Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST), a leading supplier of enterprise-class solid state and hard disk drives, today announced that EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) has qualified and is now shipping Hitachi Ultrastar SSD400S SLC-based (single level cell), 2.5-inch, SAS solid state drives (SSD) in its "all Flash" VNX Unified Storage systems for mission-critical Microsoft and Oracle environments. The Ultrastar SSD400S family is the world's first jointly develop SAS and FC enterprise-class SSDs, combining Hitachi GST's proven enterprise HDD strength with Intel's extensive capabilities developing high-endurance SLC NAND flash memory and advanced SSD technology. All of this powers Hitachi GST's leading line SSDs with high endurance, reliability and sustained performance for Tier 0, mission-critical server and storage workloads.

A serious player in the PC motherboard industry, the world's 3rd biggest (in terms of volumes) at that, ASRock is one brand that has accumulated the engineering potential to make anything. It's far from finished with its LGA2011 motherboard lineup, and made sure visitors at its CeBIT booth had their jaws on the floor. Enter, the ASRock X79 Extreme11. This motherboard is designed for not just extremely-overclocked PCs, but battlestations holding their own huge storage arrays. This monster is built in the EATX form-factor.

The LGA2011 socket is powered by a 16+2 phase DigiPower VRM, which draws power from two 8-pin EPS connectors. It is wired to eight DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting up to 64 GB of quad-channel DDR3 memory with speeds of over DDR3-2400 MHz by overclocking. The memory areas are powered by 4+4 phase VRM. Apart from the 24-pin ATX connector, and the two EPS connectors, the board also draws power from two 4-pin Molex connectors. The board makes use of Japanese-made solid-state capacitors almost throughout.

Adaptec will demonstrate data center bandwidth and latency optimization with the new 6 Gb/s Series 6 products at CeBIT 2012. Visit the Storage Pavilion, Hall 2, Stand E51 to learn more about:

- Live technology demo showcasing 6600 MB/s sustained data transfer rate with a high port count 6 Gb/s SATA/SAS RAID Adapter, based on PMC's 24-port SRCv RAID-on-Chip (RoC), with a PCIe 3.0 interface. A RAID adapter based on PMC's RoC can support up to 2x the bandwidth of a previous generation RoC solution, with 2x the bandwidth on the PCIe interface and 3x the bandwidth on the SAS interfaces.

- Tuning your data center environment to fully optimize performance, price and sustainability.

LSI Corporation today announced a new line of MegaRAID SATA+SAS controller cards designed to deliver the high I/O transaction performance required to accelerate the most demanding database applications and datacenter workloads. Powered by the LSI dual-core 6 Gb/s SAS RAID-on-Chip (ROC), the new controllers deliver data quickly and reliably to mission-critical applications by combining the industry's highest server RAID performance, achieving up to 200,000 RAID 5 random I/Os per second (IOPS), with intelligent flash-based caching and enhanced data protection capabilities.

RAID Incorporated, an end-to-end customized solutions provider in HPC, Big Data, and virtualized environments, today announces its new range of FusionAMD server solutions based on AMD Opteron 6000 Series Processors and DDR3 memory support.

Optimized for 16/12/8-Core AMD Opteron Processors, this latest comprehensive line of solutions offers unrivaled levels of performance and flexibility. The solutions boost I/O performance with PCI-Express 2.0 to double throughput, increase performance and reduce power with DDR3 memory, and also reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) with high levels of integration and energy-efficient components.

Synology today announced DiskStation DS1512+, a 5-bay next generation NAS server for delivering high performance and scalability with complete business solutions to small and medium businesses.

"NAS severs today are expected to produce higher levels of reliability and availability. With today's introduction, Synology customers can share and access data on DS1512+ in full confidence and satisfy the productivity, versatility and reliability they demand," said Peter Chen, Product Manager of Synology Inc.

Synology DS1512+ features a passive CPU cooling technology and a fan redundancy mechanism of two user-replaceable 80 mm fans, thus eliminating a single point of failure and ensure continuous system uptime during malfunction. The dual LAN network failover support allows DS1512+ to sustain the potential of one network discontinuity while maximizing system availability at all times.

