Storage - Page 134

According to a report written by the Taiwanese Digitimes website, Intel is planning to bundle Solid State Drives as part of its Centrino 2 mobile platform by the end of the end of September this year.

Getting in on solid state storage is still very much a costly affair, but there's more than one way to skin a cat.

The lads over at Engadget have spotted a Compact Flash to SATA adapter which allows the use of not one, not two, but three CompactFlash cards in tandem to be accessed using the SATA interface.

Sharkoon has updated its SATA QuickPort PRO external hard drive caddie. Its original model was made famous due to its stylish and ease of use as well as affordable price. It will allow you to quickly make use of old 2.5" and 3.5" hard disk drives that you have laying around the house or office.

One of the more interesting products to show up at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai this week is clear sign that Intel are shooting for a big piece of the solid-state storage market with some pre-production SSD drives demonstrated.

The folks over at Super Talent sent us a press release earlier stating that they have started shipping what they are calling the world's thinnest 256GB solid state drive.

FSD56GC25H is bound to be a mighty expensive beast offering good performance but sadly it is only using SATA I technology whereas many are companies are preparing SATA II models right now. Even still, it supports 0.1ms access times, a maximum of 65MB/sec sequential read speed and 50MB/sec sequential write speed. It also supports up to 1600G of shock and 16G of vibration, which is said to be about five times greater than typical hard disk drives.

OCZ has had its SATA I 64GB solid state drive on the market for some time now but just today they have introduced their High-Speed SATA II solid state drive.

It comes in 32GB and 64GB models and claims read speeds of 120MB/s and write speeds of 100MB/s, which is a huge improvement over the previous generation drive, which offered 58MB/s reads and 35MB/s writes.

CeBIT in Germany has now closed its doors for another year but news from the largest tech trade show in the world is still trickling out.

Fujitsu have just leveled up with Hitachi in terms of the world's largest 2.5" hard drive to hit the market. The new series of MHZ2 BT 2.5" hard disk drives come in a capacity of up to 500GB. Unfortunately as is the case with Hitachi's recently announced 500GB 2.5" drive, this one also appears to rely on three platters which makes its physical height a few mm higher than standard 2.5" drives; thus making it impossible to fit into some notebook chassis'.

The drives specs include a 4,200RPM spindle speed, 8MB buffer, 300MB/s Serial ATA interface, 12ms read seek time, 21dB noise out and a power consumption of 0.5W at idle/1.8W when reading or writing.

Fujitsu have said that they plan to roll out the MHZ2 BT series of drives into the market at the end of May.

For further details, head over to Fujitsu's website.

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has today announced its new "Power Over eSATA" initiative. This new specification provides a solid steady form of power to eSATA devices without the need for a seperate power cord to the system which has been required by the majority of standard eSATA devices to date.

If only they could have done it right the first time and made this a standard to begin with; but as they say, better late than never.

Hitachi have pushed the barrier of mechanical notebook storage today with the introduction of the world's first 500GB 2.5" HDD, this raising the capacity limit by a whopping 180GB over previous drives.

Dubbed the Travelstar 5K500, this HDD operates at 5400RPM with a seek time of 12ms. Hitachi were able to squeeze 500GB into the drive by using three platters with a 260Gb/in² areal density.

There is a downside however; the drive's thickness has been increased from the standard 9.5mm to 12.5mm to fit all three platters inside the casing, this making the unit too large to fit inside the majority of notebooks currently on the market, not to mention external enclosures too.

As a result of the above, Hitachi are aiming the drive more so at PC makers who may choose to make more space available for it in next-gen systems. On that note, ASUS were quick to respond in announcing that they plan to design the world's first One Terabyte Notebook by allowing for enough space inside to carry two of these new Hitachi drives. You can read the full PR about this here.

The official announcement on the new 500GB TravelStar can be found here folks.