The Inquirer

LG Blu-Ray writer burns 4x media at 6x speeds

Rob Kerr — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:43:13 GMT

Rob Kerr the Inquirer, Thursday 15 May 2008. 12:09:00

First INQpressions LG GGW H20L

Product: LG GGW H20L Website: Lge.com/GGWH20L System Requirements: Intel Pentium D 3.2GHz or Higher, Windows Vista (x86, x64), Windows XP with SP2, RAM 1GB, HDD 30GB or more, 60GB for Blu-ray Disc Authoring, Serial ATA Price: $399.99, £152.94 - research price, Ebuyer UK A FEW MONTHS back Toshiba officially pulled out of the HD-DVD market - all hail our Sony overlords - we now hear you cry. Prior to that LG had already successfully produced TV set-top boxes capable of playing both High Def media formats, along with optical drives of a similar nature for the PC. We reviewed one of these wonders way back in June of 2007....

Intel sends Google into solid state - report

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:39:28 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk the Inquirer, Monday 12 May 2008. 08:59:00

Quick on the serve

DIGITIMES SAYS Google is buying a bunch of solid state drives from Intel to run some of its servers on. The Taiwanese site was told by its memory-making moles that Google is looking to fit SSDs into servers located at its Mountain View HQ. Intel landed the order with its old Mate Marvell serving up some supporting bits and bobs. Digtimes doesn't know how many drives we're talking about here. It may just be a twisted pair. Which Google should be able to afford. µ L'INQ Digitimes

Toshiba wants half of SSD market

Stewart Meagher — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:09:49 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 15:05:00

Solid statement

TOSHIBA'S TOP MAN Atsutoshi Nishida has told attendees at a corporate strategy meeting that the company expects to be making one in every two solid state drives by the end of the decade. The Japanese company, which has put together a totally new team to develop the up-and-coming storage technology, reckons that very few competing companies can keep up when it comes to SSDs. SSD drives, which are currently salary-sappingly expensive, are expected to account for 10 per cent of the storage in notebook computers by 2010. µ L'Inq Tech On

Laptop HDs get speed bump

Stewart Meagher — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:35:13 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Wednesday 7 May 2008. 11:26:00

Hitachi spins out 7,200 rpm devices

LAPTOP HARD DRIVES have been playing catch up with their desktop cousins for some time but an announcement from Hitachi today sees the gap narrowing between the 3.5 inch drives normally found in big boxen and the diminutive 2.5 incher in your laptop. The Japanese electronics giant's new Travelstar 7K range has platters which spin at a nippy 7,200 rpm whereas most current 2.5 inch drives wheeze away at 5,400 rpm. And at a maximum of 320GB, the capacity is pretty impressive too. Hitachi reckons the drives improve application performance by 12 per cent whilst reducing power consumption by 22 per cent and still remain quiet enough to make watching movies on your lappy a pleasurable experience....

Super Talent does SSDs for laptops

Sylvie Barak — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:59:17 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Tuesday 6 May 2008. 20:45:00

Flashing them about

SUPER TALENT TECHNOLOGY launched a line of new MasterDrive solid state drives or SSDs, that the company claims are completely interchangeable with hard disk drives (HDDs). The firm said its new SSDs are more power efficient, reliable, rugged, lighter and most importantly, faster than HDDs. The life of the SSDs is apparently extended by proprietary wear-leveling algorithms which ensures storage media have evenly distributed data writes and for controllers in the storage media to remap logical-block addresses to different physical-block addresses in the solid-state memory array. MasterDrive DX drives use SLC NAND Flash which the company reckons can support an impressive sequential read and write speed up to 120 and 70 MB/sec respectively, backed up with a three year warranty....

Blu-Ray sales tank for good reasons

Charlie Demerjian — Mon, 05 May 2008 09:22:44 GMT

Charlie Demerjian the Inquirer, Monday 5 May 2008. 09:16:00

DRM, Price and BD-J

BLU-RAY PLAYER SALES are sucking wind as well they should. According to Cnet, sales of the DRM infected format players are dropping like rocks. The not so bright people out there had expected sales to skyrocket once the format war was done, but it didn't. They thought was people would ignore the massive defects of Blu-ray and buy like the dumb sheep that they are, handcuffing themselves to the Sony bank account. Surprise, it didn't happen. US consumers are still dumb sheep, but this time they are realizing what is being done to them and they aren't biting. Sony's hope of having 50% of disc sales this year be Blu-ray are more likely to happen because of falling DVD sales than rocketing Blu-ray....

