Light Peak around the corner - without the Light

Intel has been talking to several news outlets about their Light Peak technology at CES. While we all knew Intel was going to push this standard in favor of USB 3.0, this is the first time they have mentioned actual finished implementations. Previous estimates said the technology was likely to be ready sometime during 2012; but there is a bit of fine print in this announcement.

Intel Light Peak

Intel Light Peak

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2011: the year of the 4TB drives?

Seagate has started talking up their next generation of perpendicular magnetic recording technology. In a recent analyst briefing they announced their sixth generation of this technology, which promises the next round of storage density increases. The Register has done the math, and reckons we should be seeing 4TB drives this year. Savvio 15K.2
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Seagate debuts 3TB external drive

Seagate is the first vendor to offer 3TB hard drives. This first drive is only available as an external USB 2.0 drive for now; for $249.99 you can buy a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk External Drive (try saying that a couple of times in a row!). The drive is currently on back order, but should be available soon. The $249.99 package includes a USB 2.0 host interface, but can be upgraded by switching the base of the unit. Other interface options available are USB 3.0 and FireWire 800.

Seagate GoFlex

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OCZ adds PCIe SSD to consumer lineup

While several companies are already offering internal Solid State Drives for use in servers, OCZ has just announced a solution that targets the consumer segment. The RevoDrive uses a PCIe connection to enable higher speeds than possible with a traditional SATA interface, but OCZ manages to keep the price for the drive relatively low.

OCZ RevoDrive

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Hot-swap SATA to USB 3.0 dock from ThermalTake

I’ve seen a couple of UB 3.0 drive docks announced over the last couple of months, but this new model from ThermalTake stood out in my mailbox. The BlacX 5G supports both 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch SATA drives; instead of traditional external drive enclosures where you have to open a case to insert the disk, this unit allows you to insert a drive without any other steps.

ThermalTake BlacX 5G

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Toshiba and University of Tokio improve SSD write speeds

Toshiba and the University of Tokio have presented an interesting technique for improving the write speed of Solid State Drives at last weeks VLSI symposium. The technique is targeted at three-dimensional NAND flash stacks; a method of stacking more NAND flash chips on top of each other to improve storage density and bring down costs.

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Samsung touts low-power 512GB SSD

Samsung has announced a new member for their Solid State Drive family. The drive uses 32 gigabit Samsung chips that entered production last year; new about the drive is a “toggle-mode DDR structure”. According to Samsung, this leads to a significant performance increase:

The new 512GB SSD makes use of a 30 nanometer-class 32 gigabit chip that the company began producing last November. The toggle-mode DDR structure together with the SATA 3.0Gbps interface generates a maximum sequential read speed of 250 Megabyte per second (MBps) and a 220MBps sequential write speed, both of which provide three-fold the performance of a typical hard disk drive. At these speeds, two standard length DVD movies (approximately 4GB each) can be stored in just a minute.

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OCZ keeps the new products coming

OCZ sure knows how to keep everyone’s attention. Why launch all your new products at once when you can spread the press releases out over the course of a week? The latest is the announcement of a 1.8″ version of their Vertex 2 model.

OCZ Vertex 2 1.8 inch

OCZ Vertex 2 1.8" SSD

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Yet another SSD breakthrough?

It was hard to miss the news about Anobit today. They announced the first drive using their Memory Signal Processing technology; with their proprietary technology they hope to make Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash drives as reliable as the more expensive SLC models.

Anobit Genesis SSD

Anobit Genesis SSD

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OCZ launches new Deneva SSDs

OCZ just launched a new product as part of their Enterprise label: the Deneva series of SSD’s. These appear to be aimed at OEMs; OCZ offers these in a variety of interface options (SATA, SAS, FC and PCI-express) and all sorts of form factors.

OCZ Deneva 2

OCZ Deneva 2

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