Seagate started presenting great products lately like the DAVE project, the new encrypted HDD and the Savvio hard drive. They recently unveiled another such a product under the brand Momentus 7200.2.

The new device is a 2.5″ hard drive for laptops that uses perpendicular recording technology to achieve higher memory density therefore higher storage capacity for the same form factor. Having 160 GB as the maximum capacity the Momentus 7200.2 also offers a performance boost due to the 7200 rpm (compared to the regular notebook hard drives that offer 5400 rpm) and SATA high-speed interface (up to 3 Gb).

Another useful feature that can be added to the device is the acceleration sensor which can detect falls greater than 8″ (about 200 mm) high. Upon the fall detection the device will park the read/write heads achieving a better reliability for the stored data and the hard drive.

In early January we have announced the 1 TB (tera-byte) hard disk showcased by Hitachi. Well that product is now available for shipment. In a press release Dell and Alienware announce that the Hitachi hard drive can be included in selected XPS, Aurora and Area 51 computers starting today.

If you don’t realize how much storage the new product can achieve, Dell estimated that a single hard drive can accommodate “a million photos, 16 days of DVD quality video or even a million minutes of music”.

The price for the new hard drive probably depends on the selected system, but we don’t expect it to vary to much from what Hitachi presented in January for the Deskstar 7K1000 ($399). Anyway, additional details can be also found on www.dell.com/XPS and www.alienware.com/desktops.

The 2.5″ 32 GB SSD (solid state drive) SanDisk announced in early January is available now for purchase by computer manufacturers. Forget the hybrid hard drives, the ones that use both flash memory and magnetic storage for an increase in performance. We now have the real deal already ready to be included in the new notebook computers.

But what can we expect from such a hard drive. Well first we have all the advantages: an important increase in read/write speed, a decrease in power consumption (more battery time for laptops) and higher reliability as the flash based drives have no moving parts and they are harder to brake. However there is a very big disadvantage: the price. Flash memory is more expensive to produce than traditional magnetic storage so the price for flash memory based products is way higher than the price of the magnetic counterparts.

Yet there are persons willing to pay a higher price for better performance. The $350 price set for the 32 GB SSD is for large orders only so don’t expect you can find it at a hardware store at a price like that. However, the price will most likely fall and the capacity will increase at the same time and we will definitely have a more competitive product by the end of the year.

CeBit 2007 in Hanovra this year will bring a lot of new launches that we gadgeters, will be so in love with. One example is the in-car computer from SNT Korea, the IOPS. The new device has HSDPA support that will allow you to connect to the Internet at very high speeds and also supports T-DMB for Live TV. The in-car PC is able to connect a Bluetooth keyboard and a mouse so that you can start working from your car, it’s powered by Windows XP and has GPS navigation. It also has an internal hard drive where you can record movies or TV shows, and a touchscreen display. We’re waiting for CeBit to start to see what else the machine has inside related to the processor, memory or other things.

Source

Laptop prices may go down now that Apple announced that they will be launching hybrid notebooks that will take advantage of the fast memory that we already have working in digital cameras or the portable media players. There is also an LG report that says they will be using hybrid drives, spinners and flash, for their new R400 notebooks they will be launching.

We already know that Samsung is shipping samples of their new NAND technology memories for better speeds and lower power consumption, and the new Apple and LG news can only mean better prices and performance for us the users. The technology is light, much better shock resistant, less space needed which would make information safer and the laptop thiner and lighter. Apple is already using the technology on the iPod Nano and the iPod Shuffle music player, and plan to release the hybrid laptops in the second quarter of 2007.

About the hybrid LG notebook we have more informations though, since they will be shipping it in a couple of weeks and apparently it has a 14.1-inch wide screen display, BlueCore4 which some kind of Bluetooth 2.0, and will have a 1.3 megapixel integrated camera. It also has an ATI Radeon X2300 (120MB VRAM), 1GB DDR2 Ram and the 120GB2.5″ MH80 Hybrid Drive. It’s supposed to cost around $1200.

Intel is unveiling their strategy and ideas for the future, announcing that shortly they will release for testing the new phase-change memory known as PCM or PRAM, and by the end of the year 2007 they will start mass production.

