It looks like Kingston is always staying behind when it comes to launching new cards. This time they’re trying to recuperate, by launching the new 32GB SDHC card. Can you believe, it took them THAT long to produce it and to put it on the market?

It’s a Class 4 card that promises to maintain a speed of 4MB/sec, but very expensive. Make sure you want to spend $308 on it or go for some other brands and buy to on that money (How about a class 4 PNY 32GB card for around $125?).

Though we don’t have it confirmed yet, NewEgg seems to have the new Kingston 32GB SDHC card for sale at just $209, which is much more affordable. Why would they inflate the price if it sells for “just” $209? I’m not really partying over here. Don’t like to be tricked into paying more …

What about you?

Samsung has began the mass production of Spinpoint F1 RAID Class (F1R) 3.5″ SATA hard drive that features a 1TB capacity.

The F1R is designed for enterprise storage and surveillance applications and comes with an industry-leading seven year limited warranty for enterprise applications. Enterprise applications are usually very demanding; databases, email and web servers, super computing, software development, data warehousing, surveillance technologies, call centers and near-line/backup storage systems are just a few that can use the Spinpoint F1 RAID Class 3.5″ SATA hard drive.

It features high performance, high reliably and low power by delivering the world’s highest recording capacity using only three platters and running at 7,200rpm. The dream ends with a 16 or 32MB cache, a Serial ATA 3.0Gbps interface, a 175MB/s maximum media transfer rate and NCQ for random I/O performance.

What do you think?

Samsung

Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate, says they are gradually planning a turnaround of its solid-state drives (SSDs). The company will build solid-state drives by 2009 initially for enterprise-class consumers, who most likely need very high-speed storage disks no matter what the price is. Seagate is also planning a 2TB hard drive next year.

However, Watkins considers that a big portion of the market is not ready for solid-state drives, yet. Moreover, as a new product, SSDs may have to face the question of reliability. Pricing won’t be reasonable for a lot of users for the next few years. As solid-state drives eventually lose the capability to write to each storage cell, many users may need to replace the drive sooner than expected.

Enterprise clients may want to use traditional hard disks instead of SSDs for long-term storage use and leave the SSDs for speed-focused tasks only. Seagate is considered comparatively tardy to embracing SSDs, because Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk, and many other storage companies have already promoted their technologies.

Source

Samsung is going to release a 256GB SSD. It’s supposed to be uber-fast because the MLC-flash SATA II drive has speeds of 200MBps read and 160MBps sequential write which is awesome. There is no certain thing that we will afford it but there’s time till September when the 1.8-inch version should be available. It may be a good idea to wait until the half a terrabyte SSDs will be available, don’t you think?

via Engadget

A new product in the My Book Studio line has been released by Western Digital. As expected we’re getting two RAID 0 drives in a quad-interface external case that has got itself a new design and upgraded Green Power units drives to run cooler and to consume less power. There are good things for Mac users, too, because the new My Book Studio Edition II is HFS+ formatted.

It’s already available with 1TB and 2TB space for $349 and $599 respectively.

Press release

I’m not sure if I need an elastic USB flash memory drive because I don’t have a habit of accidentally rip it out or knock off. However, looking at the pictures this is a pretty interesting concept by Serbian designer Damjan Stankovic. It’s called the USBee and has the ability to bend in any direction, features a vented housing for cooling and a detachable protective cap.

The USBee flash memory drive won the 1st place at the MS Industrial USB Competition which was held by Serbian Design Community forum DizajnZona and I think it has a lot of potential to go into production.

via YankoDesign

A mix between new hardware and “going green” is always a good thing. Western Digital managed to come out with two GreenPower hard drives that are supposed to be cool, quiet and eco-friendly: the 1TB Caviar GP and the 1TB RE2-GP.

“WD’s GreenPower platform is the first 3.5-inch hard drive platform designed with power savings as the primary attribute. GreenPower drives from WD deliver average drive power savings of 4-5 watts over competitors’ drives, ultra-cool, quiet operation and solid performance.”

They both work on a SATA 3Gbps interface and have a 16MB buffer. The Caviar consumes 7.5Watts when working and 4 Watts when idle while the Re2 version consumes 7.4 Watts, respectively 4.0 Watts. Both have a stand-by power consumption of 0.97 Watts.

The 1TB Caviar GP has a 3 years warrany while the 1TB RE2-GP has 5.

via HotHardware

The 3Gbps SATA-equipped MHZ2 BJ from Fujitsu, is world’s first 320GB laptop drive that spins at 7,200 rpm. It’s a standard 9.5-mm in size, with 16MB of cache, 25dB noise levels (important for a laptop) when idle and seek time 10.5-ms for reads and 12.5-ms for writes. The new Fujitsu MHZ2 BJ will start shipping from June, so stay tuned.via Impress

Western Digital managed to come up with a new two-platter 640GB, 3.5-inch hard drive, which is a lot cooler, quieter and much more economical. Oh I missed the fact that they are much faster? Dubbed WD Caviar SE16, it has two 320GB platters, gets up to 3GBps and should be available from today for $140.

via Gearlog

The Koreans from Mtron announced today that they’ve managed to develop a new 1.8-inch hard drive in their SSD line. They are proudly telling us that a faster 128GB SSD is in the works using the Single Level Cell (SLC) technology instead of the denser but slower Multi Level Cell (MLC) technology.

The new Mtron 128GB SSD is supposed to be able to read at 120MBps and write at 100MBps. Since it’s a SSD which means it has less moving parts power consumption is cut in half. Al-Gore fans, that’s a good thing, right?

I can only find one problem here. What if your desktop computer is not fast enough to keep up with it, because this baby is able to write six times faster than a normal HDD! We’ll find out more about it in April, when it’s going to be released. So far I have no price for it, but it should be expensive.

Electronista