Hasta La Gadget!

Apple’s pre-configured 21.5- and 27-inch iMacs both ship with 1TB hard drives, but if you’re willing to wait a day or two for a custom model to ship, two new flash storage options are now on offer. Any iMac configuration can now be had with either a 256GB or 512GB flash upgrade, priced over the base drive at $300 and $600, respectively. A 768GB flash option remains available with the 27-inch model only, for an additional $900. Education and corporate discounts still apply, but even with a modest price drop, be prepared to fork over quite a bit of cash for the turbo-charged drives, available through Apple’s online store at the source link below.

Filed under: Desktops, Storage, Apple

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Via: AppleInsider

Source: Apple Store

When it comes to storage and backup drives, Western Digital would be a name that many people are familiar with, although some might have run into unpleasant experiences in the past where their backup hard drive just died even before making it past the 1 year mark, which is rather unfortunate. Still, we are not here to start an Aunt Agony channel for failed hard drives, but rather, talk about Western Digital’s latest solid state hybrid drives and hard drives that rely on a single edge connector to save space, and hence, reducing its thickness to a mere 5mm thick.

You can say that the all new WD Blue and WD Black 2.5-inch drives were specially manufactured with notebooks and Ultrabooks in mind, where being a mere 5mm thick, it would translate to sleeker notebook and Ultrabook designs down the road. The thing is, will the other components and parts of a notebook or Ultrabook be able to achieve such levels of miniaturization? This slimmer design is touted to lower weight by up to 36% compared to the traditional model, not to mention boasting of reduced noise during operations. The 500GB WD Blue 5mm will retail for $89 a pop, while versions of the WD Black 5mm SSHD are said to ship to PC manufacturers, leaving us in the dark concerning its capacity and costs.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Lenovo Helix Begins To Ship, Acer Teases “A Unique Notebook” In Star Trek Trailer Video,

Crucial has launched its M500 2.5-inch SSD drives, which are available in a wide variety of capacities with prices starting as low as $129.99. The drive is aimed at those looking for a solid-state drive that outpaces HDDs and doesn’t completely break the bank, with Crucial boasting that the M500 can easily take on modern computing and multitasking demands.

The drive is available in 120GB, 240Gb, 480GB, and 960GB capacities, with their respective prices (listed in order) being $129.99, $219.99, $399.99, and $599.99. The SSD uses 20nm MLC NAND Micron flash and a SATA 6GB/s controller, as well as custom firmware, all of this combining to offer an IOPS (input/oupt operations per second) of up to 80,000.

To keep data safe, there’s on-board hardware level encryption said to meet both IEEE 1667 and TCG Opal 2.0 standards, depending on software. In addition, the M500 also utilizes thermal management technology and offers power-loss protection. There are advanced recovery features against errors, and a device sleep option for improving battery life, which is reported as offering a 93-percent power improvement over the last Crucial line of SSDs.

Crucial’s Senior Worldwide Product Manager Robert Wheadon had this to say: “We designed the Crucial M500 to meet the reliability and performance expectations of today’s systems, and are thrilled to offer the first terabyte-class. SSD for under $600. The Crucial M500 is equipped with an impressive new set of features, making it a multifaceted solution for today and tomorrow.”

The M500 drives are available now.

[via Global Newswire]

Crucial launches 2.5″ M500 SSD starting at $130 is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

RAID cards are one of the more difficult things in the technology world to get excited about. Especially since most of these discrete add-on boards are really aimed at enterprise users, not media centers or gaming rigs. But, we’ve got to hand it to LSI and Intel for knowing how to make a splash. The companies caught our attention by slapping a pair of 512GB SSDs on a Nytro MegaRAID PCIe card. While there are a couple of models of the controllers, it’s the RCS25ZB040LX specifically that’s carrying the 1TB of flash storage. The media isn’t meant for installing programs or archiving data, though, instead its dedicated cache for the controller. All that blazing fast SLC flash should help speed up any task that is reliant on frequent random reads. We don’t think you’ll be picking up one of these SandForce-powered bad boys for your personal server though, even an entry level version with 100GB of SLC will set you back $1,795.

Filed under: Storage, Intel

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Via: SemiAccurate

Western Digital has been producing hard drives for a number of years and is one of the most popular companies in the market. As the hard drive market declines, the SSD market is growing. Hard drives use spinning magnetic platters to store large quantities of data, but have slower data access speeds.

On the other hand, the SSD uses very fast flash storage allowing for incredibly quick access speeds, but the typical SSD has low storage capacity. SSDs also tend to be very expensive. Western Digital has announced that it has made a significant investment in a solid-state storage company called Skyera.

Western Digital has announced that it has participated in Skyera’s recently announced Series B round of financing. Western Digital Capital co-invested in the $51 million round of funding as an extension of the strategic relationship between the two companies. Western Digital had previously invested money with Skyera as an initial outside investor.

Skyera CEO Radoslav Danilak says that the new round of investment backed by Western Digital will help the company to expand its business across marketing, sales, and engineering. Skyera produces a line of enterprise solid-state storage systems in the skyHawk series. The company’s solid-state storage systems have what Western Digital calls an industry breakthrough price point of under three dollars per gigabyte. The low price of the systems allows the latest generation 19/20nm solid-state technology to be used as a direct replacement for traditional enterprise hard drive systems.

[via WDC]

Western Digital announces major investment in Skyera is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.