HighPoint Technologies, Inc., a leading HBA and storage solutions manufacturer, is now shipping its latest SAS 6Gb/s HBA, the RocketRAID 2711. Designed specifically for workstations and entry-level servers, the RocketRAID 2711 is an external 4-port, SAS 6Gb/s PCI-E 2.0 x8 RAID controller supports SAS/SATA devices in a variety of storage configurations including direct connectivity, SATA JBOD, and SAS expansion.

The RocketRAID 2711 delivers enterprise management and connectivity features at entry level costs. The Industry standard external Mini-SAS port (SFF-8088) simplifies installation procedures and is compatible with a wide range of storage devices available for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac platforms, including the recent release of MacOS X Lion. The low-profile design allows the card to be integrated into a variety of rack-mount and chassis designs.

As the first to ship a multi-disk 1TB hard disk drive (HDD) in 2007, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced that is has achieved yet another 1TB milestone by squeezing it on a single disk. Leveraging the company's strong R&D heritage and time-to-market leadership, the new one terabyte per platter (1TB/platter), one-disk, Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.D drive family is now shipping worldwide. Featured in both Deskstar and CinemaStar brands, Hitachi is providing a full range of capacities, 250GB - 1TB, on both low RPM CoolSpin and 7,200 RPM platforms.

With the addition of the new Deskstar and CinemaStar drives, which are first in a family of 1TB/platter drives, Hitachi continues to offer one of the broadest most reliable product lines for desktop and mobile solutions. For the ultra thin and light notebook market, Hitachi delivers the 7mm z-height Travelstar Z5K500 drives (636 gigabits per square inch "Gb/in²"). And now, ideal for high-performing desktop computers and the consumer electronics (CE) market, Hitachi presents the new 1TB/platter Deskstar and CinemaStar family drives (569 Gb/in²).

Gigabyte released a new utility that allows you to change the mode of the chipset SATA controller between IDE, AHCI, and RAID (if available), from within Windows. While the switching isn't exactly on-the-fly (because changing SATA mode is effectively changing the SATA controller as Windows sees it, and hence can't happen on-the-fly), it certainly saves the trouble of going into BIOS setup and digging out that option. The utility works by writing the value of the selected mode to the CMOS, and prompting a system reboot for the change to take effect. Gigabyte's Disk Mode Switch utility works on Gigabyte motherboards based on Intel 6-series chipset (H61, H67, P67, and Z68). Now why you'd need a Windows-based utility to change a BIOS setting as infrequently changed as SATA controller mode is something we'll leave it to you to comment on.DOWNLOAD: Gigabyte Disk Mode Switch

SAPPHIRE Technology, a leading manufacturer and global supplier of graphics, mainboard and multimedia solutions has just introduced a new mainboard developed to support the latest SandyBridge family of CPU's from Intel.

The SAPPHIRE Pure Platinum Z68 is a full ATX sized board that supports the 2nd Generation Intel SandyBridge i3 / i5 / i7 processor family using socket LGA1155. Four dual channel memory sockets are provided, supporting up to 16GB of DDR3 memory with current technology, and capable of supporting up to 32GB when suitable modules become available. There two USB 3.0 ports and four USB 2.0 ports (plus 8 on headers), as well as Gigabit LAN and Bluetooth connectivity with EDR (enhanced data rate). It has four SATA II 3G ports, and two SATA III 6G ports (+ two more on a header) and supports Intel "Rapid Storage" technology as well as RAID 1, 0, 5 and 10.

German brand EOLIZE is hereby announcing its first Mini-ITX Case aiming for private and corporate market. EOLIZE SVD-NC11-4 chassis is ready to be used for NAS and Home Servers based on common aftermarkets Mini-ITX Motherboards.

Prices for Hard Drives are falling constantly while the capacity increases as well as the demand for mass storage solutions from private and corporate users. Hence puts NAS and Home Servers more into focus of end-users, small and medium-sized businesses. EOLIZE SVD-NC11-4 Mini-ITX chassis is a comparatively cheaper solution for these applications. It furthermore comes in a stylish black overall design to fit in most environments.

Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, today announced the USB 3.0 Express ST2, a new dual channel USB 3.0 flash that hits price points comparable to USB 2.0. As USB 3.0 begins to proliferate through the market, customers are anxious to utilize the new capabilities of these machines and get a taste of what USB 3.0 has to offer. Many are simply looking to hit speed here to fore impossible on the USB 2.0 bus, without breaking the bank. For those customers, the ST2 is perfect. Fully backward compatible to USB 2.0, the ST2 is future proof, offering excellent performance on bus the USB 2.0 or 3.0 bus.

Offering similar performance as our USB 3.0 Express DUO (67MB/s read, 24MB/s write), the ST2 now gives our customers a choice in case design. Based on our popular design recently debuted with the Express RC8, the ST2 is enclosed in a sleek aluminum housing and accented by a translucent blue plastic trim. The design characteristics offer both feature parity and a strong family resemblance. Just like the RC8, the translucent plastic features on the ST2 serve as both a means to retain the cap and it acts as a light pipe for the enclosed blue LED; even straight through the cap. Available in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB capacities, the new USB 3.0 Express ST2 is NOW IN STOCK and ready for immediate shipment. MSRP for the 8GB ST2 is $20 USD.

MSI is unveiling its new generation top-of-the-line GT683DX gaming computer, featuring the ultimate in performance and hardware. It packs Intel's second generation Core i7-2630QM quad core processor, nVidia's latest and greatest GeForce GTX 570M discrete graphics card, four DDR3 memory slots, accelerated dual hard disk architecture, as well as Dynaudio and THX TruStudio Pro smart wrap around sound. Taipei-MSI just introduced the GT683DX gaming laptop with powerful hardware, including Intel's 2nd generation Core i7-2630QM quad core processor and nVidia's newest GeForce GTX 570M discrete graphics card (1.5GB GDDR5 display memory), representing a 20% improvement in performance over other discrete graphics cards currently on the market to deliver hiccup-free graphics even when you play the latest high-resolution games. It received a record 12,475 points when it was tested in the performance mode on 3DMark Vantage.

ASUS unveiled its first socket FM1 motherboard in the mini-ITX form-factor, catering to the premium HTPC and small form-factor (SFF) markets. Like with similar mini-ITX boards, the F1A75-I Deluxe crams in all the connectivity features it can on its tiny PCB, outdoing even large ATX boards. It is based on the AMD A75 chipset. The FM1 socket supports AMD's A-Series "Llano" APUs, and is powered by a 4+1 phase VRM. It is wired to two full-length DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting dual-channel DDR3-1866 MHz memory. The board draws power from standard 24-pin ATX with 4-pin CPU power.

The lone expansion slot is a PCI-Express 2.0 x16, letting you plug in just about any PCIe addon card. Storage connectivity includes four SATA 6 Gb/s ports with RAID support, and one eSATA 6 Gb/s. Other connectivity features include 6-channel HD audio with optical SPDIF (our only gripe), four USB 3.0 ports (two on the rear panel, two by header), WiFi b/g/n, gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, and a number of USB 2.0 ports. Display connectivity includes one each of DVI, HDMI 1.4a, and DisplayPort 1.2. The HDMI 1.4a output includes 8-channel HD audio of the GPU, so the 6 analog audio channels is sort of compensated. The board features ASUS TPU performance control chip, EPU energy-efficiency chip, and a UEFI firmware with ASUS EZ-mode GUI setup program. There's no word on pricing.

Once a PC enthusiast-centric company, OCZ is taking the solid state drive business seriously, across all market segments, consumer-thru-enterprise. The company now has SSDs in nearly all form-factors, making use of nearly all industry standard interfaces, it even has its own high-bandwidth interface modelled. Some of its highest performance SSDs are in the PCI-Express addon card form-factor, that include SSDs with transfer rates well within the gigabyte per second range.

OCZ CEO Ryan Petersen will be holding a conference call with the press later today, in which he will be talking about the company's enterprise SSD business, and unveil a new PCI-Express SSD, called Z-Drive R4. Z-Drive is OCZ's enterprise PCI-E SSD targeted at systems in which throughput is everything. The Z-Drive R4 was spotted at this year's Computex event, it is essentially a PCI-Express 2.0 x8 addon card that has an 8-port SATA 6 Gb/s controller, driving eight, yes, eight SSD subunits in RAID 0. Each subunit consists of a SandForce SF-2281 controller with its own NAND flash memory. As with all compound SSDs, the RAID 0 volume is completely abstract to the host machine.

