RunCore, the leading manufacturer of high-performance and rugged solid state drives (SSDs), today introduced their latest consumer-grade SSD for ultrabooks and MacBook Air, the Rocket Air SSD.

As moderns laptops are designed ever thinner and lighter to be more energy-saving and easier to carry, demand for improved storage performance is also increasing at the same time. In order to deliver both these advantages, the RunCore Rocket Air SSD is ultra-thin in size, yet provides superb performance. With its internal MLC flash and consumer-grade operating temperature, the RunCore Rocket Air SSD is particularly targeting thin laptops like ultrabooks as well as MacBook Air.

Computex Taipei, the largest computer exhibition in Asia, will start from June 5(Tuesday) to 9 (Saturday). This year Team Group Inc. will be showcasing customized industrial-standard products and Z77 platform at the first floor of Taipei World Trade Center Nangang Exhibition Hall in front of media and clients from all over the world with a brand new look. Everyone is about to be surprised with what they are going to experience.

In addition to the carefully design, fashion-focused stands, Team Group will not only have brightly colored and themed showcases for product display, but also create a space featuring "technical, creative and people-oriented" exquisite style with installation arts. The exhibition focuses on personal experience of life and brings out the image of Team Group as boutique technology. All intelligent product lines will be shown to give general consumers a whole new charisma of "going beyond intelligent technology!"

Century Japan introduced CRNS35U3MR "EX Volume" 2-bay HDD enclosure, which provides fast external storage. The enclosure holds two 3.5-inch SATA hard drives in lockable caddies. It allows you to run them in standalone (as independent USB mass-storage volumes), or in RAID 0 (performance) and RAID 1 (redundancy) modes. To alleviate host interface bottlenecks, the enclosure utilizes USB 3.0 SuperSpeed interface.

The enclosure draws power from an external AC power line (power supply is located internally), its controller logic spins down the hard drives sensing extended periods of inactivity (5 minutes, by default). The enclosure also has a temperature-controlled fan that completely spins down, below a temperature threshold. Measuring 130 x 210 x 115 mm (WxDxH), the enclosure weighs about 1922 g. Slated for early-June, the CRNS35U3MR from Century is priced at 14,800 JPY (US $186).

ASUS announced a new retail and OEM channel DVD writer drive, the DRW-24B5ST. Built in the conventional 5.25-inch SATA form-factor, the drive is said to pack energy-efficient components that reduce idle power draw (mounted disc idling, and no disc idling), by 50%. ASUS branded this feature as E-Green. Armed with 1536 KB of cache, the drive offers DVD access times as low as 160 ms, and CD access times as low as 140 ms. It writes DVDs at speeds as high as 24X depending on the media type, and CDs at speeds as high as 48X. It is priced at 2,500 JPY (US $31).

Introducing MyDigitalSSD Bullet Proof 3 (BP3) mSATA III solid state drives for laptops, ultrabooks, tablets, desktop computers and more.

BP3 drives are easy to install SSD upgrades that eliminate the bottle-neck of stock hard drives and double the performance of SATA II drives with R/W speeds up to 500MB/s and 315MB/s respectively; not only increasing productivity but lowering energy consumption and prolonging battery life per I/O.

Lian Li today announces three new brushed aluminum cases, PC-Q02, PC-Q03, and PC-Q16, designed for modern users who need a compact central storage hub to share information among all their latest generation mobile devices.

The Lian Li PC-Q02, PC-Q03, and PC-Q16 take advantage of the increasing efficiency of small form factor motherboards and progressively cheaper hard drives, and are able to hold the essential storage hardware in a small form factor. They also have high-quality features that are to be expected from Lian Li including: elegant brushed aluminum frames, easy-to-remove pop-off panels, USB 3.0 connectivity, rounded yet stable aluminum feet, as well as many tool-less features to make installations and upgrades easier. These three chassis also all have a dual LED power button which turns blue when on and glows red while reading.

Logitec Japan introduced a new external hard drive (model: LHD-EG40THEU3F), which provides 4 TB of storage. Beneath its enclosure is a 7,200 RPM drive, and to take advantage of its speed, are two high-bandwidth interface options, USB 3.0 and eSATA. Measuring 120 x 199 x 35 mm (WxDxH), and weighing 1.1 kg, the drive packs a 40 mm fan to cool the unit, which gets activated only if the interior temperature crosses a threshold. It relies on an external AC adapter for power. The drive includes support for a variety of TVs that take in USB mass-storage devices. It is priced at 39,800 JPY (US $500).