Creative coughs up over MP3 player fiasco

Andrew Thomas — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:52:59 GMT

Andrew Thomas the Inquirer, Friday 2 May 2008. 08:31:00

Confused capacities

CREATIVE is still refusing to comment on its alleged settlement of a class action suit brought against the company in California. The action supposedly stemmed from the fact that Creative calculated drive capacity in base ten (1,000,000,000 bytes per GB) instead of base two (1,073,741,824 bytes per GB). The action claimed that Creative misrepresented the capacity of its MP3 players. Anyone upset about losing seven per cent of their player's capacity who can still find the receipt for a Creative MP3 player purchased between May 5, 2001 and April 30, 2008 is eligible to receive a 50 per cent discount on a new 1GB player or a 20 per cent discount at the company's online store....

Apple deal could kill DVD sales

Stewart Meagher — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:05:45 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Thursday 1 May 2008. 11:53:00

Itunes movie release dates sharpened

APPLE IS EXPECTED to announce later today that future feature film release dates on its media marketplace, the Itunes Store, will now coincide with retail DVD release dates. The groundbreaking move is expected to involve the likes of Fox, Disney, Warner Bros, Paramount, Universal, Sony, Lionsgate and New Line. MGM is conspicuous by its absence. No official figures are available as of yet on current volumes of sale, but the announcement later today, predicted by the Hollywood Reporter, should include the relevant data, and we'll bring that to the party as soon as we have it. The move is expected to bring pressure to bear on the likes of Amazon's Unbox service and Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace, and we fully expect similar deals to be hammered out by all major competitors lickety split....

Intel puts its best Flash forward

Nebojsa Novakovic — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:03:34 GMT

Nebojsa Novakovic the Inquirer, Thursday 1 May 2008. 09:21:00

Claims its SSD drive beats the rest

THE SSD drive hype has toned down a bit now, as a result of some inconsistent performance across various vendors, and further doubts on long term reliability, even with wear-levelling algorithms. Benchmarks and real-life usage situations show massive improvements over hard disks in some cases, just to give terrible disappointments in others. Ever seen the otherwise pointless Sysmark? Well, SSD vs HDD there doesn't look too 'flashy'. Intel has just started peddling its 32GB, 80GB and above flash SSD drives, with the recent IDF being the first event showing the production units. They claim their SATA units show much higher real performance compared to certain " S*" competing offerings....

Sun gives away storage software

Nick Farrell — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:06:29 GMT

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Wednesday 30 April 2008. 08:31:00

What is open sauce for the goose...

SUN IS PLANNING to open sauce part of its storage technology. The outfit said that it will give away developer tools and professional service capabilities that will allow developers to build on its OpenSolaris platform. Sun's Graham Lovell, senior director for storage servers and appliances, said that this will effectively turn industry-standard servers into low-cost storage appliances. It will also mean that the Vole's Windows Storage Server operating system, found on many low-cost storage outfits, will get a run for its money. Lovell has promised that punters will be able to download a copy of the storage version of the Opensolaris operating system and install it on any server and have a NAS appliance within 10 minutes....

Blu-ray still has a fight on its hands

Sylvie Barak — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:35:26 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Monday 28 April 2008. 17:01:00

Big yawn could keep punters with DVD

DESPITE emerging triumphant in the battle of the high-definition storage format, Sony may still have a way to go to win the war, say boffins from analyst outfit ABI Research. ABI reckons that because almost 85 per cent of all Blu-ray players are actually PS3s, Blu-ray as a separate video unit, or PC disk drive could take as long as five years to take off. In a recent report covered by the (cough) Philippine Inquirer, a principal analyst at ABI, Steve Wilson, noted that the fact that so many DVD players (35 per cent) could be "upconverted" to work with high-definition TVs, was a major problem for Blu-ray, especially with the prediction that over the next five years as many as 60 per cent of all DVDs would be upconversionable....

Via plugs eco-friendly NAS board

Stewart Meagher — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:31 GMT

Stewart Meagher , Monday 31 March 2008. 11:46:00

Thin green network machine

VIA HAS ANNOUNCED the arrival of a new thin board for small business server applications. The VIA NAS 7800 is powered by a VIA C7 1.5GHz processor with optional fanless VIA Eden-based skus. Scalable storage needs are met with the support for up to eight S-ATA II ports with 1.5Gbits/sec and 3Gbits/sec data transfer rates, and for Native Command Queuing. Network support includes Gigabit Ethernet ports and an optional integrated IEEE-802.11g VIA wireless module. Featuring the Via CN700 chipset, the Via NAS 7800 supports up to 1GB of DDR2 system memory, integrated Via Unichrome Pro Integrated Graphics, an onboard IDE connector, a type-I Compact Flash slot, two COM ports and up to 6 USB 2.0 ports....