PRAM memory is a replacer of the well known flash memories, and is faster and very reliable with much smaller dimensions. If it were to compare them the biggest advantage of the PRAM memories is that they resist to as many as 100 million writing cycles, while the cells of a flash memory degrade after 10,000 cycles and that the read latency is reduced to 20ns for PRAM memories from 50-90ns for flash. However if we were to compare it to the DDR2’s latency of ~3ns this is not the fastest thing out there.

For implementing the new PRAM memory modules, Intel has the license for them, since 2000 for using the Ovonyx technology. The new PRAM memory is considered the killer of flash memory.
[via ArsTechnica]

It looks like every new piece of hardware released these days needs to have a heat cooling system either with a fan or using water and all kinds of pipes. OCZ Technology is ready to announce the water cooled RAM, as a next step from heat-sinks and heat-spreaders, that will be available optional on their products. Water cooling became available in processors and graphic cards and it’s now available for RAM memory chipsets.

The advantage of using the new FLEX XLC water cooled RAM is that when it’s not hot the memory operates much faster and life span increases. However you can use it for longer period of time I think you still need to replace it when 256 or 512 won’t be enough, with a bigger one. However, this is not intended for those home users unless they are fans of overclocking.

The new Flex XLC Water Cooled DDR2 Kit from OCZ gets a neutral review from us, because there are both bad and good points here. You need to already have a water cooling system in place to connect this one to it, and since it’s about water connections that really makes me think of a possible leakage that would be fatal for the extreme computer you expect, but I am not forgetting the mix between the air based heat-sink and heat-spreaders with this new water cooled kit which would definitely lower significantly the temperature of your memory chipsets.

Think if it’s worth it, and read more impressions on HotHardware. For prices, check below.

Nowadays everybody is talking about Nintendo Wii’s revolutionary controller. However, Emotiv Systems has a product that is even more revolutionary as it appears to be taken out directly from SF movies. I am referring to the Project Epoc, a new controller, shaped as some kind of headset trough which you can interact to a device with only the power of your thoughts.

This might just be the ultimate controller for lazy boys as you won’t have to move any muscle when playing games. No wires are needed either as the controller connects wireless not only to consoles, but to PC’s too, so there is a possibility you won’t be needing a keyboard and a mouse to interface with your PC.

However the bad news is that, for now, there is no available version for customers, but that will be announced at a later date on the product’s webpage.

NVIDIA launched a new line of professional graphics cards that include NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600, Quadro FX 5600 and NVIDIA Quadro Plex VCS Model IV. The new models deliver optimized application performance thanks to GPU computing visualization, the largest frame buffers and Quadro solutions to solving complex problems. The new NVIDIA Quadro FX line is designed for the most complex users in the world of professional graphics world.

When it comes to features, Shader Model 4.0 enables a high level of performance and remarkable effects for applications that use OpenGL and DirectX 10, and the extremely large frame buffers of up to 1.5GB allows real-time processing and visualization for very big textures and frames with great quality and Full-Scene AntiAliasing (FSAA) resolutions. The unified architecture of GPU computing and NVIDIA CUDA capable of dynamic allocations ensures a result for the industry leading complex problems. The new NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600 and 5600 and the Plex VCS Model IV takes advantage of the best class solutions like NVIDIA Quadro G-sync, SDI or NVIDIA SLI technology.

NVIDIA

In a press release last week Samsung, world leader in memory manufacturing, has announced it achieved an increase in data speed of world’s fastest memory for graphic cads, the GDDR 4. If you think there success is just a regular announcement you are wrong as the increase in speed is considerable, Samsung managing to achieve a 66% progress.

Built with the 80 nm technology, the new 512Mb density GDDR4 memory runs at 4Gb/s (2.0GHz) while the fastest GDDR4 available today on the market reaches just a 2.4Gb/s. As you probably know, memory is one of the key factors in current graphic cards performance and we can barely wait to see the progress Samsung’s new product will offer.

On the same memory topic, Samsung announced today it will start mass producing its 1 GB DDR2 memory using the 60 nm technology. By taking this step, Samsung will leap ahead of its competitors that still use only the 80 nm process, as the new technology provides 40% production efficiency.