Stories by Lucas Mearian

Sun Microsystems Tuesday announced two new midrange, modular disk arrays that double the capacity, memory and throughput of its previous 6500 series arrays.

Seagate Technology Monday launched its first 2TB enterprise-class disk drive as part of a new family of near-line SAS and SATA drives.

The level of technology deployed by hospitals to help doctors and nurses automate their work can mean the difference between life and death, according to a recently-reported study. The study, involving more than 167,000 patients in 41 hospitals across the US, also showed that better IT lowered costs.

Samsung Electronics announced Thursday that it has developed the first 4Gbit DDR3 DRAM chip using a 50 nanometer (nm) lithography process. The new chip doubles the density of earlier DRAM chips, yielding modules with up to 32GB capacity.

The world's six largest computer drive makers Tuesday published the final specifications for a single, full-disk encryption standard that can be used across all hard disk drives, solid state drives (SSD) and encryption key management applications. Once enabled, any disk that uses the specification will be locked without a password -- and the password will be needed even before a computer boots.

Brocade Communication Systems on Tuesday announced the DCX-4S Backbone, a smaller, modular version of its multipurpose core network switching platform designed to consolidate server, storage area network (SAN), and data center networks.

As solid-state disk (SSD) technology closes in on hard-disk drive (HDD) capacity and price, experts say it may not be long before spinning disks are a thing of the past and a computer's storage resides in flash memory on the motherboard.

The SD Association unveiled a new SD card specification last week at the 2009 International CES that it said can support data storage capacities of up to 2TB with read/write speeds to 104MB/sec. The specification, called SDXC (eXtended Capacity), uses Microsoft's exFAT file system to support the large capacity and interoperability in a broad range of PCs, consumer electronics and mobile phones.

SanDisk unveiled its next-generation solid-state drives (SSDs) at the International CES. One series is aimed at the hot netbook market and the other at laptops. The company's new higher-performance SSD for laptops are priced at less than US$250 for a 120GB model and are being positioned as a "drop-in replacement" for hard disk drives to extend the life of existing hardware.

A decreased demand for NAND flash-related applications has led DRAMeXchange Technology and others to lower their outlook for 2009 NAND flash chip sales.

Samsung Electronics announced Tuesday that it has developed a 2.5-in., 100GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive with enhanced performance for use in servers running applications such as video-on-demand, internet data centers and online transaction processing.

Seagate is now shipping its densest desktop hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.12, which offers 1TB of capacity on two disks. The drive is a 3.5-in. disk that spins at 7,200 rpm and has an areal density of 329 gigabits per square inch. Seagate said it expects to add platters using the same technology later this year to achieve even larger total capacity.

Last month, Kanguru Solutions announced the first USB flash drive that also offers External Serial ATA (eSATA) connectivity. This month, OCZ Technology also announced an eSATA-enabled flash drive with up to 32GB capacity, as did Advanced Media's Ridata-brand.

The inventor of a car slightly wider than a strand of DNA took the top prize in nanotechnologies this week. James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University, won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for experimental nanotechnology for his nanocar, which is four nanometers across and includes a chassis with an engine, a pivoting suspension, and rotating axles attached to rolling buckyball wheels each made of 60 carbon atoms.

Intel has announced it is expanding its X25-M 2.5-inch and X18-M 1.8-inch SATA solid-state drive (SSD) family with a 160GB drive in a 2.5-inch form factor.