Lite-On builds Blu-ray drives for new Xbox - report

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:31 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk , Tuesday 1 April 2008. 09:25:00

Lite on details

MAKER OF DISC-SPINNERS Lite-On is building Blu-ray Disc-(BD) ROM drives for the Microsoft Xbox 360 console, according to Taiwan-based Digitimes' sources. Lite-On currently builds DVD drives for the Volish box, but it looks like Microsoft will bite Sony's bullet and move up to Blu-ray, since it can't persuade anyone to make HD-DVD drives any more. Lite-On will begin shipping drives to Microsoft in the latter half of this year, Digitimes' unverified sources said. They also said the firm has begun shipping the drives already so unless a poisson d'avril has swum under the drawbridge, someone's a bit confused. The drives headed for Microsoft are for the next-generation Xbox, the 361....

The dead are speaking

Ambrose McNevin — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:31 GMT

Ambrose McNevin , Friday 4 April 2008. 07:17:00

Telling the living like it was

SOME PEOPLE might be happy talking to the dead via tombstones or watching funerals via web cams but only the truly morbid would want to be the talking dead. But now you can, thanks to a service from Copeland Closure (geddit?) which says "web technology enables letter writing and guaranteed delivery of final sentiments" It's what they are calling "emotional coverage", kind of like life insurance for the dead. You sign up to a web site and, for several hundred yankee dollars a pop, you can write a letter to someone which will be delivered in the event of your death, "in a leather-bound portfolio." It gets better....

Samsung shows ultra-thin SSD

Charlie Demerjian — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:31 GMT

Charlie Demerjian , Saturday 5 April 2008. 11:30:00

IDF Spring 2008 128 Gigs of goodness

SAMSUNG HAD TWO memory goodies to show off at IDF. One was a SSD, the other a Fully Buffered DIMM. Samsung has long been on the forefront of the SSD revolution, and they show no signs of slowing down. They have 1.8 and 2.5" SSDs in 64 and 128GB capacities. The interesting bit is the drive on the left, a 1.8" model 128GB SATA model. Thin SSD Notice how thin it is? It is tiny, less than half the size of a normal 1.8" drive, and much closer to a PCMCIA card than a high capacity 1.8" drive. It most likely doesn't give up any performance to it's physically larger brethren, so it could bring a whole new level of performance to very small notebooks....

Boffins claim to stick 200,000 DVDs on a single disk

Nick Farrell — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:30 GMT

Nick Farrell , Monday 7 April 2008. 07:28:00

No really

TOP BOFFINS say they have hatched out a way to stick 200,000 DVDs on a single disk. Professor Min Gu and his team at Swinburne University of Technology's Centre for Micro-Photonics are three years into a five year project that is looking at how nanotechnology can be used to exponentially increase the amount of information contained on a single disc. The target is to get a petabyte of data on a single disc. This is about 20,000 times greater than a Blu-ray Disk. His big idea is to incorporate nanostructured material onto a standard CD or DVD sized disk. Another one of the boffins, Dr James Chon said that a typical CD is about 1.2 millimetres thick, the information recorded on it using what is now standard technology takes up less than a micron of the CD's thickness....

AMD champions faster network storage

Stewart Meagher — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:30 GMT

Stewart Meagher , Monday 7 April 2008. 15:38:00

Developer kit for new platform available

AMD HAS RELEASED a reference design kit (RDK) for the Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) 2.0 Specification based on the AMD Athlon processor today. This RDK can simplify the design process and provide a standardised platform powered by AMD's Direct Connect Architecture. AMD expects to help storage vendors deliver low-power, high-performance, entry-level networked storage systems while helping reduce time-to-market. Buddy Broeker, director of Embedded Computing Solutions, AMD reckons the SBB RDK "could help our customers reduce the typical design cycle by three to nine months." The new kit provides storage vendors with a platform which addresses the need for high memory and I/O bandwidth in networked storage environments and supports Network Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Networks (SANs), Unified Storage systems, as well as all major interface connectivity options including GigE, 10GigE, Fibre Channel, and Infiniband....

There's a new botnet worm on the loose

Egan Orion — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:30 GMT

Egan Orion , Monday 7 April 2008. 17:13:00

Kraken seeks to sink the Fortune 500

THERE'S A NEW botnet rampaging across the net that's already infected an estimated 400,000 machines or about twice the size of the Storm worm botnet, according to Damballa. Dubbed Kraken, this newest botnet has been detected in at least 50 Fortune 500 companies and is said to be invisible to the antivirus software running on 80 per cent of machines. Kraken hides by using a combination of ploys, including changing its binary code regularly and morphing itself so that it evades static pattern matching. Paul Royal, principal researcher at Dambala said, "It's easy to trace but slow to get antivirus coverage....