Japanese company RATOC Systems introduced a trio of products that lets users expand their data storage once they run out of drive bays and ports in their case. The first one is the RS-EC32PE-U3R, a bundle consisting of a 2-bay USB 3.0 to SATA 3 Gb/s RAID enclosure and a PCIe USB 3.0 addon card; the RS-EC32EX-U3R, which is a bundle including the same 2-bay RAID enclosure, but including a 2-port USB 3.0 expansion card in the ExpressCard34 form-factor; and REX-PEU3X, which is a standalone 2-port USB 3.0 expansion card in the PCIe form-factor.

The expansion cards in these bundles are based on new Renesas μPD720202 chipset. The RAID enclosure has two 3.5-inch SATA drive bays. Its controller provides a maximum data transfer performance of 372 MB/s. It supports disk organization modes of "single" (just a single disk connected), RAID JBOD, RAID 0, and RAID 1. Expected to launch mid-March, the RATOC RS-EC32PE-U3R and RS-EC32EX-U3R are priced at 11,130 JPY (US $138), the REX-PEU3X goes for 3,360 JPY (US $41.7).

Intel "Lynx Point" 8-series chipset, which will form the foundation of 4th Generation Core processors in the LGA1150 package, codenamed "Haswell", was detailed in a leaked company slide. A slightly older report this week focused on Haswell chips having DirectX 11.1 graphics, and a reorganized display output logic that sees digital display outputs being wired to the processor package, while analog display outputs being routed to the chipset. This chipset talks to the processor's embedded graphics controller over a slightly less functional Flexible Display Interface (FDI).

Lynx Point chipset is a platform controller hub (PCH), much like all the Intel client-platform chipsets released since P55. A crude way to define its function would be to call it a "glorified southbridge", which handles all the connectivity of the system, while lacking the main PCI-Express root complex of the system to which graphics cards are ideally connected, as that's relocated to the CPU package. The PCH does have a narrower 8-lane PCIe hub, but to wire out x1 and x4 expansion slots, and onboard controllers. The Lynx Point chipset connects to the processor primarily over DMI, although the slide doesn't detail the DMI bandwidth. Most likely, it's similar to Cougar Point's 4 GB/s. Lynx Point also lacks a supplementary 4 GB/s PCIe link from the processor that's found on X79 chipset.

LaCie is excited to announce availability of the 2big Thunderbolt Series. With speeds up to 327MB/s, the Thunderbolt interface delivers speeds three times faster than FireWire 800. For data transfer gurus, that means 1TB of data - that's nearly 235,000 MP3's, 750 iTunes movies, or more than 450,000 photos* - can be transferred in less than an hour! Furthermore, you can daisy chain multiple 2big Thunderbolt devices to increase overall performance.

AREA PC also introduced the RAIDJet SD-PESA3-2RL, a cheap 2-port SATA 6 Gb/s RAID card. The card uses a Marvell-made SATA 6 Gb/s RAID controller that gives out two ports, and connects to the host of PCI-Express 2.0 x1. RAID 0 and 1 are the only modes possible. The controller supports standard AHCI/RAID drivers. The card has a half-height PCB, making it compatible with low-profile PCs. It will be available as low as 2,980 JPY (US $38).

Today LaCie announced the 5big Office Series, its latest five-bay network attached storage solutions. With easy setup, collaboration and total data protection, the 5big Office Series is a solid long-term investment for any small business. They feature the industry-trusted Windows Server operating systems and a powerful Intel Atom processor.

POWERED BY WINDOWS

The 5big Office, powered by Windows Home Server 2011, is perfect for backing up as many as 10 PCs. The 5big Office+, powered by Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials, backs up as many as 25. Get up and running in a flash on either system with a straightforward setup process and a familiar Windows environment. The 5big Office Series helps business groups collaborate like no comparable NAS.

