Intel today introduced 1.5 TB variants of the Optane 905p SSD that implements 3D XPoint memory. The drive comes in half-height PCI-Express 3.0 x4 add-on card, and 15 mm-thick 2.5-inch form-factor with U.2 interface. Both variants offer sequential transfer rates of up to 2,600 MB/s reads, with up to 2,200 MB/s writes. Random access speeds are rated at up to 575,000 IOPS reads, with up to 550,000 IOPS writes. A function of its sheer capacity and 3D XPoint, endurance for these drives is rated at 27.37 PB (bytes written). The drives retain the feature set of their less capacious siblings, including 256-bit AES native encryption. The company didn't release pricing.

GIGABYTE today announced its latest generation of servers based on Intel's Skylake Purley architecture. This new generation brings a wealth of new options in scalability - across compute, network and storage - to deliver solutions for any application, from the enterprise to the data center to HPC. (Jump ahead to system introductions).

This server series adopts Intel's new product family - officially named the 'Intel Xeon Scalable family' and utilizes its ability to meet the increasingly diverse requirements of the industry, from entry-level HPC to large scale clusters.. The major development in this platform is around the improved features and functionality at both the host and fabric levels. These enable performance improvements - both natively on chip and for future extensibility through compute, network and storage peripherals. In practical terms, these new CPUs will offer up to 28 cores, and 48 PCIe lanes per socket.

Designed to address the explosive worldwide demand for digital storage, Seagate today launched the world's first 1.5 terabyte (TB) 2.5-inch portable external drive. Available immediately, the new 1.5TB FreeAgent GoFlex ultra-portable drive delivers an all-in-one, technically advanced solution to help store, share and enjoy libraries of digital content in one's preferred medium-whether on a Mac or PC, or a television, at home or on the go. With 1.5TB of capacity people can now store and carry up to 60 HD movies, 750 video games, thousands of photos or countless hours of digital music.

"Today's announcement is a 'triple-crown' of consumer technology-packaging record breaking capacity, blazingly fast USB 3.0 connectivity and the bonus of movie entertainment-making the 1.5TB GoFlex ultra-portable drive an unprecedented and innovative solution," said Darcy Clarkson, vice president of Global Retail Sales and Marketing for Seagate. "Bringing this solution to market on the heels of our 3TB GoFlex Desk drive and the Momentus XT solid state hybrid drive is proof of Seagate's continuing technology leadership and tradition of setting storage industry milestones."

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in digital consumer electronics and information technology, today announced the F4EG, the world's highest-density, environmentally friendly hard disk drive (HDD) for the desktop market. The EcoGreen F4 features a 2-terabyte (TB) capacity - 667 GB for each of its three disks - and is capable of storing up to 880 hours of DVD video or 500,000 songs in MP3 format. The internal F4EG utilizes Samsung's high-density design technology to provide better performance, low power and improved reliability to its 'EcoGreen' hard drives.

"Storage-hungry multimedia professionals, gamers and home PC users continue to increase the amount of video, music, photo and other personal data they store and back-up," said I.C. Park, vice president, Storage Sales, Semiconductor Business, Samsung Electronics. "The F4EG delivers all the benefits of a low-power drive yet features top performance quality and is environmentally friendly."

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in digital consumer electronics and information technology today announced the F3EG, its new high-performance environmentally-friendly HDD (hard disk drive) for the desktop market. The EcoGreen F3EG, a higher capacity model from its predecessor the F2EG, features 2TB capacity with 500GB per disk that is capable of storing up to 880 hours of DVD video or 500,000 or more songs in MP3 format. With increased recording density, the EcoGreen F3 drive is more power efficient by supporting a capacity up to 2TB with four disks.

"Storage-hungry multimedia professionals, gamers and home PC users continue to increase the amount of video, music, photo and other personal data they store and back-up," said In Cheol Park, vice president, Storage Sales, Samsung Electronics. "The F3EG delivers all the benefits of a low-power drive yet features high performance and is environmentally friendly."

Transcend Information, Inc., a worldwide leader in storage and multimedia products, today introduced the latest addition to its StoreJet external hard drive lineup, the StoreJet 35T. With its TurboHDD USB transfer mode and One Touch auto-backup button, the compact 3.5-inch StoreJet 35T is an ideal data management system for uploading, downloading, storing and transferring vital data and information.

About the size of a hardback book, the black streamlined StoreJet 35T offers up to 1.5TB capacity, providing ample space for essential files, folders, documents, photos, music and high-definition videos. Its slender design allows it to be placed upright, thus occupying a smaller footprint to save precious desk space. Ideal for use at home or at the office, the handsomely designed StoreJet 35T is both stylish and practical.

LaCie announced today the availability of two new high capacity Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions - Big Disk Network and d2 Network. These professional file servers are optimized for users to instantly store, share, and back up files, from any PC or Mac on a wired or wireless network. LaCie's new NAS solutions deliver high-performance and professional-class reliability, in an easy-to-use network solution for the home or small office.

