You’re probably laughing to yourself right now saying, “300GB? That’s not big storage.” But, hear us out. The oh-so memorably titled MK01GRRB and MK01GRRR are not your standard hard drives — these are enterprise-grade disks that spin at 15k RPM and fit in a 2.5-inch bay. Toshiba claims they’re the highest capacity 2.5-inch, 15k drives on the market, and we couldn’t dig up any evidence to the contrary. The 6Gb/s SAS connection makes sure businesses get the most they can out of those platters spinning at break neck speeds and the GRRR models include a self-encrypting feature. The two drives will start shipping in both 147 and 300GB sizes in Q1 of 2012, but pricing has yet to be announced.

Western Digital said on Monday that it’s facing a weak December due to the Thailand floods. According to the company, rising water penetrated the Bang Pa-in Industrial Park’s “flood defenses” over the weekend and entered WD’s manufacturing facilities, submerging some of the equipment.

To make matters worse, water infiltrated the location of the company’s other manufacturing plant in Thailand, Navanakorn Industrial Park, on Monday morning. So far there’s no indication that the water has entered the facilities, and the company currently reports that all employees in Thailand remain safe.

“The company now expects that the flooding of its Thailand facilities, combined with flood damage to the company’s supply chain in Thailand, will have significant impact on the company’s overall operations and its ability to meet customer demand for its products in the December quarter,” WD said on Monday.

WD’s other facilities in Malaysia, Singapore and the U.S. are fully operational. The hard drive manufacturer said that further updates on the Thailand situation will be provided during its investment community conference call on Wednesday, October 19, 2011.

Western Digital is just one of many affected by the floods in Thailand including Seagate, chip makers ON Semiconductor and Microsemi Corp. Analysts predict that the predicted supply constraints may have a significant impact on the broader computer industry, leading to higher prices and a shorter list of components later this year or early next year.

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Patriot Memory updates its SSD lineup with the release of the Pyro SE SSD series, which utilizes synchronous MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory versus asynchronous MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory.

Patriot Memory Pyro SE SSD is a 2.5-inch form-factor based on the SATA 6.0 Gb/s interface and the SandForce SF-2281 controller. The Pyro SE will be offered in 60 GB, 120 GB and 240 GB capacities. In addition, the drives include DuraClass, DuraWrite, TRIM support and comes with a 3-year warranty. The Pyro SE’s performance is expected to deliver sequential read and write speeds of 550 MB/s and 520 MB/s, along with a maximum 4K random write of 85,000 IOPS.

“The Patriot Memory Pyro SE will offer increased performance while still maintaining our aggressive pricing strategy”, says William Lai, Patriot Memory’s Product Manager. “The Patriot Memory Pyro SE will be the ultimate choice for performance users looking to increase productivity while not bankrupting their budget.”

Though pricing has not been announced, users should expect the pricing for the drives to be close to the current pricing of the Pyro SSD drives:  60 GB – $110, 120 GB – $205, and 240 GB – $440. Read more on the new Patriot Memory’s Pyro SE SSDs at the product page.

EVGA has caused quite some buzz when it displayed one of the first X79 motherboards at the GeForce LAN 6 party. Gamers attending got a first peek at a prototype of its flagship X79 Classified board, which will be supporting Intel Sandy Bridge-E Core i7-3000 series processors. Besides the displayed E779 model, EVGA will also be offering the E775 (X79 SLI) and the E777 (X79 FTW).

According to pictures that are making the rounds on the Internet, the E779 will have four DDR3 slots, five PCIe x16 3.0 and one PCIe x1 3.0 interface, as well as two SATA 6 Gbps, four SATA 3 Gbps and two eSATA ports. EVGA integrates VIA’s Superspeed USB controller and will offer eight USB 3.0 ports on the E779. Additionally, there are two USB 2.0 connectors as well as a Bluetooth radio.

