Posted 03/10/10 at 08:11:19 AM by Paul Lilly

Transcend can now focus all of its attention on putting out products rather than worrying about defending itself in court. That's because the memory maker said it has received notification from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin that rival SanDisk has withdrawn its patent infringement lawsuit.

The suit dates back to October 2007 when SanDisk went on a suing spree, accusing 25 companies of patent infringement through three separate lawsuits. These were all companies that either made, sold, or imported USB flash drives and other memory related products.

SanDisk had sought both damages and a permanent exclusion order from the International Trade Commission (ITC) banning importation of the products in the U.S.

It's unclear whether SanDisk dropped its patent suit against all 25 companies or just Transcend.

Read More

Posted 03/10/10 at 08:09:50 AM by Mark Soper

Whether you are preparing to reuse a hard disk for another operating system, clear off your junk shelves by passing along outdated drives to a friend or relative, donate an old PC to a charity or school, discard a too-small USB drive or flash memory card, or repurpose an SSD, you don’t want to leave any information on the storage device. With stories abounding of identity theft aided by information lifted from discarded storage devices, you want devices you no longer plan to use to have no usable information when they head out the door.

When you erase/delete a file from your computer, it’s not really gone until the areas of the disk it used are overwritten by new information. If you use the normal Windows delete function, the “deleted” file is sent to the Recycle Bin until the space it uses is required by other files. If you use Shift-Delete to bypass the Recycle Bin, the space occupied by the file is marked as available for other files. However, the file could be recovered days or even weeks later with third-party data recovery software. As long as the operating system does not reuse the space occupied by a file with another file, the “deleted” file can be recovered.

In this article, we'll show you how to erase your drives the right way, leaving no trace behind.

Read More

Posted 03/10/10 at 07:25:24 AM by Paul Lilly

In the highly competitive enterprise storage sector, IBM this week had reason to celebrate, saying it achieved the highest growth among the top three storage vendors.

According to a market share report by IDC, IBM's external disk storage systems revenue grew by 9 percent year-over-year during the fourth quarter of 2009, putting the company's growth rate well ahead of the competition. By contrast, EMC stayed relatively flat with a 0.7 percent decline, while Hewlett Packard's revenue took a backwards slide to the tune of 7.3 percent during the same quarter.

Big Blue also noted gains in the Windows and Linux OS segments in 2009, boasting a 24 percent increase in Linux storage. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that the overall Linux storage market was down 4 percent.

Read More

Posted 03/05/10 at 08:42:26 AM by Paul Lilly

Citing sources from hard drive makers, news and rumor site DigiTimes says that Apple's iPad could end up slowing SSD growth in the market place. Say what?

The reason, sources say, is because the iPad might create a shortage of NAND flash chips. Apple already consumes about one-third of the total NAND flash output because of the company's immensely popular iPod and iPhone devices, and if the iPad proves to be just as hot, NAND flash supply could tighten.

The news gets even worse for SSD fans. The cost of NAND flash has been the biggest roadblock in pushing SSDs into the mainstream, and the sources noted that prices are continuing to increase. That should change once the NAND flash industry transitions to a 20nm process technology, however that isn't expected to happen until at least the second half of 2011. Bummer.

Read More

Posted 03/04/10 at 10:58:28 AM by Paul Lilly

In another nod towards the increasingly popular SandForce controller, Corsair today announced its Force Series SSDs built around SandForce.

"The Force Series are the fastest SSDs that Corsair has launched to date," stated Kevin Conley, Vice President of Engineering at Corsair. “We have been very impressed with the SandForce SSD Processor innovations in the months that we have been working with them, and we can’t wait to get these extraordinarily fast SSDs into the hands of our most demanding customers."

And fast they are, at least on paper. By combining the SandForce SF-1200 SSD processor with MLC flash memory, Corsair claims its new SSD line can race along at 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write speeds.

These will be available in 100GB and 200GB capacities and come with TRIM support in Windows 7. No word yet on price or availability.

Read More

Posted 03/03/10 at 07:03:40 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Sometimes a company just does something unnecessarily extravagant to get attention. This time the company is Patriot, and the extravagance is building a PC with 40 SSDs in one huge array. This feat was accomplished using 5 LSI Mega RAID SAS/SATA 9260-8i raid cards to connect up the 40 TorqX SSDs. The System also packs two 1000w Thermaltake power supplies, and a server board with dual Xeons and 48GB of DDR3 RAM.

We would like very much to play with this system, but it’s unlikely that Patriot will be letting it out of their sight. According to a questionable claim apparently made by a Patriot rep, the system would be able to rip a Blu-Ray in 0.9 seconds. Technically, we’ve never seen an optical drive capable of that sort of read speed. It’s possible this was just a ham-handed attempt to show the speed of the drives. If so, the array is able to write about 8GB per second. Yeah, we’d take that.

Read More

Posted 03/03/10 at 01:59:49 PM by Paul Lilly

Western DIgital is no stranger to low capacity, high performance, pricey storage solutions, only up until this point they've always fallen under the company's VelociRaptor line. That all changes today, as WD announced its first-ever consumer-oriented solid state drive (SSD), the SiliconEdge 2.5-inch SSD family.

"The development of the WD SiliconEdge Blue product family leverages WD's extensive experience in designing and manufacturing highly reliable storage products and the company's worldwide sales and distribution network to accelerate SSD technology adoption by OEMs, technology enthusiasts, gamers and road warriors," said Michael Hajeck, senior vice president and general manager of WD's solid state storage business unit. "Customers who demand the ultimate in performance will find the WD SiliconEdge Blue SSDs exceed all their requirements."

The new drives ship in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities and features a native SATA 3Gbps interface. Read speeds come rated at up to 250MB/s, while WD says you can expect writes in the neighborhood of 170MBs. TRIM support also comes standard, as does NCQ.

In addition to performance, WD is touting the SiliconEdge family's ruggedness, saying the product line has "passed WD's extensive functional integrity testing procedures" consisting of over 250,000 of testing.

The drives are available now for $279 (64GB), $529 ($128GB), and $999 (256GB).

Read More

Posted 03/03/10 at 01:59:06 PM by Paul Lilly

Western Digital's been quite the busy body today in the SSD sector. In addition to the just-announced MLC-based SiliconEdge Blue line, the storage vendor also just unveiled its WD SiliconDrive N1x 2.5-inch SSD family. Built around a single-level cell architecture (SLC), Western Digital says these provide a cost effective alternative without giving up a ton of performance.

"The WD SiliconDrive N1x SSDs are the newest addition to our SiliconDrive product family, which has shipped several million units since the first products were introduced. SiliconDrive SSDs have consistently met critical OEM application requirements for high reliability, high performance and long product deployment cycles," said Michael Hajeck, senior vice president and general manager of WD's solid state storage business unit. "Satisfying the challenging storage demands for a wide variety of OEM applications, WD has designed the WD SiliconDrive N1x and WD SiliconEdge Blue product families to facilitate SSD technology adoption in a multitude of existing and expanding new markets that can benefit from advanced storage solutions."

Like the SiliconEdge Blue line, the SiliconDrive N1x family also features a native SATA 3Gbps interface. Read and write speeds are a little more modest at 240MB/s and 140MB/s, respectively, compared to 250MB/s and 170MB/s on the SiliconEdge.

TRIM and NCQ support also come as part of the package, as does a five year warranty.

No word yet on price or availability.

Read More