News on financial reports and awards

China has approved Seagate Technology's proposed acquisition of Samsung Electronics' hard disk drive (HDD) business, but with conditions, including measures to minimize potential price increases after the deal, the country's Ministry of Commerce said on Monday.

Tech stocks looked strong Friday morning on the back of a week of upbeat surveys on small business and online spending, positive news about enterprise hardware and hopeful reports on U.S. employment and the European debt crisis.

Backwash of Thai floods to push up PC prices and cause significant delays in supply

The devastating floods in Thailand will cause a 28 percent quarter-on-quarter drop in hard disk drive (HDD) production in the fourth quarter, potentially affecting notebook production in early 2012, research firm IHS iSuppli said on Monday.

Western Digital said its primary manufacturing facility in Thailand was flooded over the weekend, with its secondary site also at risk, raising the possibility of a global shortage of hard disk drives (HDD) in the current quarter.

Severe floods in Thailand have disrupted production of electronics including hard disk drives and semiconductors, with a number of factories suspending operations.

Australian technology developer and cloud computing specialist, Jasco Consulting, has partnered up with data protection vendor, i365 to expand its OneNimbus cloud portfolio.

Seagate jumped into the SSD (solid state drive) market today with the unveiling of its Pulsar drives. SSD drives have been a growing segment, but Seagate adds significant credibility and opens up new possibilities for the nascent technology.

The scoop: FreeAgent DockStar, by Seagate, about $US100

Network-attached storage (NAS), once only available (and affordable) for enterprises, is becoming more common for small business and even home use. And necessary - if you are looking for secure backups for your data, a single backup disk collecting data once or twice a day is no longer enough.

Capitalizing on the buzz around green IT, Seagate and Western Digital have released new "green" hard drives designed to use less power (in part by spinning more slowly than the latest generation of drives) and produce less heat (thus requiring less cooling).

Solid-state disk (SSD) drives are all the rage among techies. The drives use non-volatile NAND flash memory, meaning there are no moving parts. Because there is no actuator arm and read/write head that must seek out data on a platter like on a hard disk drive (HDD), they are faster in reading and, in most cases, writing data.