Stories by: Brian Fonseca

Hired by Marvel Entertainment to help bring a 9-foot-tall gamma-powered superhero to life on the big screen, officials at the Soho VFX special effects facility needed massive storage availability to help its artists create digitally-rendered fight scenes for the film, The Incredible Hulk, which opens Friday in US theaters.

Sun Microsystems is set to unveil Friday open source software that can repurpose any OpenSolaris-based x86 server into a block-based storage device capable of emulating the physical characteristics of a storage array.

Toshiba plans to introduce two new 1.8-in. hard drives, which the company claims can reduce the storage footprint in ultra-portable and sub-notebook PCs by as much as 40% compared to traditional 2.5-in. drives.

Western Digital Tuesday unveiled a new family of 3.5-in. hard drives offering capacities of 750GB and 1TB for desktop and multi-drive systems. Additionally, officials announced a repackaging of its hard drive product, which will now be offered in separate high-performance, energy efficient and so-called "best value" categories.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies this week unveiled the 500GB 3.5-in. CinemaStar hard drive, which it said mutes noise and cuts power consumption in set-top boxes and digital video recorder (DRV) storage devices.

Intel and Micron Technology are set to unveil a jointly developed 34-nanometer, 32-gigabit NAND flash memory chip that should enable the production of cheaper solid-state drives with larger storage capacity.

Researchers who extracted data from a hard drive onboard the ill-fated Space Shuttle Columbia mission say the device was so thoroughly damaged by its fiery crash to Earth that it resembled simply a cracked "hunk of metal" when it appeared at their door six months later.

Hitachi Wednesday is set to unveil a 320GB mobile computer hard disk drive that offers 60 percent more capacity and requires some 25 percent less power than its year-old predecessor .

Rackspace this week unveiled a Web-services-based online storage service that will allow software developers to store, backup and access files and content for their applications. The new CloudFS service will be available later this year through the company's Mosso hosting division.

Managers are looking more closely at hosted business applications as the number of unfinished IT projects grows, skilled workers become increasingly scarce, and upgrade and maintenance costs skyrocket.

SAP and Research in Motion have announced a joint development effort that will allow corporate customers to access SAP business applications from BlackBerry mobile devices.