Other World Computing (OWC), a leading zero emissions Mac and PC technology company, announced today it has expanded the new Mercury Elite Pro Dual mini bus powered (no AC adapter needed) portable hardware RAID storage solution with two new hard drive and three new OWC SSD based models. Now offering 10 pre-configured choices with hardware RAID-1 "mirrored" redundancy for "live activity" data protection; or RAID-0 "stripe" for maximum performance capacity, the Mercury Elite Pro Dual mini contains two 2.5" hard drives or OWC Mercury Electra 6G SSDs for up to 2.0TB of capacity and a "Quad Interface" of FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0, & eSATA connections for Plug and Play data transfer speeds up to 300MB/s with Mac and PC computers.

Buffalo announced the LinkStation WSX2.0TL/R1, a compact NAS server that makes use of two 1 TB 2.5-inch SATA hard drives in RAID 0 to offer 2 TB of storage space in a fast volume. You can reconfigure the drives to different RAID modes, or make them work as standalone volumes, as well. Measuring 40 x 82 x 135 mm, the LinkStation WSX2.0TL/R1 uses common 1 Gb/s Ethernet to connect to the network, and USB 2.0 to take in additional storage devices that follow the USB Mass Storage code. It is fully DLNA compliant, making it compatible with a variety of networked devices apart from computers. It can act as an iTunes server, as well as a Bittorrent download box. Data backup software is included. It is available in piano black and pearl white options. Slated for a mid-August launch in Japan, it is priced at US $450.

SAPPHIRE Technology, a leading manufacturer and global supplier of graphics, mainboard and multimedia solutions has just introduced a new mainboard developed to support the latest A-series Fusion APU family from AMD.

AMD's A-series APUs combine - on a single chip - a Quad core CPU, interface circuitry equivalent to a Northbridge and a DX11 graphics core equivalent to a desktop level graphics card, and also incorporating a 3rd-generation UVD (universal video decoder) for the accelerated decoding of HD and Blu-ray content, including stereoscopic 3D support. This APU series together with the A75 chipset, which has native support for the latest interface standards, such as SATA 6G and USB 3.0 as well as USB 2.0 and PCI-Express Gen2, makes a powerful combination that delivers all the features required in a state-of-the-art PC.

Apple today unveiled the new Apple Thunderbolt Display, the world's first display with Thunderbolt I/O technology and the ultimate docking station for your Mac notebook. With just a single cable, users can connect a Thunderbolt-enabled Mac to the 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display and access its FaceTime camera, high quality audio, and Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, USB 2.0 and Thunderbolt ports. Designed specifically for Mac notebooks, the new display features an elegant, thin, aluminum and glass enclosure, and includes a MagSafe connector that charges your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.

"The Apple Thunderbolt Display is the ultimate docking station for your Mac notebook," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "With just one cable, users can dock with their new display and connect to high performance peripherals, network connections and audio devices."

HighPoint Technologies, Inc., the industry's price-leading manufacturer of host-to-target storage controllers, is now shipping the RocketRAID 2782 32-port PCI-Express Gen 2 RAID HBA. With an MSRP of $849 US, the RocketRAID 2782 reduces costs by as much as 50% over comparable RAID HBA's.

No other manufacturer delivers high-density Host RAID storage solutions with 32-dedicated SAS 6Gb/s ports. Comparable HBA's only offer up to 24 ports, and require sacrificing one or more internal Mini-SAS ports in order to utilize the external connectors. The RR2782's defines no-compromise, high-connectivity - all 32 ports are available at all times, in any combination.

Introducing the MB882HX-1SB 2.5" SATA SSD Xpander Hybrid Adapter. Using a high speed 2.5" SATA SSD and a high capacity 3.5" SATA hard drive, you can combine them to create a new breed of species. Using our hybrid technology, we can take a moderate or 2nd generation 2.5" SATA SSD in combination with a mid to higher end 3.5" SATA hard drive which automatically creates "hybrid partition" and "storage partition". The "hybrid partition" doubles the capacity of the SSD drive and provides high performance in transfer rates. The storage partition gives you the remaining capacity of the hard drive* (the size of the 3.5" SATA hard drive minus "hybrid partition" size).

