ASRock released a nifty little software utility that steps up USB transfer rates. The ASRock XFast USB utility is also able to speed up USB 3.0 flash drives, which are well within the 5 Gb/s theoritical maximum of the interface. OCWorkbench did a "before and after" test of the utility as part of its Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 review. The portable SSD managed transfer rates of 156 MB/s before using the utility, which then jumped up to 241.32 MB/s after using it. SiSoft SANDRA was used for measurements. More tests can be found here.

RunCore developed a unique kind of device, the Pro IV USB 3.0 ExpressCard SSD. This device is both a USB 3.0 hub and SSD, which connects to an ExpressCard/34 slot as well as USB 3.0. As an SSD, it provides 64 GB of responsive storage for laptops, with transfer rates of 110 MB/s read and 80 MB/s write. When connected as ExpressCard, it also gives out two USB 3.0 ports. The device itself can be used as a standalone external SSD, by connecting the bundled USB 3.0 male-male cable to the "host" port on the device, and the other end to a PC/laptop with a USB 3.0 or USB 2.0 port. RunCore did not give out pricing information.

Plextor is excited to reveal they will be launching their first solid state drive (SSD) in the UK next month - the world-class 2nd generation M2S Series. Plextor has a deserved, solid reputation for high performance, high quality products, especially in the storage sector. This leap into the SSD sector in the UK and Europe is a new move for the ever-expanding manufacturer, and a demonstration of their continued position as pioneers in a market likely to grow rapidly in future years. SSDs are increasing in popularity as a complement alongside traditional HDDs and the technology may eventually replace the HDD entirely for the OS and working environment.

Available in 3 capacities (64GB, 128GB and 256GB), the perfectly engineered 2.5" internal M2S Series SSD is one of the first of its kind to support the new SATA III 6B/s interface and boasts exclusive technologies to increase speed, stability and lifespan - offering up to 10 years of performance which doesn't degrade over time as other SSDs might. With read speeds of up to 480 MB/s, write speeds of up to 330 MB/s and performing significantly highly in benchmark tests, the M2S is currently the fastest SSD available on the market.

Active Media Products, a leading manufacturer of SSDs, DOMs and USB drives, today announced the new FLIP pivot USB 2.0 flash drive, an ultra-slim pivot style drive. "The FLIP drive is designed in fire orange and white racing colors, giving it a unique look, and the drive is extremely small and ultra-slim, making it a highly portable storage device", stated Active Media Products VP of Sales, Jerry Thomson.

The pivot style lid protects the drive when not in use - and you'll never have to worry about losing the lid because it conveniently flips open, giving instant access to your data. Pack 4GB or 8GB of data securely onto the FLIP drive. It is designed to fit easily on a keychain or in a pocket or clipped to a backpack. Load up to 2000 MP3 songs or up to 2400 six megapixel photos onto your FLIP drive to take with you anywhere.

In its 25th anniversary year, Antec, Inc., the global leader in high-performance computer components and accessories for the gaming, PC upgrade and Do-It-Yourself markets, today introduced the next-generation of the popular P183, P193, Nine Hundred Two and Twelve Hundred models, expanding the Performance One and Gaming Case series' portfolios, respectively, by adding new convenience options and performance features for PC enthusiasts, gamers and high-performance users.

Antec has taken the fundamentals of its previous P183, P193, Nine Hundred Two and Twelve Hundred enclosures and enhanced them to accommodate the newest component standards with the new P183 V3, P193 V3, Nine Hundred Two V3 and Twelve Hundred V3 models.

HighPoint Technologies, Inc. launches its Smart Hybrid HBA's product line. These ground-breaking PCI-E 2.0, SATA 6Gb/s HBA's combine solid state disks (SSD) with hard disk drives (HDD), into single, high-speed storage solutions, optimized for performance hungry workstations and applications. Smart Hybrid HBA's allow users to take advantage of the gigabyte-unit cost savings of a HDD's combined with the performance of SSD, without sacrificing capacity.

HighPoint's RocketHybrid HBA's are powered by Marvell's cutting-edge SATA 6Gb/s 88SE9130 IC and revolutionary HyperDuo technology. This technology was designed to aid SSD's acceptance into the mass-market by addressing the cost and capacity issues associated current SSD storage. Current hybrid approaches of combining SSD's and HDD's for use as boot drives, do not provide the consistent, high-speed file access required by high-performance applications, such as gaming or media editing.

StarTech.com, a leading manufacturer of hard-to-find connectivity parts has announced the availability of two new 4-Drive External Hard Drive Docking Stations, both offering USB and eSATA host connections, with support for 2.5" and/or 3.5" Serial ATA hard drives or Solid State Drives (SSDs).

Adding to StarTech.com's extensive line of Hard Drive Docking Stations, the SATDOCK4U3E SuperSpeed single connection dock and SATDOCK4U2E high speed single/multi-PC drive docking stations are the first in the market to support four SATA hard drives or solid state drives simultaneously, offering users a practical way to maximize their external storage capacity.

Active Media Products, a leading manufacturer of DOMs, small form factor SSDs and USB drives, today announced the world's first 64GB SATA DOM (Disk on Module) drives, which are ideal for servers and embedded computing applications where high reliability is paramount. These DOMs are built with MLC flash to provide outstanding resistance to extreme dust, temperature, shock and vibration. These 64GB DOMs are also less than half the size and a fraction the weight of a 2.5" SATA HDD or SSD, measuring only 2.2 x 1.3 inches (55 x 33 mm).