The d2 Network supports up to 1.5TB capacity, while the Big Disk Network combines two drives in a RAID 0 setting, for up to 3TBs of storage. Both NAS solutions are perfect for advanced users or small to medium sized offices that want to develop workgroup environments for up to 50 users (15 at one time). Network administrators can choose from various security levels for user profiles, groups, and public or guest access. Users can connect an external USB drive to increase security through scheduled backups, or even expand capacity. The d2 Network also includes an eSATA connection for storage expansion.

Samsung Electronics, a world leader in digital consumer electronics and information technology, today announced its new EcoGreen F2EG hard disk that delivers a massive 1.5 TB of capacity with 500 GB per disk. With increased recording density and reduced number of disks, the EcoGreen F2 drive is more power efficient by supporting a capacity up to 1.5TB with 3 disks.
"Lower platter count means less power to start the motor, less power to continuously spin the motor and a lighter head-stack which takes less power to seek," said Andy Higginbotham, director of HDD sales and marketing for the Samsung Semiconductor Storage Division. "With fewer heads and disks, the F2EG hard drive has a lower probability of head-disk failures, enabling customers to build more reliable systems."

Japanese hardware manufacturer Logitec (≠ Logitech) released the new LHD-ED line of 1.5TB external hard drives, variants of which are segregated on the basis of connectivity options:

• Model LHD-EDU2 provides just USB 2.0
• Model LHD-EDFU2 provides USB 2.0 and FireWire
• Model LHD-EDSAU2 provides USB 2.0 and eSATA

Connectivity aside, the variants are identical in measuring 42 × 225 × 132.5 mm, weighing 1.1 kg (around 2.42 lbs), and feature hard drives with spindle-speeds of 7,200 rpm. They are backed by a one-year company warranty, and will go on sale by the end of this month at prices ranging between US $282 and $304.

Intel's Core i7 helped strengthen the company's foothold over the desktop CPU market beyond what it already had with the Core 2 series. The level of performance the Core i7 has on offer, comes at an expense of high thermal characteristics, with the rated TDP of 130W to begin with. Eurocom feels it could design a laptop, a portable workstation rather, that features Core i7 series processors. It could be one of the first to do so, with the Phantom i7 D900F.

Holding Core i7 processors in their existing series: models 920, 940, 965 XE, the Phantom i7 holds a 17-inch display with a native resolution of 1920 x 1200 or 1680 x 1050. It features up to 8GB of DDR3 memory and up to 1.5TB of storage using three 500GB hard drives. A Blu-ray or DVD writer drive and a 7-in-1 memory card reader handle removable storage. Graphics will be handled by 1GB variants of GeForce 9800M GTX, Quadro FX 3700 or a soon-to-be-released "G280" graphics accelerator. Connectivity is care of Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, an ExpressCard slot, and optionally Bluetooth. A built-in TV-tuner and a 12-cell battery make for the rest of the package. The Phantom i7 is slated for May.

For people that still experience the freezing problems with their 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives, here is some relief for you. As previously reported here, Seagate has released a new firmware for the small number of drives with strange behaviour. Here's the official statement:

Some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drives may show uncharacteristic operation when used with Mac and Linux operating systems in multi-drive configurations. Users may experiences pauses in video streaming applications or a dropped drive from RAID arrays. Customers seeing these symptoms should contact Seagate Technical Support for a firmware upgrade. In order to assure the proper application of the new firmware, please email a description of the issues you're seeing to Seagate (discsupport@seagate.com) Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. Also, please describe your system, operating system and the application in use when the issue arose, and you will receive a prompt response with appropriate instructions. As an alternative to the contact email address above please access http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/.

Again, to obtain the firmware first you need to find your HDD's model number, serial number, current firmware version using either Seatools for DOS or just look at the drive's sticker it should be written there, and finally you need to describe your system specs, operating system and the application in use when the disk freezes. After you have that information, please contact Seagate Technical Support, by email or by phone, they'll send you the new firmware and probably tell you how to update.

Last week Tom's Hardware had covered a bit about the freezing problems with Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard disk drives. Today, they bring some more info directly from Seagate:

Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware. We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions

Seagate also unveiled the part numbers and firmware versions for the affected models, they are as follows: part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18. If you're one of the "lucky" owners affected by this specific issue, please contact Seagate via their regional support channels. Seagate is also currently working on a firmware update for the affected models.

Seagate today unveiled the industry's first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives to meet explosive worldwide demand for digital-content storage in home and business environments. The debut of the Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drive, the eleventh generation of Seagate's flagship drive for desktop PCs, marks the single largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives - a half-terabyte increase from the previous highest capacity of 1TB, thanks to the capacity-boosting power of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.