Intel's X79 chipset for Sandy Bridge-E platform was originally designed to have four SAS (serial-attached SCSI) channels apart from its usual loadout of SATA ports. Early prototypes of socket LGA2011 motherboards displayed at last year's Computex event (June), carried a large number of chipset-driven ports. However, Intel found the chipset-integrated SAS RAID controller (independent device from the SATA RAID controller) to have "unreliable performance", and hence changed its specification at the last moment. So the production specification of X79 ended up having the same SATA port loadout as P67 (two SATA 6 Gb/s + four SATA 3 Gb/s).

This specifications change did not result in a design change of the X79 PCH package, its die remained the same, so did its package and pin-map, which motherboard vendors had for nearly an year. So ECS decided to implement the SAS ports despite being out of specifications. LegitReviews discovered that its X79R-AX sample very much did have SAS ports wired to the PCH. With firmware of the SAS RAID controller and drivers, it could enable and use those ports. Although the SAS ports are physically present on the board, users have to enable them via the UEFI firmware setup program (BIOS).

Japanese company Orange Systems announced a new modular PCI Express SSD, the "Wings" series, which is a collection of products: the PCIe SSD card, its SSD subunits that have to be purchased separately, and those subunits in hard cases that turn them into 2.5-inch simple SSDs. To begin with, Angelbird has three PCIe SSD main card variants: "Lite", 16 GB, and 32 GB. These cards are basically PCI Express x4 SATA 3 Gb/s RAID cards that have SATA power+data interfaces on the card. The 16 GB and 32 GB cards have a localized SSD subunit on the board, while the "lite" variant has no localized subunit, and relies entirely on attached subunits.

These subunits are basically 2.5-inch SSD PCBs stripped of their cases, which Orange Systems refers to as Wings Expansion Cartridges, which are basically SandForce SF-1220 driven SSDs with MLC NAND flash, available in capacities of 60 GB, 115 GB, and 240 GB. When attached in pairs to the Wings PCIe SSD card, the card's main controller runs them in a RAID 0 configuration that is abstract to the host, delivering increased performance. Lastly, these "Expansion Cartridges" are available with their outer shells, branded as "Crest SSDs".

Everyone knows the N4200PRO, one of the first Atom D525 based NAS. Thecus is now announcing its proud successor, the N4800. This time, the N4800 will be one of the first Intel Atom N2700 based NAS!

Gathering what's been best for the N4200 series, the N4800 also has its own fair share of new technologies with no less than 2 GB of DDR3 RAM. This very powerful NAS will become a must-have for all small and medium businesses in need of centralized storage, application serving, and top-notch response time within multi-user environments. For the more demanding users, the N4800 will also have its use at home.

Mushkin unveiled three new lines of consumer solid state drives (SSDs) at CES, the Chronos GO, Atlas, and Scorpion. Chronos Go is a series of simple SSDs in the 1.8-inch SATA 6 Gb/s form-factor, Atlas is a series of mSATA SSDs based on a fast controller that takes advantage of SATA 6 Gb/s interface, while Scorpion is a line of ultra-high performance PCI-Express SSDs. At the heart of all three is SandForce SF-2281 SSD controller. Chronos GO is available in Standard and Deluxe variants, both offering sequential read speeds up to 565 MB/s, and write speeds up to 525 MB/s, with 4K random write performance of 90,000 IOPS. These drives are available in capacities of up to 480 GB.

Next up are the Atlas mSATA drives. These include standard and deluxe variants, too, with the same sequential read speeds of up to 565 MB/s. It's just that the deluxe variant offers slightly higher write speeds of up to 535 MB/s, while the standard one stays at up to 525 MB/s. These drives will be available in capacities up to 240 GB. Both Chronos GO and Atlas lines will be available sometime in Q1, 2012.

Marvell introduced its latest line of SATA 6 Gbps controllers, under the 88SE92 Series. The series includes the 2-port 88SE9220, 4-port 88SE9230, and 4-port 88SE9235. All three take advantage of the new PCI-Express 2.0 x2 interface. PCI-Express x2 (2 lanes) has till now only been hypothetically possible, since PCI-SIG has no slot specification for it. With increasing need for system bandwidth while keeping pin-counts and package sizes low by onboard controllers (such as SATA 6 Gb/s and USB 3.0), PCIe 2.0 x2 has emerged as a viable solution based on the proven PCIe 2.0 specification, as PCIe 3.0 is yet to attain maturity in the industry. PCIe 2.0 x2 gives the controller system bandwidth of 1000 MB/s per direction, 2000 MB/s total. This ensures that a connected SATA 6 Gb/s device doesn't face a bottleneck at a given time, something which was impossible on older PCIe 2.0 x1 chips.