Team Group Inc., one of the leading manufacturers of memory products in the world, is expanding the SSD market this year. We are constantly working to improve ourselves in R&D capability. In addition to surpassing ourselves technically, Team Group is now rolling out the new generation power-saving SSD SATA II A1 to cut the power bills and watch out for the pockets of consumers who are suffering the increase of fuel and electricity prices. This is one new serious product with a high C/P value!

SSD SATA II A1 features high-speed NAND Flash as the data storage. The built-in 128MB DDR Cache memory combined with S.M.A.R.T, ECC automatic error correction protection, the supports for WIN7 TRIM Command and the PHISON 3105 controller allows writing/reading speed up to 270MB/s and 210MB/s, respectively, and random writing/reading up to 15000/6000 IOPS. It is a perfect evolution of data transmission speed and completeness. The zero-noise and lower power consumption design gives longer operation time and improved working efficiency for laptop users, making SSD SATA II A1.

Keeping your data safe is important. That's why Thecus is manufacturing state-of-the-art devices that make managing your data storage look like a piece of cake! But what do you do when you reach the limit of storage of your hard drives? You could of course by bigger disks, a NAS with more bays or add some external hard drives connected through USB 3.0 or eSATA ports. The cost can add up pretty quick and not everyone can afford all this material.

A more economical and simpler approach to free up some space on your NAS is to transfer your data onto something permanent that can be stored away. Those photos and videos that you haven't watched in years, those projects in 2002 that are no more needed for reference, things you don't want to get rid of because you know the minute you do, Murphy's Law will kick in and you'll need them again.

Silicon Power (SP), the world's leading provider of memory storage solutions today launches a new member of 2.5" SATA II Solid State Disk entry level families - Technology T10. T10, built with a brushed metallic structure, inherits excellent performance and stability from the SATA II families, reaching up to 278 MB per second transfer rate. T10's aesthetic design is the new selection for your personal computer upgrade offering unique style at an affordable price.

Normally when it comes to SSD, it can be described as pricey, rigid, and bulky; however, Silicon Power's T10 can totally alter your perspective when selecting a SSD. Coated in light silver gray, T10 reveals a refined ambiance; its brushed aluminum structure makes T10 an aesthetic artwork. As a SATA II entry level SSD, T10 can be your best economical choice of having both performance and stylish design.

RunCore, leading supplier of high-performance solid-state drives, announces the global launch of its InVincible Solid State Disc drive. This SATA SSD solution provides for highest data security through a special button device that allows for total physical destruction with a single click.

The RunCore InVincible SSDs allow you to protect sensitive data from third party access in two ways with a single click. One method is the intelligent elimination of all your data through overwriting the entire disk with meaningless code. This overwrite-deletion method ensures that there is no way to potentially recover previous data stored to the device, effectively setting you SSD back to factory default.

Dell announced today it is expanding its client virtualization solutions with the introduction of the first virtualized 2U rack workstation enabling up to four concurrent professional graphics users to work from a single workstation from virtually anywhere. The Dell Precision R5500 rack workstation is the first four-GPU (graphics processing unit) configuration to be certified by Citrix with GPU pass-through on Citrix XenServer 6 using Citrix XenDesktop HDX 3D Pro, and brings additional security, IT resource optimization and end user flexibility to high performance workloads. This new usage model is designed for customers running 3D workloads in the engineering, medical, media and entertainment, scientific, software development and economic and finance market segments looking to support additional users on a single workstation.

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NYSE: WDC) today announced a new family of CinemaStar 2.5-inch hard disk drives (HDDs) for the growing traditional and small form factor audio/video (A/V) and consumer electronics (CE) HDD markets. With continued technological advancements and increased capacities, 2.5-inch hard drives are satisfying the needs of both the traditional 3.5-inch CE market as well as the small form factor market, while allowing OEMs to design smaller, more compact A/V streaming devices.

