Centrelink has kicked off a major technology purchasing initiative worth between $30 million and $40 million, as the national welfare agency continues its drive towards shifting its storage architecture towards being used as a service.

A new SATA interface to be introduced Monday at the Intel Developer Forum will provide a standard for solid-state storage vendors to use when building components for netbooks and laptops.

Triple-whammy. PC Perspective is reporting that a trifecta of motherboard manufacturers--ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI--are all using the exact same SATA 6.0 Gb/s controller into their upcoming P55-chipset motherboards. Only said controller, Marvell's 88SE9123, is suffering from a few problems that are causing at least two of the three vendors to pull the controller from their motherboards. Consequently, said products will ship without support for the SATA 6.0 Gb/s connection specification.

In an apparent response to user complaints, Apple Inc., today released a firmware upgrade that it said fixes an issue with the drive interface in new MacBook Pros.

We've seen glimmers on the horizon for some time now, but the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has finally made official the third iteration of the serial ATA specification. SATA Revision 3.0 doubles the existing SATA 3Gb/s bandwidth to 6Gb/s, or roughly 600 MB/s, using a connector that's fully backwards-compatible with the older specification. Device manufacturers (especially motherboards) won't have to reinvent the wheel connection-wise, which should help the new specification reach full market acceptance in a short time frame.

The Serial ATA International Organization today released the SATA Revision 3.0 specification, which doubles data transfer speeds from 3Gbit/sec. to 6Gbit/sec.

Intel's next-generation interface for solid-state drives (SSD) promises to make them faster and last longer, but laptops will continue to use the Serial ATA (SATA) interface in the near-term, say two leading vendors' executives.

Network Instruments has developed what it claims is the largest network data recorder available. The GigaStor SAS has a capacity of up to 288 terabytes, and was originally developed for a U.S. military customer which needed to store a month's worth of the traffic on its network, said Douglas Smith, the company's president and co-founder.