Storage News - Page 103

To overcome this size constraint, Russell and Xu conceived of the elegantly simple solution of layering the film of block copolymers onto the surface of a commercially available sapphire crystal. When the crystal is cut at an angle - a common procedure known as a miscut - and heated to 1,300 to 1,500 degrees Centigrade (2,372 to 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit) for 24 hours, its surface reorganizes into a highly ordered pattern of sawtooth ridges that can then be used to guide the self-assembly of the block polymers.

"We can generate nearly perfect arrays over macroscopic surfaces where the density is over 15 times higher than anything achieved before," said Russell. "With that order of density, one could get a high-definition picture on a screen the size of a JumboTron."

"It's one thing to get dozens of soldiers to stand in perfect formation in an area the size of a classroom, each person equidistant from the other, but quite another to get tens of trillions of individuals to do so on the field in a football stadium," Xu added. "Using this crystal surface as a guide is like giving the soldiers a marker so they know where to stand.

it turns out that its new 5th generation mainstream chipsets won't feature support for SATA 6Gb/s. Both P55, that comes in Q3 2009, and P57 that comes in Q1 2010 and has better support for 32nm CPU with IGP Clarksdale, won't support SATA 3.

This comes as quite a surprise, as AMD prepares its SB820 Southbridge that should have SATA 3 support and this Southbridge should launch in early 2010. Since both P55 and P57 are single chip chipsets Intel will have to release a new chipset to get SATA 3 support.

A review, however, entitled "Long-term performance analysis of Intel Mainstream SSDs" on technology Web site PC Perspectives claimed, among other things, that the Intel X25-M solid-state drive may degrade in performance as a result of "internal fragmentation" and that "a 'used' X25-M will always perform worse than a 'new' one" and, in some cases, drives "would drop to significantly below manufacturer specs."

The reviewers claimed that they made an effort to reproduce real-world scenarios. "Dozens of different scenarios were played out on our drives. XP / Vista installs, repeated application / game installs, batch copying of files...were all liberally applied to the X25-M." The review concluded that "all three of our SSDs suffered a drop in performance regardless of the type of workload applied to them."

Thank you for contacting Seagate Support.

A firmware issue has been identified that affects a small number of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive models which may result in data becoming inaccessible after a power-off/on operation. The affected products are Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22.

Based on the low risk as determined by an analysis of actual field return data, Seagate believes that the affected drives can be used as is.

However, as part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, Seagate is offering a free firmware upgrade.

Please follow this link

(https://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931) to enter the Knowledge Base article(s) detailing the steps to update your drive.

In the unlikely event your drive is affected and you cannot access your data, the data still resides on the drive and there is no data loss associated with this issue. If your drive is no longer accessible, contact us directly for further assistance at https://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/.

Kingston is targeting its SSDs to Fortune 1000 companies and select vertical markets. The SSDNow E Series is specifically designed for the enterprise server environment while the SSDNow M Series is built for the road warrior who demands ultimate performance from a notebook PC. The Kingston SSDNow E and M Series use Intel's solid-state drives, which are the best-performing drives on the market.

"We are thrilled to enter the solid-state drive market with our SSDNow E and M Series SSDs. The combination of the fastest SSDs in the world along with Kingston's tremendous distribution capabilities and legendary customer service will position us to succeed in this arena," said Mark Leathem, director of Flash business development, Kingston Digital. "The performance capabilities of these first two offerings are off the charts and our enterprise customers will be very pleased to use them in servers and corporate laptop computers."