From slim 7mm z-height 500GB HDDs to high-capacity, 2.5-inch, 9.5mm 1TB HDDs, HGST's new CinemaStar family targets the vast majority of CE capacity needs, while providing the right balance of performance, low power and quiet acoustics for multi-stream digital video recorders (DVRs) and set-top-boxes (STBs). Now in its sixth generation, each CinemaStar drive is fine-tuned with advanced streaming technology to efficiently optimize the 24/7 recording and playback of A/V content.

Chinese PSU maker SAMA launched its energy-efficient 400W PSU, which it unveiled in April. The model is priced at 258 RMB (US $41), and available throughout mainland China. Although not conforming to 80 PLUS standards, the maker assures energy efficiency levels as high as 82%. This 400W PSU has sufficient cabling for a single graphics card gaming PC, including a 24-pin ATX, 8-pin EPS, 6-pin and 8-pin PCI-Express power, three Molex, and six SATA power connectors. We know from the older report that the PSU utilizes a dual-forward switching topology, with high-efficiency PowerMOS instead of conventional transistors with half-bridge structure. The PSU includes active power factor correction, and various protective mechanisms. It is revealed that the 120 mm fan is made by Yate Loon Electronics.

Dane-Elec, a leading global manufacturer and distributor of memory, has added the mySSD O-Series to its new solid-state drive line. The series is designed specifically for the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) market and engineered for the embedded computing, server, notebook, and tablet categories. The O-Series is an ideal solution for mission-critical applications such as military, public safety, utility, homeland security, and mining applications as well as mobile workers in outdoor environment field services in which failure is not an option.

"The mySSD O-Series is designed for high-threat and unpredictable environments in which durability and reliability is absolutely essential," remarked Eric Tafolla, OEM Sales Engineer at Dane-Elec. "Flash-based SSD drives are steadily replacing outdated and less reliable spinning disk drives; however, one product does not fit every customer's unique requirements. That is why we offer customized solutions, where our products are built to meet specific customer needs, in addition to our standard O-Series models."

QNAP Systems, Inc. today announced its new additions for the high-end SMB market segment with two 16-drive 3U rackmount Turbo NAS models with up to 64TB storage capacity using 4 TB drives. The TS-EC1679U-RP and TS-1679U-RP, powered by the Intel Xeon processor and the Intel Core i3 processor respectively, are the highest capacity and highest performing NAS products ever developed by QNAP. Both models feature optional 10GbE networking and 6Gb/sec SATA interfaces, achieving incredible 2,000 MB/sec and 200,000 IOPS throughput; delivering sustained ultra-high performance suitable for demanding data center & high-end SMB environments. The new models feature cable-less disk drive backplanes, hot-swappable power supply, and cooling fan modules for maximum reliability and uptime.

Data is important to backup every so often, as many times there are accidents that occur with your hard drive. Hard drive failure in any case is detrimental to any small business or end user that has records stored in only one place. Once that data is gone, it is very difficult to recover the information and is very expensive to pay data recovery specialists. There also may be times where you need to transport a large amount of data from one hard drive to another.

With a plethora of backup software available, it makes it easy to backup any critical data needed. However, there isn't a quick and easy way to make this process easier on the hardware end. The MB971SP-B DuoSwap hot swap drive caddy for 2.5" & 3.5" is the perfect tool to setup your hard drives and maintaining them.

Scythe introduced a pair of new external HDD/SSD enclosures under the KAMAZO series. These include the KAMAZO-S35-U3-BK, designed for 3.5-inch SATA drives; and KAMAZO-S25-U3-BK, designed for 2.5-inch SATA drives. Both enclosures take advantage of USB 3.0 SuperSpeed interface to eliminate interface bottlenecks. Made of anodized aluminum, the KAMAZO-S35-U3-BK measures 112 x 197 x 30 mm (WxDxH), weighing 268 g. This enclosure draws power from an external AC adapter. The KAMAZO-S25-U3-BK, on the other hand, relies on USB for both bus interface and power. It measures 80 x 131 x 18 mm, weighing 126 g. Apart from running on PCs as USB mass storage devices, these enclosures are supported by smart TVs such as Toshiba Regza and Sharp Aquos. Slated for May 16, the KAMAZO-S35-U3-BK is priced at 2,480 JPY (US $31), while the KAMAZO-S25-U3-BK goes for 1,280 JPY (US $16).

