The maximum areal densities of hard disk drives are expected to more than double by 2016, according to an IHS iSuppli storage space market report published Monday.

At its annual user conference today, EMC announced upgrades across most of its major product lines, including a new high-end Symmetrix VMAX array with up to 4PB capacity and twice the performance of its predecessor.

Advancing its roadmap toward increased use of flash storage, EMC today announced that it has purchased start-up all-flash array maker XtremIO.

If you want to speed up your PC but don't want to deal with a new hybrid hard drive, one way is to simply add an SSD cache drive to your PC. These drives aren't meant to be mass storage devices; instead, they cache your most frequent application operations and thereby improve performance.

Solid-state storage array maker Whiptail today announced its first modular, scalable all-flash array with up to 72TB of capacity.

OCZ Technology today released a firmware upgrade for its Vertex 4 line of solid-state drives (SSDs) with SATA 3.0 interfaces that doubles sequential write performance on the lower-capacity drive and markedly increases write speeds on its mid-capacity SSD.

Johns Hopkins University engineers are using diamonds to change the properties of an alloy used in phase-change memory, a change that could lead to the development higher capacity storage systems that retain data more quickly and last longer than current media.

Hitachi Data Systems today announced a new midrange storage line that allows access to both block and file-based data through a single management interface.

In March, Western Digital agreed to buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies> (HGST), the disk drive subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., in a stock and cash transaction valued at $US4.3 billion. HGST CEO Steve Milligan will join WD as president at the closing of the deal, expected in the fourth quarter.

Start-up Nimble Storage came out of the development stage this week with its first product -- an array that combines solid state drives (SSD) with high-capacity, cost and performance serial ATA (SATA) hard drives, acts as primary and backup storage and replicates offsite for disaster recovery.