This is the perfect upgrade solution without purchasing an expensive high capacity SSD. The Xpander Hybrid Adapter doubles the sequential transfer rates of the hard drive exclusively in the hybrid partition, it is great for people who move, play or edit large media files. Such as a video editor, graphic designer, HD movie enthusiast that use applications like Adobe Photoshop, Sony Vegas and Windows Media Center that require large file loads / transfers. For editing, you can use the hybrid portion as a sketch drive; move the working files to it for fast editing. When you are done with the file we recommend moving the file to a RAID protected archive drive. The "storage partition" is perfect for non-important applications or files i.e. games, movies, music, or other media files.

Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, today announced their next generation SSD, the TeraDrive PT3.
Featuring the SandForce 2200 processor, SATA 6 Gb/s interface, and Double Data Rate, ONFiTM flash, the new TeraDrive PT3 offers a significant leap in performance over drives offered just a few months ago. The union of these 3 new technologies has forever changed the storage landscape. Right out of the gate, this new generation SSD stretches well within the new found bandwidth promised by the SATA 3.0 bus and breaks the 500MB/s barrier in both Read and Write scores. The comparisons between SSDs and HDDs just became a little harder to justify.

The only SSD processor to compress data before writing, SandForce's unique set of technologies enables the new TeraDrive PT3 to offer enhanced performance, flash durability and data integrity. Add to that the introduction of ONFi, double data rate flash, and the SATA 6 Gb/s interface, and we have one of the largest incremental leaps in performance that the storage market has ever seen.

Other World Computing (OWC), a leading zero emissions Mac and PC technology company, today announced the OWC Mercury Electra 6G SSD, a new consumer/prosumer targeted SandForce Driven SATA Revision 3.0 6Gb/s Solid State Drive. Designed and built in the USA utilizing the highest quality components available, including Tier 1/Grade A NAND, the OWC Mercury Electra delivers 556 MB/s read and 523 MB/s write sustained data rates for over 7X faster performance than a standard factory hard drive found in Mac and PC computers.

Three Consumer/Prosumer Models Offered Starting At $229.99. Offering the SATA Revision 3.0 performance of a 6 Gb/s SSD, but aggressively priced like a SATA Revision 2.0 3G SSD, the OWC Mercury Electra 6G is ideal for high speed personal computing, home office environments, gaming, and production workstations, can be incorporated into a RAID 1 or SPAN configuration, and is available for immediate ordering in three capacity sizes:

Lenovo today announced two new additions to the ThinkServer family - the TS130 and the TS430 - that give small-to-medium businesses and corporate branch offices a performance boost and powerful manageability tools. A perfect fit for businesses with few or no IT staff, they feature the latest Intel Xeon processor technology, are loaded with remote management tools and offer easy setup.

Lenovo also announced the ThinkCentre M71e, an entry-level desktop to give mainstream corporate offices the technologies they need to conduct business productively, securely and reliably every day. The desktop features 2nd generation Intel Core i processors, rapid boot up and security authentication features.

While not the very first of its kind, Intel Smart Response technology took the enthusiast community by storm, offering a middle-ground between small but fast SSDs, and large but slow HDDs. By caching on the SSD, Smart Response is able to give system responsiveness a significant boost. Before that, HDD major Seagate put a tiny SSD component onto its Momentus XT hard drive, to chop access times a little. Now OCZ inverted the concept, and strapped an HDD onto its SSD to make it more capacious, on its new RevoDrive Hybrid.

Here, the major component is a SSD RAID 0 on a stick, which pools data onto an HDD. RevoDrive is a PCI-Express x4 SSD card, which uses a number of SandForce SF-1200 driven SSD sub-units in RAID 0 that's abstract to the host machine. The card is normally available in capacities as low as 60 GB, or as high as 480 GB. On RevoDrive Hybrid, OCZ installed a 2.5-inch hard drive with capacities as high as 1 TB, with the SSD component very much intact. The device promises to give you RevoDrive-like speeds, and humongous capacities, by streaming low-access data onto the HDD.

