Hasta La Gadget!

Buffalo is releasing a 3TB external HDD “HD-AVSV3.0U3/V” in the beginning of May, which the company says is particularly recommended for use with Panasonic’s VIERA TVs and DIGA DVD and Blu-ray disc recorders.

USB3.0 compliant “HD-AVSV3.0U3/V” allows you to record 3 TV programs simultaneously when it is connected to Panasonic’s USB3.0 compliant DIGA blue-ray disk recorder.

It’s only 12cm wide so it is extremely portable.

Price: ¥31,080 (including tax)
Size: 120 × 40 × 200mm
Weight: 900g
Estimated recording time: 374 hours for Digital terrestrial broadcasting, 265 hours for BS digital broadcasting

We have a feeling 4K is going to be a major theme at this year’s NAB, which also means we’ll be seeing a good deal of hardware that can actually handle such high-res content. Mostly, we’re talking pro cameras and the like, but at least one company will be showing off some professional-grade hard drives — after all, you’re gonna need a solid storage solution to process those supersize files, right? G-Technology just introduced the “Evolution” family of products, the centerpiece of which is the G-Dock ev, a mini-tower with two hard drive modules and dual Thunderbolt connections. What you put in those hard drive slots is up to you: the company is offering both a 9.5mm 7,200RPM drive (rated for 136 MB/s transfers) and a beefier 15mm cartridge promising 250 MB/s. Once you choose your drives, you can arrange them in a RAID 1 configuration if redundancy is important, or RAID 0 for maximum speed.

What’s more, each of the drives has a USB 3.0 socket on board, so if you needed to you could hand it to someone else in your office and let them grab whatever data they needed off the HDD. In any case, the dock will come standard with two 1TB, 9.5mm drives — look for it next month, priced at $750 for the bundle. If you later need some additional cartridges, the 9.3mm G-Drive ev will cost either $150 or $200, depending on whether you want 500 gigs or a full terabyte. The bigger 15mm G-Drive ev Plus will go for $350 (it’ll be sold with 1TB only). Lastly, G-Technology also announced the G-Drive Pro with a Thunderbolt port and claimed transfer speeds of 480 MB/s. That’ll ship this summer for either $700 or $850, depending on whether you want 2TB or 4GB of storage. All that’s in the PR after the break, along with an endorsement from Vincent Laforet himself. Must be good, right?

Filed under: Storage

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If you’re at all familiar with mobile processors, you’ve likely heard a lot about 32nm vs. 28nm construction when comparing the current generation of chips from companies like Qualcomm and others. That refers to the size of the processor, where a smaller number is better in terms of power consumption, fitting more transistors in less space for more efficient processing.

Currently, it’s hard to get past around the 20nm when creating individual patterns for data storage on today’s disk drives, which is another area in addition to processors where Moore’s Law applies. Today though, HGST, a Western Digital Company, announced a breakthrough that allows it to produce patterns as small as 10nm, via a process called “nanolithography,” meaning that it can essentially double the current maximum storage capacity possible in hard disk drives, given the same-sized final product.

HGST’s process, which was developed in tandem with Austin, Texas-based silicon startup Molecular Imprints, Inc. doesn’t use the current prevailing photolithography tech, which is limited in how small it can go by the size of light wavelengths, which is what allows it to get to the 10nm threshold, and hopefully beyond even that in time, HGST VP of Research Currie Munce told me in an interview.

The upshot of all this is that HGST hopes to have the process ready for wide-scale commercial production by the end of the current decade, with a process that makes the resulting storage both affordable and dependable enough to be used widely by customers who need ever-increasing amounts of storage. The number of customers who fit that description is increasing rapidly, too: the advent and growth in popularity of cloud services means that big companies like Facebook, Apple and Amazon are continually building and expanding new data centers in search of greater storage capacity. HGST’s nanolithography process could double the storage capacity per square foot at any of those facilities, without having the same effect on power requirements, which is clearly an attractive proposition.

While the process looks well-suited to disk-based storage, where redundancies and workaround can account for minor imperfections at the microscopic level, Munce says that HGST nanolithography is less well-suited to the task of creating mobile processors for smartphone like those mentioned above.

“If you don’t connect the circuits properly on a processor it doesn’t work at all,” he explained. “On a hard disk drive, we can always have error connecting codes, we can always use additional signal processing to cover up a few defects in the pattern that’s created.”

Still, for HDDs and computer memory (RAM), HGST’s breakthrough could have a massive impact on cloud computing, mobile devices and the tech industry as a whole, and all within the next five to six years.

Are you getting bored with simple black or white HDDs? If so, you could consider one of Buffalo’s new HDD series: “Design Selection HDD” – 8 models in two series:
– HD-PCTU3-BD Series
– HD-PCTU3-WD Series
Designs use various patterns in simple and pop colors like pink and gold. It’s a portable HDD with USB3.0 that holds up to 1TB.
These models are only available upon request and Buffalo will be accepting orders until 1pm on March 4th at their online shopping site. …

Century, the company that brought us the HDD Stage Rack or the HDD USB SATA and IDE Dock, announced today the launch of the CROSU2TV, a USB 2.0 HDD Stage Rack with HDMI out and support of pretty much every SD or HD Videos format on the market including DB-ISO! Announced at 12,800 Yen and available from today onward the CROSU2TV is the perfect little buddy for every Geek and Video fans, pity though that we are limited to USB 2.0 only!