This system bandwidth bottleneck alleviation also allowed Marvell to add support for up to 4 SATA 6 Gb/s ports on the 88SE9230 and 88SE9235. All three controllers further support port multipliers. Among the three, the 88SE9230 is the top-of-the-line chip, supporting Marvell RAID software, HyperDuo (Marvell's in-house SSD caching technology), RAID 0, 1, 10 modes, AHCI, and 128/256-bit AES native encryption. The 88SE9235 is a cost-effective variant of the 88SE9230, it lacks RAID, and only features AHCI/IDE modes. It also lacks native encryption. The 88SE9220, the 2-port controller, otherwise supports all the features of the 88SE9230, except of course support for RAID 10 (since it's not possible with just 2 member disks).

QNAP Systems, Inc. today unveils the next generation of its extremely popular and award-winning TuboNAS server lineup, along with its latest VioStor NVR video surveillance systems. In addition, the company is pleased to debut new NAS Firmware (3.6) and a new storage expansion solution for its business-class Turbo NAS.

The new NAS series, available in 2, 4, 5, 6, or 8-drive versions, are powered by a high performance dual-core Intel Atom processor. This new range provides the perfect blend of performance, business-ready features and value that make QNAP the ideal networked storage choice for small and medium-sized businesses.

LaCie announced its latest peripherals featuring Thunderbolt technology today at the 2012 International CES. The new 2big Thunderbolt Series delivers speed, flexibility and capacity, while the eSATA Hub Thunderbolt Series allows users to connect external eSATA drives to their new Macs. This announcement follows the unprecedented success of LaCie's Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series and further asserts the company's commitment to deliver high-quality products featuring Thunderbolt technology.

"LaCie is proud to offer the widest range of storage solutions featuring Thunderbolt technology," said Erwan Girard, Professional Business Unit Manager, LaCie. "These products are some of the fastest and most flexible storage solutions on the market. They will dramatically accelerate the workflow of even the most demanding digital users."

HighPoint Technologies, Inc., an industry leading HBA and storage solutions manufacturer, has announced a new milestone in 6Gb/s SSD storage performance. Recent driver and firmware updates for the best-selling RocketRAID 2700 series of 6Gb/s SAS HBA's dramatically improve the performance of RAID and non-RAID SSD configurations.

As the cost-per-gigabyte ratio of Nand Flash Chips continues to improve, SSD's have become the storage device of choice for many PC enthusiasts, gamers and media professionals. Multi-SSD configurations, once regulated to ultra-high-end workstations and enterprise servers, are now realistic propositions for the high-performance personal computing market. HighPoint SAS 6Gb/s HBA's are the ideal storage companion for such configurations. The RocketRAID 2700 series has been performance tuned to support today's fastest 6Gb/s SSD's, boosting transfer rates by as much as 50%.

Apart from the powerful little Mr. Clone 3.0 drive-cloning and docking device, Japanese company AREA also launched the SATA 6 Gb/s TwinTurbo Hybrid addon-card. 2-port SATA 6 Gb/s cards aren't new, but they either come in 2-port internal SATA, or 2-port eSATA forms, making you have to choose between the two types. This addon-card from AREA features two internal SATA 6 Gb/s ports, two eSATA 6 Gb/s ports, and uses a common 2-port SATA 6 Gb/s controller.

The ingenuity here is a simple jumper-based way of configuring those two SATA channels to individually work as internal SATA or eSATA. So now you can set the card to have two eSATA 6 Gb/s ports, two internal SATA ports, or one internal SATA and an eSATA, whichever way you'd like, by simply toggling two sets of four jumpers switching which way the data traces of each SATA channel end up. The card uses an ASMedia ASM1061 2-port PCIe SATA 6 Gb/s controller, which supports IDE, AHCI, and simple RAID modes. It connects to the host over PCI-Express 2.0 x1. Slated for May 2012, the AREA SATA TwinTurbo Hybrid will be priced at 2,980 JPY, or $38.