The RamSan-70 "Gorilla" is a high-performance, half-length PCIe card with 900 GB of usable SLC Flash capacity. Delivering 330K IOPS and 2 GB/s of bandwidth, it offers higher performance and greater capacity than any other half-length SLC Flash PCIe card.

Texas Memory Systems, Inc. (TMS), maker of The World's Fastest Storage, introduces the new high-performance RamSan-70, a 900-GB half-length PCIe card featuring Toshiba's newest 32nm SLC Flash. The RamSan-70 carries on Texas Memory Systems' tradition of delivering a complete integrated RamSan storage solution on a single board.

HighPoint Technologies, Inc., a leading HBA and storage solutions manufacturer, announces the arrival of new high port-count PCI-Express x16 SAS 6Gb/s HBA's. Available with up to 32 dedicated ports, RocketRAID high port count SAS HBA's provide maximum port count for minimal investment while delivering a connectivity bandwidth up to 19200 MB/s; ideal for a wide-range of high-performance and high-density storage applications.

Here is the complete socket AM3+ motherboard first-wave of ASUS, the M5A series, short and sweet. Based entirely on AMD 9-series chipset, including 9-series southbridge chips, the first-wave caters to gamer, performance, and enthusiast market segments, and only includes those chipset models that rely on discrete graphics (leaving out AMD 980G, 990GX). The lineup even includes models from ASUS' gamer/enthusiast-oriented Republic of Gamers (ROG) family, and The Ultimate Force (TUF) family.

The lineup starts with three models based on AMD 970 + SB950 chipset, which is a single discrete graphics card platform. The M5A97 is the entry-point, it bases itself entirely on what the chipset offers, plus two USB 3.0 ports. Moving up is M5A97 Pro, which has everything its little sibling has, plus a stronger 6+2 phase Digi+ VRM, and two eSATA ports. The M5A97 EVO, which was pictured a little while ago. This has everything the Pro variant has, plus two front-panel USB 3.0 ports, and FireWire.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading designer, manufacturer and distributor of high-performance solid state drives (SSDs), today unveiled the VeloDrive PCI-Express SSD. Designed to meet the needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), enterprise clients and system integrators, the VeloDrive optimizes high-performance computing and storage applications, providing unparalleled versatility and simplified integration.

"The VeloDrive is the latest addition to our comprehensive lineup of PCIe SSDs. A truly configurable solution, it helps a range of customers accelerate their application performance," said Daryl Lang, VP of Product Management, OCZ Technology Group. "The ability to run the VeloDrive in multiple modes provides clients with the freedom to use the raid stack of their choice. This maximizes performance and creates faster, more seamless deployments with RAID stacks that may already have been qualified for their unique usage model."

The world's most expandable 2U server with quad NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and integrated InfiniBand, the ESC4000 helps professional users conserve space and energy while offering a high density architecture that supports dual CPUs. Flexible 8+1 expansion options and intelligent fan-control technology with 20% energy savings make it the server of choice for users who wish to combine performance, high efficiency, and environmental responsibility.

The ESC4000 joins previous entries in the ESC server series from ASUS, including the ESC1000 and ESC2000, making it the first ever 2U rack model in its category. The ESC4000 offers almost double performance with the same space requirements when compared to similar products thanks to an innovative high density design. Through its advanced parallel computing performance, flexible design and versatile hardware, the ESC4000 serves the needs of high-end professional applications, including scientific, weather and financial modeling, as well as advanced medical and life sciences uses.

Sharkoon presents two external SATA RAID cases in a stylish, black metal design, which allows multifunctional configuration possibilities for a fail-safe hard drive system. The Sharkoon 2-Bay RAID Box offers two lockable Hot Swap bays for 3.5 inch SATA hard drives, each with up to 3 Terabyte storage capacity. The inserted data medium can be operated in RAID level 0, 1 or JBOD. The desired mode can be selected through a switch on the case's front. Blue LEDs display operation, data transfer and the selected RAID mode. Cooling is ensured by the 70mm fan on the backside. For external connection, the 2-Bay RAID Box provides a USB3.0 interface. The case measures 215 x 130 x 120 mm (L x W x H) and weighs 1926 grams. An instruction manual, power cable, USB3.0 cable and two keys are provided within shipping.