100 GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter doesn’t come with a drive or a cable. Unlike every other Thunderbolt product we’ve tested, the GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter has just one port, so it needs to be at the end of the Thunderbolt chain.

The GoFlex is also unlike the other Thunderbolt products we’ve tested in that it doesn’t require external power, which is probably the reason that it doesn’t allow you to attach additional Thunderbolt devices to it. Seagate said a desktop version with two Thunderbolt ports should be out before the second quarter of 2012 with a price of $199.

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Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from CIO.com. Visit CIO’s Macs in the Enterprise page.

Storm clouds continue brewing in the usually uneventful land of hard disk drives.

The severe flooding that inundated Thailand a few months ago swamped more than 1000 factories, including some of the world’s largest hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers. Toshiba had to halt production in the majority of its hard disk production facilities, while world number one HDD maker Western Digital ceased all production in the country.

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Nvidia lowered its revenue forecast Tuesday for the quarter ending Jan. 29, citing the impact of the hard disk drive (HDD) shortage caused by the Thailand floods on its mainstream GPU business.

Competitors Intel and Advanced Micro Devices also reported that they were affected by the floods, as HDD manufacturers like Western Digital start to bring their operations back to normal in Thailand.

Research firm Gartner warned earlier this month that the major impact of the HDD shortage after the floods will be felt in the first half of this year, and even potentially continue through the year. The shortage had a limited impact on fourth quarter PC shipments and prices, but PC shipment growth could be temporarily affected during 2012, it said.

Western Digital, which saw its factories in Thailand inundated in the floods, said on Monday that it expects its hard disk drive production capacity to be restored to pre-flood levels only by the third quarter of this year.

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It wasn’t so long ago that Apple observers were wondering why it was taking Thunderbolt peripherals so long to get to market. This week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas may be putting an end to that conversation.

Here are some of the new Thunderbolt-compatible accessories that have been unveiled at CES:

Belkin has introduced the new $299 Thunderbolt Express Dock. The dock includes three USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 800 port, one HDMI port, one 3.5mm audio port, one gigabit Ethernet port, and two Thunderbolt ports for daisy-chaining to other Thunderbolt devices. The dock will be available to buyers in September.

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After winning the approval of regulators in Europe, Australia, and Japan, Western Digital may have hit a snag in its bid to acquire Hitachi’s disk drive arm. Chinese regulators are concerned that the deal could hurt hard drive competition.

In March 2011, Western Digital announced its proposed takeover of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), the disk drive arm of Hitachi Ltd., in a cash and stock deal worth about $4.3 billion. Over the past several months, the acquisition has won approval in several key markets.

Late last month, however, Shang Ming, head of China’s Ministry of Commerce’s anti-monopoly unit, said he fears the buyout will hurt competition. Ming said his agency will look for “appropriate solutions” to address those concerns.

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Seagate Technology said Tuesday it has completed the acquisition of the hard disk drive (HDD) business of Samsung Electronics, after it recently received approval for the deal in Australia, China, and the European Commission. Seagate said in April that it was acquiring the HDD business of Samsung Electronics for $1.4 billion in stock and cash.

Under the terms of the transaction, Seagate said it has gained parts of Samsung’s HDD business, such as Samsung’s M8 product line of high-capacity, 2.5-inch drives, and other assets, infrastructure, and employees.

Samsung employees joining Seagate include a number of senior managers and design engineers from Samsung’s South Korea facility, who will develop small form-factor products for the mobile computing market, Seagate said.

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Prices of the most popular hard drives are beginning to drop as inventories climb out of a deep hole that began in October after massive flooding shut down major production sites in Thailand.

According to new information from ecommerce tracking site Dynamite Data, the top 50 hard drives on sites such as Newegg.com and Tigerdirect.com leaped in price by 50 to 150 percent after the flooding. The price jump started in October when drive inventory levels plummeted 90 percent in less than a week, according to Kristopher Kubicki, data architect at Dynamite Data.

“The first flooding was October 8, and within a week (two weeks at the most), almost all that inventory at distribution had dried up,” Kubicki said. “I’m not sure if that was distributors getting the inventory recalled from them or if it was getting purchased that fast. I think consciously people moved it out of distribution and into system manufacturers.”

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Seagate and Western Digital are cutting back on hard drive warranties—in some instances from five years to one—in order to save money or redirect it to product development.

Seagate’s warranties on certain drives will be reduced as of December 31, 2011 and WD will follow beginning January 2, 2012. All drives shipped prior to those dates will continue to carry the current warranty term associated with the products.

The warranty period reductions (first reported by The Register) mean some of Seagate’s and WD’s most popular drives for desktops and laptops will no longer carry three- or five-year warranties.

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Hitachi said it is currently shipping limited numbers of the 4TB Deskstar 5K4000 ($400) hard drive mechanism in a self-installation kit. The drive has a 32MB cache buffer as well as Hitachi's power management features.

A stand-alone external Touro Desk drive ($420) and shipments to OEMs and other partners are to begin in the first quarter of 2012. Buyers of the external 4TB Touro Desk drive get 3GB of online storage for free.

Seagate's external drive is currently on back order on its website, priced at $300.

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Hard disk drive supply shortages in the wake of Thailand flooding will continue to affect consumers, computer system manufacturers and corporate IT shops into 2013, according to market research firm IDC.

"I think the most painful period will occur now through February of next year. We expect the situation will improve, but it won't feel as if things are back to normal until 2013," said John Rydning, an IDC analyst who follows the hard disk drive market.

Rydning said supplies will increase to the point where it will be possible to meet "immediate demand" in the second half of next year, but distribution channels, online retail sites and system manufacturers will continue to feel the affects into the following year.

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Rush orders for solid-state drives (SSDs) increased last month in the wake of massive flooding in Thailand that caused a serious drop in hard disk drive supplies.

According to DRAMeXchange, a research division of TrendForce, rush orders for SSDs rose even as shipments of end-market products, including PCs, smartphones and tablet PCs, continued to drop because of sluggish economic conditions.

More than a dozen hard disk drive (HDD) factories have been shut due to flooding in Thailand. PC manufacturers have been bracing for significant supply shortages. Another NAND flash product, memory cards, saw a huge decline in sales due to the Thai floods, which closed down digital camera factories.

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Seagate on Tuesday announced the third generation of its hybrid drive, the Momentus XT. This time around, Seagate has doubled the NAND flash to 8GB and increased capacity to 750GB.

Seagate also said the Momentus XT hybrid drive comes close to matching the performance of market-leading solid state drives (SSDs) that are more than twice as expensive.

Besides more memory and a faster drive interface, Seagate has added what it calls FAST Boot, which cuts a computer's boot time in half compared to the previous generation Momentus XT.

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