Storage - Page 126

The purchase will provide the current market leader in 2.5-inch drives with a way into the growing SSD market. Based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., SiliconSystems was established in 2002, and makes SSD products for communications, industrial, embedded systems, medical, military, and aerospace applications. SiliconSystems' product lineup includes SSDs with a variety of interfaces, including SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB, and CF, in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, and CF.

The Fremont, Calif.-based Western Digital has a strong presence in the notebook industry with its 2.5-inch drives, but not the rapidly expanding Netbook segment. With the acquisition, Western Digital is now instantly a player in that market.

"SiliconSystems' intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD's solid-state drive development programs for the Netbook, client and enterprise markets," said Western Digital President and CEO John Coyne in a statement Monday.

Fast response time is critical for a wide range of enterprise applications, including online transaction processing, real-time business analytics and timely delivery of data-intensive content-on-demand such as multiple channels of streaming video. The increased transfer rate of the new SAS interface operating at 6 Gb/s is ideal for meeting these challenges. The new serial interface is fully backward compatible with existing 3 Gb/s devices to provide enterprise customers with exceptional configuration flexibility and investment protection.

The drives feature average seek times as low as 3.9 milliseconds and the fast rotational speeds reduce average latency time to 3 milliseconds, enabling customers to access data more quickly and efficiently.

"With the simplest set-up process in the industry, the ix2 not only provides home and small business network storage users with such important features as media serving, Bluetooth and video surveillance capabilities, now we've added remote access so users can connect to their files from anywhere in the world, as well as the new standard in peer-to-peer file sharing and much more," said Jonathan Huberman, president of Iomega and the Consumer and Small Business Products Division of EMC, in a statement. "That's the power of network computing with Iomega and EMC."

"Once, Zeus felt in love with the beautiful Europe, now, every speed enthusiast can do the same." smiles Steffen Eisenstein, CEO of Mushkin Logistic GmbH and looks on the aluminium dressed SSDs. But like always for Mushkin, the inside value is one of the finest,

Unique and only at Mushkin, the SSDs will be delivered in an exclusive aluminium packing and protected with a 3 year warranty. The customer can fall in love without hesitation!

Many database and system administrators are finding that SANs are too expensive and don't meet performance, protection and capacity utilization expectations," said David Flynn, CTO of Fusion-io. "This is why more and more application vendors are moving toward application-centric solid-state storage. The ioDrive Duo offers the enterprise the advantages of application-centric storage without application-specific programming.

"AMD strives to deliver platform technology that our technology partners can use to create high- performance desktop and laptop PCs," said Leslie Sobon, vice president of Product Marketing, AMD. "The new SATA 6Gb/second technology not only incorporates the best features of previous SATA generations but also includes new enhancements. This innovation enables AMD to continue to evolve its technology platforms and to develop low-cost designs that our technology partners can use to improve their own PC and laptop products."

The Seagate and AMD demonstration features two Seagate SATA disk drives - one a shipping Barracuda® 7200.12 3Gb/second hard drive and the other a prototype Barracuda 6Gb/second drive - in a desktop PC to show the performance difference between the two generations. The PC is powered by an AMD prototype SATA 6Gb/second chipset. The Seagate SATA 3Gb/second drive runs at more than 2.5Gigabits per second and the SATA 6Gb/second drive at 5.5Gigabits per second, with the performance of each storage interface displayed on the PC monitor.

As hard disk capacity increases from an increased number of disks, so does power consumption. However, Samsung's F2EG drive offers low power consumption by using EcoTriangle, a low-power, low-heat, low-noise operation technology. With its advanced design and fewer components, the F2EG drive is 40% lower in power consumption in idle mode and 45% lower in reading/writing mode than competitive drives. Samsung's Eco-Triangle technology offers more energy efficient and high performance hard drive options to manufacturers of home media PC, external HDD, set-top box, and personal NAS.

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."