PC maker competes with Sony and Toshiba on hi-def video on notebooks.

Dell today added Blu-ray disc capability to its notebook PC line, making an effort to compete with Sony and Toshiba in the growing market for mobile high-definition video platforms.

In addition to showing high-end movies and games, Dell's XPS M1710 notebook could serve as a central node to support digital entertainment throughout the home, the company said. Customers can save 50G bytes of either data or video on a single Blu-ray disc.

Toshiba has claimed a first with its MK2035GSS 2.5in notebook hard drive which uses perpendicular recording technology to achieve a massive 200GB of storage.

PCs represent about 50% of high-def DVD sales

PCs are emerging as a battleground in the budding war between two technologies vying to be the standard for high-capacity DVDs.

Bigger, better TagmaStore array adds iSCSI support Hitachi Data Systems last week said it has enhanced its largest storage arrays with software and hardware that gives the TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (USP) a 25% performance boost.

The company has enhanced the microcode and added optional 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel controllers, iSCSI connections and new load-balancing capabilities among the processors to allow the TagmaStore to operate at 2.5 million I/Os per second.

Drive will include flash memory, allowing for better battery life and faster boot time.
 
 Samsung Electronics plans to unveil next week a prototype hard drive that can improve system performance and extend battery life on laptops, the company said today.
 
 

Nvidia and Corsair Memory said Monday that they had developed an enhanced memory standard that will allow novices to overclock their systems with a high degree of confidence.

The capability will become available later this month, using the SLI-certified TWIN2X2048-6400C4 and the TWIN2X2048-8500C5 modules from Corsair as well as motherboards based on the nForce 590 SLI chipset from Nvidia.

Sony will ship both laptop and desktop computers with Blu-ray Disc drives

Sony will begin selling its first personal computers with Blu-ray Disc drives in Japan in June, the company said Tuesday. Both laptop and desktop computers will be available.

160GB 5,400 RPM drive designed for notebook and mobile computing
 
Hitachi has joined rivals Fujitsu and Seagate with the launch of its first perpendicular hard drive, the 2.5in Travelstar 5K160.

A quiet, 750GB internal hard drive at a hefty price

Seagate's latest hard drive has an incredible 750GB storage capacity.

The Barracuda ST3750640AS drive is available with ATA100 or Serial ATA II/300 interfaces. The latter is a native Serial ATA unit so you get NCQ (native command queuing), hotplug and hotswap capabilities.

2.5-inch hard drives that can hold 160GB of data will be available by mid-year.
 
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies will soon begin selling its first hard drives based on perpendicular recording technology, the company said yesterday.
 

IBM and Fujitsu have demonstrated a record data storage capacity showing that an 8 terabyte tape cartridge format is possible. 
 
Taking advantage of a new media coating formulation from Fujitsu, IBM researchers built a drive capable of reading and writing data at 6.67 billion bits per square inch (Gbps).

Veritas Storage Foundation Basic was unveiled on Tuesday in conjunction with the Symantec Vision 2006 conference
 
Symantec has released a free version of its Veritas Storage Foundation product, designed to entice enterprise customers into installing the storage management software on servers running outside of the data center.

LOS ANGELES  - While high-definition DVD titles trickle into stores, the arrival of the first titles in the rival Blu-ray Disc format has been pushed back by a month until June 20.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment president Benjamin Feingold said his studio's first batch of Blu-ray releases will be ready May 23, as planned.

LOS ANGELES - A survey of high-volume DVD users by online DVD trading company Peerflix Inc. on Wednesday showed that about one in five may buy high-definition DVD players or discs in 2006.

Hollywood studios are counting on the new format, which boasts better quality images and more storage space for content, to renew demand for DVDs, which are more profitable than theatrical releases.
 

Users of Sun Microsystems' supported Solaris 10 operating system will finally get the new 128-bit ZFS (zettabyte file system), which brings virtually unlimited data capacity.

TDK has gone ahead and produced the 200GB Blu-ray Disc it announced a few weeks ago that it was working on. And while it appears to have failed to compress four standard dual-layer 50GB discs together into a single unit, it has nonetheless come up with a novel alternative.

Dual-core Xeons show thirst for power

Blog: Intel has caught up to rival Advanced Micro Devices with its dual-core chips for dual-processor and four-processor servers....

Source: CNET News.com

Intel has caught up to rival Advanced Micro Devices with its dual-core chips for dual-processor and four-processor servers. But with the chips, Intel still lags AMD in one important domain: power consumption.

 

Samsung unveils 16 GB solid state drive

Samsung today announced the Korean electronics giant has developed what it claims is the first Solid State Disk (SSD) based on NAND Flash memory technology.

By Jørgen Sundgot, InfoSync World

According to Samsung, the company is capable of building SSD units with capacities of up to 16 GB whilst maintaining a power consumption rate less than five percent of current hard disk drives.

Samsung Replaces Hard Drives With Flash

Company will begin offering a flash memory-based storage device for laptops.

By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service

Samsung Electronics has developed a replacement for conventional hard drives that is based on flash memory chips. The company plans to begin mass production of the device in August, it says.

The solid-state disk (SSD) uses memory chips in place of the mechanical recording system used inside hard drives, and has several advantages including lower power consumption and higher data rates.

Samsung develops flash-based disk

Disks will have a capacity of up to 16GB; first disks will target sub-notebooks and tablet PCs.

By Richard Shim, CNET News.com

Flash memory maker Samsung is trying to drive a new kind of disk for PCs.

The company announced Monday that it has developed a "solid-state disk" using flash memory for PCs, which traditionally have used hard drives. The 1.8-inch NAND flash-based disks, which will be available in August, will have a capacity of up to 16GB. The first disks will target sub-notebooks and tablet PCs.

WD Launches "Extreme" Drive, NAS Device

Western Digital announced its first networked hard drive at the E3 show this week, together with an "Extreme" external drive that's all about the bling.

By Mark Hachman, ExtremeTECH

The WD NetCenter will ship in June for $399 for a 320-Gbyte model, the highest capacity point in the NetCenter lineup. Capacities will range from 160 to 320 Gbytes. For those who want a little something extra to impress the ladies, the $299 320-Gbyte Extreme Lighted Combo Drives will add a kaleidoscope LED light, but subtract the Ethernet functionality.

Midrange storage lines revamped by HP

Its Enterprise Virtual Array product line has two new members, and a new NAS system has been unveiled, along with a device for speeding up WAN connections

By Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com

HP revamped its midrange storage systems on Monday and introduced a framework for future storage technology.

The company replaced two members of the Enterprise Virtual Array product line, the 3000 and 5000, with three models, the 4000, 6000 and 8000. The new systems have greater top capacity and faster communication performance, HP said. The addition of the EVA 6000 means customers now can buy an intermediate system: The 3000 and 4000 have 56 hard disks, the 5000 and 8000 have 240 disks, but the 6000 straddles the divide with 112 disks.