Targeted at overclockers, EVGA told visitors that the board will pass the most stringent requirements for CPU tuning, including deep freezing.

SOURCE via Legit Review

AMD may be unveiling its first 28 nm graphics chips before the end of the year. Industry sources told Germany’s heise online that AMD is targeting December 6 as a launch date.

There was no information which architecture these new GPUs will be based on, but there appears to be reason to believe that AMD may be unveiling performance desktop boards, which will become available in very limited quantities in December, heise said. Due to 28 nm transition problems, it may take some time until there is enough supply to meet demand.

If heise’s sources are correct, then we assume that the announcement in December will be about AMD’s Southern Island GPU family, which is expected to be called the Radeon HD 7000 series. We are expecting these GPUs to use Rambus’ XDR2 DRAM memory instead of GDDR5, MIMD instructions instead of VLIW, support for PowerTune as well as x86 addressing and Partially Resident Textures.

TSMC reportedly increased its pricing for 28nm products as it noticed substantially higher demand than the company initially expected. Xbit labs speculated that TSMC’s capacity for 28nm wafer production is only 7000 to 10,000 units during the current fourth quarter.

SOURCE via heise.de

The Deneva 2 and Intrepid are designed for slim servers, tablets, dual drive notebooks, and network security devices. The Deneva 2 mSATA series utlilizes MLC NAND Flash memory, a SATA 6.0 Gb/s interface and offers throughput rates with up to 80,000 random 4k write IOPS and 550MB/s of bandwidth. The mSATA has a MTBF (mean time before failure) of 2 million hours, supports TRIM and has a 3-Year Warranty with Dedicated FAE/FSE support (includes PM/engineer support through validation cycle).

The OCZ Intrepid mSATA Series features Indilinx Arowana Flash Translation Layer with Hyper-Queuing, resulting in increased sequential write speeds and IOPS. The Intrepid Series utilizes Indilinx Ndurance Technology for reduced write amplification and advanced over provisioning.

“OCZ Deneva 2 and Intrepid mSATA solid state drives provide OEMs with the flexibility to address storage and caching requirements within innovative form factors, including embedded and dual-drive devices and blade servers,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group. “These new SSDs are available in a wide range of capacities and configurations to deliver exceptional scalability, performance, and endurance, all with a compact and energy efficient design.”

For more information on the Deneva 2 and Intrepid mSATA SSDs, please visit oczenterprise.com

Infineon says it is the first company to have successfully produced chips on 300mm thin wafers, which will be used for high-voltage semiconductors.

According to the manufacturer, these Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistors (MOSFETs) offer the same behavior as those previously manufactured on 200 mm wafers (in diameter, not thickness), but will enable the company to produce the chips much more efficiently.

“Our engineers’ achievement marks a quantum leap in production technology,” said Reinhard Ploss, Operations, Research & Development and Labor Director at Infineon Technologies. “Innovation lays the foundation for profitable growth. Innovation secures our edge over the competition.”

300 mm wafers have been used for common chips such as CPUs for more than a decade, but certain individual segments still rely on 200 mm technology as the production volume does not justify a switch to the more expensive 300 mm technology.

However, Infineon had the advantage of already having a 300mm production plant; the thin wafers are produced in the former Qimonda DRAM plant in Villach, Austria.

SOURCE via Infineon

This week Toshiba revealed what it deems as the industry’s highest-capacity 2.5-inch high performance enterprise-class line of drives. Called the Toshiba MK01GRRB/R, it uses an SAS 6 Gb/s interface, spins at 15,000 RPM and offers a top capacity of 300 GB. But Seagate already beat Toshiba to the market with a similar line earlier this year, the Savvio 15K 2.5-inch hard drives which offer the same spin speeds and capacity.

According to Toshiba, its new third generation 2.5-inch 15,000 RPM enterprise drives leverage an enhanced power condition state that reduces drive spin in idle states, significantly lowering power consumption. That means less heat generated, less power consumed overall, and extra cash in the company’s pocket. Business owners can also rest assured that data will be protected thanks to the new line’s self-encryption technology which is designed to the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) “Enterprise SSC” specification.