RAIDON is releasing the new generation of SAS storage solutions, GR2880 and GR4880. These models can to be easily deployed while offering a stable performance and scheduled backup to the SMB. GR2880 and GR4880 offer remarkable SAS storage solutions, embed dual SAS host interface to the fastest data throughput for an extraordinary performance, also provides up to RAID 6 the highest RAID level protection to data from work station and data server for a secured operating environment.

Both models also provide snapshot function which only offered from high standard storage devices. This function will backup stored data in records from designation time, to prevent data encounters inevitable problems through capability of restoring primitive correct data from files of saved records.

Mouse Computer Japan (MCJ) introduced its latest notebook for gamers on the move, the i950PA5-SP. With its 17.3-inch form-factor, it classifies more as a desktop replacement, making it quite the LAN Party-animal. Under its hood is an Intel Core i7-2960XM quad-core processor clocked at 2.70 GHz (3.70 GHz max. turbo), a whopping 32 GB of RAM, two Intel SSD 320 series 120 GB drives in RAID 0, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M graphics with 2 GB GDDR5 memory, Blu-ray writer, WiFi b/g/n, and Bluetooth 3.0. The 17.3-inch display packs a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The i950PA5-SP is priced at 299,880 JPY, that's US $3,850.

RAIDON unveiled a new Internal RAID module-MR2020 is in the market. With the aim to industrial market and embedded application, MR2020 accepts two 2.5-inch hard drives to enhance the reliability of the system and supports RAID 1 for instantly data backup.

Considering the advantages of 2.5-inch hard drives such as less noise, heat-resistance, stability, less heat production and space saving etc, RAIDON transfers the hardware backup technology from 3.5-inch hard drives to 2.5-inch. MR2020, an internal storage module designed for working in IPC, product lines, servers and work stations.

The TRIM command feature has become an industry standard for internal garbage collection on SSDs. Unlike with magnetic storage devices such as hard drives, in NAND flash storage devices, new data can't simply be overwritten on existing deleted data (like overwriting on cassette tapes), instead NAND flash cells are first put through erase cycles, and then fresh data is written on them. This leads to degradation of performance in SSDs, as all deleted data will be put through erase cycles. The TRIM command allows the drive to tag freshly deleted data for disposal, and then erase flash memory occupied by that data when idling, and dynamically allocating erased cells for fresh data. This dramatically reduces write performance degradation of SSDs. Unfortunately, issuing TRIM commands to SSDs that are part of a RAID volume is so far not possible, because the RAID volume acts as a sort of an abstraction layer between the OS and physical disks. Some low-level data about member disks can still be read by diagnostic tools, but that's about it.

If the Release Notes document of Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) driver 11.5.0.1109 Alpha (read here) is to be believed, Intel plans to bring TRIM support to RAID 0 volumes with a future version of RST. Snooping through the document, one can find the following line:

2. This release will not enable the TRIM on RAID0 feature, but it will be added in the next RST 11.5 release. Contact your RST AE representative with questions.

Motherboard platforms change frequently, especially when a new chipset is unleashed. The big change coming from Intel recently is the high-end X79 chipset, taking over from the crusty old X58 chipset. The new socket boasting a scarcely credible 2011 pins to allow the new Sandy Bridge-E processor has more memory channels. The newly released X79 platform is known for the astonishing OC capability. Designed for serious overclockers, ASRock is excited to introduce several high-performance motherboards based on Intel X79 chipset.

"The motherboard is the basis of your rig, and will dictate how well the rest of your PC's components perform." Commenting on the new release, James Lee, V.P of ASRock Sales and Marketing, is with confidence. "ASRock X79 Overclock KING Motherboard Series offer the Digi Power (the most stable CPU voltage), Premium Gold Caps (top-tier capacitors), X-FAN (the smart cooling design) and Game Blaster (a Sound & LAN 2-in-1 card exclusively offered from ASRock), everything essential for overclocking. Our exciting X79 mobos could boost the performance of any kind of PC!" He stated.