Sony today introduced the brand new VAIO Fit laptop built with Sony's innovative digital imaging, sound and display technologies. Alongside the new Fit laptops are enhancements to VAIO's All-in-One Tap 20 and L Series PCs and Sony's top-selling VAIO T Series 15 Ultrabook incorporating all around excellence in productivity and entertainment with rich touch experiences powered by Windows 8.

"We built the brand new VAIO Fit line from many of the same features as our amazingly thin and powerful ultra-premium models but at an entry-level price point," said Pedro LaFargo , SVP, Sony VAIO & Networked Products Division. "Our entire new Fit lineup is optimized for Windows 8 and incorporates the best technology that only Sony can provide from our innovative digital imaging, sound and TV divisions. The new Fit family is providing students and professionals' on-the-go with advanced performance and design."

Building on the momentum of its current line of solid state hybrid drives (SSHD), Seagate Technology plc today announced it will begin shipping its third-generation of SSHD products. Featuring the Seagate Laptop SSHD, 7 mm-high Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD designed for the thinnest and lightest laptops in the industry, and the all-new Seagate Desktop SSHD, the line of drives will deliver blazing-fast performance and high-capacity at an affordable price.

Boasting solid state drive (SSD) like speed and hard disk drive capacity, the new Seagate Laptop and Laptop Thin SSHDs are the most affordable way to increase your laptop performance. With storage performance up to 40 percent faster than previous generations, the Laptop and Laptop Thin SSHDs can add as much as 30 percent to total system performance - regardless of the processor inside the system. These products also enable system builders to build high-performance, high-capacity systems, including new thin and light laptops, at mass-market price points.

Toshiba announced the new MQ01ABD series hybrid hard drives for notebooks. Built in the 2.5-inch 9.5 mm-thick form-factor, the drives embed a dual-platter hard drive with 8 GB of SLC NAND flash memory, and 32 MB cache for the hard drive component. The hard drive component has a maximum spindle speed of 5,400 RPM. Available in 750 GB (MQ01ABD075H) and 1 TB (MQ01ABD100H) variants, the drives support SATA 6 Gb/s interface, and Advanced Format. The company did not reveal pricing, as the two drives are being sampled from today.

As hard drives stared at oblivion in the Ultrabook segment, with Intel planning to slim the specification down even further, leaving room for nothing but bare SSDs, WD pulled a rabbit out of its hat with the revolutionary 5 mm-thick hybrid HDD. Following its September 10 announcement, 5 mm-thick hybrid HDDs have reportedly sparked great interest in notebook vendors, which prompted WD to pull its mass-production schedule from Q1 2013 to end of 2012.

A thinner hybrid hard disk drive (HDD) intended to serve as storage media for new computers like Ultrabooks and less bulky than a rival storage form could help the HDD industry in its unremitting battle against tablet devices, according to an IHS iSuppli Storage Space market brief from information and analytics provider IHS.

While the current form of storage for the super-thin Ultrabook laptops produced this year is the hard disk drive containing a cache solid state drive (SSD) element, that form factor at 7 millimeters is still considered too thick and too slow when compared to tablets like the iPad from Apple Inc. Since their appearance on the market two years ago, tablets-with their slim profile and fast "instant-on" capabilities-have eaten mightily into the sales of notebook PCs, whose performance and ease of use have suffered in comparison.

A new and thinner hybrid HDD measuring just 5 millimeters aims to change all that.

WD, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp. today announced it is sampling a 5 mm-thin hard disk drive featuring hybrid technology. WD has developed hard drives slim enough for integration into today's thinnest notebook PCs, which provide high-capacity storage and robustness while featuring instant-on and application performance similar to today's client solid state drives (SSDs). The new technologies will be showcased during WD's Investor Day, Sept. 13, 2012.

"Mobile devices are becoming smaller, thinner, lighter and more responsive," said Matt Rutledge, vice president of client storage solutions at WD. "Working with our technology partners, WD has developed new 5 mm hard drives that enable high capacity storage along with excellent performance and superior economics to allow our customers to expand their thin offerings."

Seagate is now shipping the second generation of Momentus XT, its groundbreaking solid state hybrid drive for consumer and commercial laptops and the company's fastest drive ever for personal computers. With a simple drive upgrade, users can boost boot-up speed and overall performance to turbo-charge their laptop PC. Seven original equipment manufacturers are gearing up to ship laptops powered by the Momentus XT drive. The drive is now available at online retailers Amazon, Canada Computers, CDW, Memory Express, NCIX, Newegg, and TigerDirect.

Powering the Momentus XT drive are Seagate's Adaptive Memory and FAST Factor technologies. Adaptive Memory technology works by identifying data usage patterns, and then moving the most frequently retrieved information to solid state memory for faster access. Adaptive Memory effectively tailors hard drive performance to each user and the applications they use. FAST Factor technology blends the strengths of SSDs and hard disk drives for faster access to applications, quicker bootup and higher overall system speed.

Eurocom, the world's leading developer of highly personalized, high-performance notebook PCs and LCD PCs, plans to launch its new mobile notebook line-up based on Intel Calpella in early October. The Calpella platform is based on Clarksfield processors with four cores that will be marketed by Intel under Core i7 trademark as well code-named Ibex Peak-M core logic that will be branded as Intel PM55.

There will be two notebook models available: 15.6-inch HD EUROCOM W860CU Cougar and 17.3-inch W870CU Cheetah based on Intel i7 Mobile processors, Intel PM55 chipset, DDR3-1333 Memory, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 2x0M or GTX 3x0M series upgradeable MXM 3.0 Type B VGA technology.

Seagate has finally started shipping its Momentus 5400 PSD 2.5-inch hybrid hard drive to OEMs. The drive will be available in 80, 120, and 160GB capacities with a SATA 1.5 interface, 8MB of cache, and 256MB of flash memory to buffer cached write requests to disk. Seagate's HHDs are said to reduce boot time from 40 to 32 seconds while cutting average power consumption from 0.78 to 0.45 watts. However, Melissa Johnson, a Seagate product manager, says the sub-par performance for all HHDs stems from first generation issues with both the BIOS and Vista device drivers because they do not know how to properly utilize the flash memory.