EMC to buy Iomega

Egan Orion — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:30 GMT

Egan Orion , Wednesday 9 April 2008. 08:27:00

A steal at $213 million

BIG IRON enterprise storage hardware, software and services vendor EMC announced Tuesday that it's buying Iomega for $213 million or $3.85 per share. Hopkinton, Massachusetts based EMC earlier offered $178 million, or $3.25 per share, for the smaller company. Iomega, headquartered in San Diego, California, had rejected that bid in favour of an all-stock deal with China's ExcelStor Group. EMC's successful bid is 5.8 per cent over Iomega's Tuesday stock closing price of $3.64. In accepting EMC's higher offer, Iomega said it paid a termination fee of $7.5 million to ExcelStor. Iomega was a high flyer during the dot-com boom with its stock trading for over $100 per share....

IT departments blissfully unaware of flash drive security risks

Andrew Thomas — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:30 GMT

Andrew Thomas , Wednesday 9 April 2008. 15:20:00

Users run amok

COMPANIES are unaware of the extent to which unsecured flash drives are used in their organisations, claims a new survey. 77 per cent of corporate end users use personal flash drives for work-related purposes, but, when asked to estimate what percentage of the workforce uses personal flash drives, corporate IT respondents reckoned only 35 per cent. Storage outfit Sandisk phoned users across the US and discovered that people used flash drives to hold customer records (25 per cent), financial information (17 per cent), business plans (15 per cent), employee records (13 per cent), marketing plans (13 per cent), intellectual property (6 per cent), and source code (6 per cent)....

Intel flogs off optical kit to its old mate

INQUIRER staff — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:29 GMT

INQUIRER staff , Thursday 10 April 2008. 14:45:00

Emcore swaps shares for kit

INTEL SAID it has agreed to sell the enterprise and storage bits of its Optical Platform Division and its Connects Cables business to Emcore. The deal includes intellectual property, bits and bobs relating to tunable lasers, tunable transponders, 300-pin transponders and integrable tunable laser assemblies as well as optical cable interconnects for high-performance computing clusters, the firms announced today. The transaction is subject to regulatory review yet is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008, If we understand the deal correctly, Emcore will hand Intel 3.7 million shares of restricted stock for the acquisition, depending on what the outfit is worth twelve months after the closing of the transaction....

Recession hits spammers and ID thieves

Sylvie Barak — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:29 GMT

Sylvie Barak , Thursday 10 April 2008. 17:00:00

Europeans worth twice as much as Americans, shocker

THESE ARE HARD economic times for all, including, it would appear, for identity thieves. So plentiful are the data leaks nowadays, with governments losing data left, right and centre and companies carelessly passing around people's credit card numbers and other personal information, that it's bringing the prices of identity theft to new all time lows, hitting the fraudsters where it hurts. Cyber crims are even having to resort to legitimate business strategies, like offering volume discounts, in order to keep revenues at an acceptable level, according to a Symantec Internet security report. The latest twice-yearly report, released this week, says that access to bank accounts was now going for as little as $10 in the second half of 2007, and that thieves were increasingly selling stolen credit card numbers in batches of 500 for a total of $200, or 40 cents each [More than mine's worth - Ed]....

ID card challenge batted back

Mark Ballard — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:29 GMT

Mark Ballard , Tuesday 15 April 2008. 07:08:00

New balls, please

AN ATTEMPT to force the UK Government to publish the feasibility studies for its infamous Identity Card Scheme has been swatted down by the High Court. The Court upheld government appeals against a decision by the Information Tribunal last year that the feasibility studies should be published. The High Court ruling was made on a technicality, however, leaving the Tribunal the option of revisiting its own ruling on the disclosure again. The Court found that the Tribunal's decision had been faulty because its reliance on the opinions of a Parliamentary Select Committee, which put it in danger of breaching parliamentary privilege....

Hitachi 450GB perpendicular drive tips up

Rob Kerr — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:29 GMT

Rob Kerr , Friday 18 April 2008. 11:06:00

Just like Seagate's but later if not greater

HITACHI GST announced this week the Ultrastar 15K450, its latest perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology based 450GB enterprise HDD. The drive shipping this quarter will be the highest capacity 15,000 RPM HDD on the market or so Hitachi says, despite Seagate shipping and not just announcing the same spec'd drive on March 4th The Ultrastar 15K450 shipping this quarter arrives in two versions, 3Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interface (just like Seagate). The drive claims average seek times as low as 3.3 milliseconds and fast rotational speeds reducing average latency time down to two milliseconds....

IBM buys Diligent

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:28 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk , Friday 18 April 2008. 12:36:00

In acquisitive mood

BIG FIRM, IBM announced it has acquired storage software outfit Diligent Technologies. Diligent, a private storage "de-duplication" technology company will become part of IBM System Storage business unit of the IBM Systems and Technology Group. IBM said acquisition will be an important part of IBM's New Enterprise Data Center model. It reckons organisations are increasingly investing in data de-duplication for e-mail, database and other storage-intensive and mission-critical applications. This is the third storage related acquisition for IBM in the past few months. In January, the firm bought Israeli-based XIV and earlier this month, it said itintends to acquire FilesX, a provider of continuous data protection software....