“SED technology provides simple and complete data security throughout the drive’s usable life cycle – with no performance impact – and enables organizations to crypto-graphically erase protected data securely, enabling the ability to return, service, repurpose, or retire drives without lengthy data overwrite operations or physical destruction of the drive,” Toshiba said.

The new line is expected to go live in Q1 2012 with the launch of four models: the 300 GB MK3001GRRB (without encryption) and MK3001GRRR (with encryption), and the 147 GB MK1401GRRB (without encryption) and MK1401GRRR (with encryption). All four will have an average seek time of 2.7 ms (read) and 3.0 ms (write), an SAS 6 Gb/s interface, and a 15,000 RPM rotational speed. However the 300 GB drives will consume 4.5 watts whereas the smaller 147 GB drives will consume 4.3 watts.

“Toshiba small form factor enterprise drives deliver the performance, capacity and security features IT administrators require for today’s mission critical server, storage and cloud appliance markets,” Toshiba said.

SOURCE via Toshiba

Today, Nvidia is taking the wraps off its 3D Vision refresh, dubbed 3D Vision 2. While the functionality remains identical to the original, the update includes hardware optimizations that address some concerns with the 2.5+ year-old standards. You can check out our full 3D Vision 2 review on Monday morning, complete with performance benchmarks vs. AMD’s competing HD3D product. For now, here are the important points:

This latest version comes with new glasses, new hardware, and some new tech behind enjoying 3D games and Blu-ray movies. Nvidia sees its 3D products as a major success thus far, with half a million 3D Vision kits sold, over 70 compatible products (monitors, laptops, all-in-ones) and a 3D games library with over 550 titles, so a refresh after roughly two years is to be expected.

Because 3D Vision uses active shutter glasses for the 3D effect, a significant amount of light is lost before the picture hits your eyes. The original standard suffers from relatively dark monitor output in conjunction with difficulty seeing through the glasses to see peripherals such as the keyboard. This problem has been successfully addressed with Nvidia 3D LightBoost, a collection of display technologies that include an LED monitor backlight that pulses twice as brightly and increasing the amount of time that the shutter glasses remain open. Nvidia says LightBoost will make 3D Vision 2 roughly 30 percent brighter than its predecessor.

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Is Seagate shipping 5 TB hard drives three months from now? That’s a hint the company dropped in a recent interview at GITEX 2011, a technology event held in Dubai. Seagate later followed up after the event by saying that an eventual 5 TB drive isn’t any real revelation, nor is the timeframe in which the product may arrive.

“Now we have 1 TB per disk,” said a Seagate Middle East salesperson by the name of Christian six minutes into the interview. “If you just do a simple calculation … now a drive can have five disks … so suddenly you make the disk 5 TB … within three months you will see it.”

Seagate first introduced a GoFlex Desk external hard drive featuring 1 TB platters and an areal density of 625 Gigabits per square inch back in May, revealing a special 3-platter, 3 TB Barracuda XT hard drive crammed inside (which typically uses 5 platters for 3 TB). According to the company, that’s enough capacity to store up to 120 high-definition movies, 1,500 video games, thousands of photos or “virtually countless hours of digital music.”

Then in September the company added a 4 TB version to its GoFlex Desk line of external drives, but instead of using 1 TB platters, it featured a 5-platter (800 GB each) 7200RPM design. Seagate will reportedly introduce an internal 4 TB hard drive in November which will also use the 5-platter (800 GB each) 7200RPM design.

That said, it’s safe to assume that Seagate’s 5TB storage monster will arrive in the form of a GoFlex Desk external drive first, and will likely be revealed during CES 2012 in January. Of course, that’s just guesswork based on Seagate’s current pattern.

SOURCE via The Register