Scythe Japan introduced a new accessory that makes hot-plugging 3.5-inch HDDs possible for most users, taking advantage of AHCI hot-plugging feature. The SCEMR-1000 from Scythe occupies one 5.25-inch drive bay in your chassis, and provides a 3.5-inch SATA HDD caddie. Key mounting portions of the enclosure are made of steel, other parts made of ABS. The interface portion of the enclosure is "dumb", in that it merely conveys the SATA interface of the drive inserted to your SATA host controller and PSU. Slated for mid-May, the SCEMR-1000 will be sold by Scythe for 1,480 JPY (US $18.5).

Buffalo launched a new line of SSDs that incorporate MRAM (magnetic random access memory) caches. The caches provide increase tolerance to power loss, and momentarily hold data that's being transacted between the drive and the host, which buys the controller some time to prevent data loss, when the power goes down. Pictures suggest that Buffalo could have SSDs in both SATA and IDE flavors. So far, MRAM cache is the only distinctive feature of a new line of SSDs Buffalo is working on, which it will unveil a little later, at the Embedded Systems Expo (ESEC) 2012.

Storage mogul TDK launched its Series 7 mSATA SSD line (model: SMG3B). The drives incorporate TDK's in-house GBDriver RS3 processor, and 1 to 64 GB of SLC NAND flash memory, which makes these drives ideal for Rapid Storage Technology SSD caching. The processor provides cutting-edge 44-bit ECC to weed out caching errors. Another application would be taking advantage of the drive's durable NAND flash memory, and deploying it in sensitive computing devices such as ATM computers, kiosks, payment terminals, ticketing machines, medical equipment, marine navigation equipment, avionics, etc. The drives only take advantage of SATA 3 Gb/s, providing sequential speeds of up to 170 MB/s reads and 70 MB/s writes. Modern SSD features including 128-bit AES data encryption, are provided. Prices vary by the numerous capacity options available.

Kingmax' high-capacity SMU25 Client Pro SSD variant was spotted by market scouts in Tokyo's Akihabara shopping district. The KM01TBSMI25 SSD by Kingmax packs 1 TB of unformatted capacity, but that is traded off for performance. Built in the 2.5-inch SATA form-factor, the KM01TBSMI25 only takes advantage of SATA 3 Gb/s interface, and provides sequential transfer rates of 250 MB/s reads, with 200 MB/s writes. The drive supports all modern SSD features, including Global Wear Leveling, TRIM, NCQ, 40-bit BCH ECC, and 1.2 million hours MTBF. It is sold for a wallet-scorching 120,000 JPY (US $1,500).

Team Group Inc., which is working very hard in the industrial and embedded storage devices, is making its entrance for the second time in ESEC, the largest embedded system exhibition in Japan, with boiling popularity from last year. In addition to the full series of industrial NAND flash and industrial control memory modules, Team Group will present industrial embedded NAND flash SSDs.

Team Group SSD series consists of 2.5" SATA and 1.8" PATA interfaces, and offers multiple choices of volume and customization service. The products feature high performance in vibration and impact resistance, ensuring smooth operations even in a harsh environment at a temperature of -40℃~+85℃. Team Group is hoping to grab the global storage market with these supreme products with good quality and high performance.

ADATA Technology today announces the launch of a complete lineup of expanded capacity solid state drives. The new SSD range includes the Premier Pro SP900 and Premier SP800, both which use new optimized firmware to utilize greater storage capacity of the NAND Flash components.

Premier Pro SP900
Boasting impressive performance numbers, the Premier Pro SP900 also offers a competitive price advantage. Maximum sequential read and write speeds are 550/520 MB per second, with maximum random 4k write speeds of 85,000 IOPS. Capacities of 64, 128 and 256 GB make the SP900 an outstanding option for upgrading notebooks that are compatible with the SATA 6 Gb per second specification.

Donya introduced a unique accessory that lets you install a 2.5-inch HDD or SSD in the optical drive bay of your notebook (while stripping it of one). Called the DN-69810, these adapters are available in 12.7 mm and 9.5 mm-thick variants with SATA and IDE interface options. The enclosures aren't much more than a SECC cage with an interface relay. Measuring 128 x 126 x 12.7/9.5 mm, the adapters weigh about 60 g. The adapter could be sold through various peripheral brands, worldwide.