"These 64GB DOMs demonstate AMP's commitment to developing cutting edge storage solutions," said Active Media Products VP of Sales, Jerry Thomson. "Active Media Products has by far the widest selection of DOM types and the highest capacity DOMs available, and these 64GB offerings extend our leadership even further."

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, announces the latest Z-Drive R3 PCI-Express SSD solution for enterprise and OEM clients. Showcased for the first time at CES 2011, the Z-Drive R3 updates the existing lineup with greater performance, reliability, and design flexibility with a new compact footprint for server applications, and is the first SSD to officially deploy OCZ's proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) technology.

Creating a 'virtual super controller,' OCZ's VCA (Virtualized Controller Architecture) pools the resources of two or more NAND flash controller interfaces, MCPs, storage processors, and a physical interface complete with customizable features and interface options that eliminates the need to re-spin expensive silicon. VCA is able to address NAND flash in an innovative way through the use of a massively parallel array, eliminating bottlenecks by increasing both read and write speeds up to the theoretical interface limit while keeping access latencies to a minimum. With VCA, IT Architects can now take advantage of enterprise-rich features that are not available when utilizing traditional raid cards with an array of SSDs in their servers. With the Z-Drive R3, which makes use of VCA technology, clients can now overcome this obstacle and deploy a single solid state drive that not only delivers exceptional bandwidth but also beneficial enterprise features including TRIM, SMART monitoring, native command queuing (NCQ), tagged command queuing (TCQ), power fail management, and wear-leveling.

Committed to the growing market for cost-effective, capacity-optimized drives, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today introduced its new enterprise-class, 3.5-inch, 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 drive family - the world's first and only 7,200 RPM drive family rated at 2.0 million hours MTBF and backed by a five-year limited warranty. The new Ultrastar 7K3000 drive family represents the fifth-generation of Hitachi's five-platter mechanical design, which has been stringently designed, tested and field proven for quality and reliability by global server and storage OEMs, as well as the most well known Internet giants worldwide.

With millions of five-platter Ultrastar drives shipped over the last three years, Hitachi's field reliability data shows an unprecedented AFR below 0.40 percent, exceeding customer and industry AFR quality specifications for a 7,200 RPM drive. By increasing the MTBF specification to 2.0 million hours, with an AFR 40 percent lower than drives rated 1.2 million hours MTBF, Hitachi enables data center managers to expect reduced failures, improved up-time and lowered TCO when using a large population of Ultrastar 7K3000 hard drives over a period of time.

Flash memory and DRAM major Kingston Technology is reportedly seeking a stake in JMicron, a company that specializes in serial ATA connectivity products such as SATA host controllers and SSD NAND flash controllers. JMicron has been supplying Kingston with controller chips for its entry-level SSDs. JMicron will host a special investors meeting tomorrow to pass the company's proposal to raise new funds through a private placement.

In a segment seeing domination with companies such as Marvell and SandForce, JMicron has seen success in 2010 with its entry-level SSD controllers. Industry sources estimated that JMicron's SSD controller shipments for 2010 totaled more than one million units. Kingston accounted for over 30% to the output, the sources said. Kingston's partnership indicates that we will get to see more of Kingston's products feature JMicron controllers.

Transcend Information, Inc., a global leader in storage and multimedia products, today announced the launch of its upgraded 2.5" solid state drives (SSDs). Built on a faster and newer controller, the revamped SSDs provide random read speeds of up to 40MB/s, resulting in significantly faster system boot up and application launch performance.

The newly released SSDs are available in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities. Thanks to their use of the new advanced controller chip and 64MB of built-in DDR2 DRAM cache memory, the new SSDs feature sequential read and write speeds up to 260MB/s and 240MB/s, and random read/write speeds of 40MB/s and 27MB/s. This dramatically improved performance not only reduces average system boot times, but also offers stutter-free response and stability for netbooks, notebooks, high-end gaming PCs and industrial computers. Users can also take advantage of their cool, noiseless operation to enjoy the perks of silent and practical computing.

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, today announced that its JC-64.8 Subcommittee for Solid State Drives will target the development of standards for SSDs in applications beyond conventional disk drive form factors. Building on JEDEC's leadership in the development of standards for solid state drives and the success of recently published SSD standards JESD218 and JESD219, the interest in standardizing SSDs for non-traditional applications is being driven by rising demand for smaller consumer electronics devices.

"Momentum for adoption of embedded SSDs continues to grow and with the right OEM support, Gartner believes that embedded SSDs could potentially out ship traditional SSD form factor usage in mobile PCs by 2013," according to Joseph Unsworth, Research Director at Gartner.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) and memory modules for computing devices and systems, reports its third quarter 2011 results (Q3'11), which ended on November 30, 2010.

Net revenues in Q3'11 were a record $53.2 million, and increased 40% both on a year-over-year and sequential basis, from $38.0 million reported in Q3'10 and in Q2'11.

SSD revenues reached a record $41.5 million in Q3'11, an increase of 325% over Q3'10 SSD revenues of $9.8 million, and a 105% increase sequentially over Q2'11 SSD Revenues of $20.2 million.

Super Talent displayed its first consumer SSDs based on SandForce SF-2000 series controllers. To be branded under the TeraDrive FT3 and TeraDrive CT3 series, SuperTalent's new SSDs will be available in a wide range of capacities starting from 50 GB, all the way up to 480 GB. Built in the 2.5-inch form-factor, the drives use SATA 6 Gb/s interface to support read/write speeds of over 500 MB/s, and "impressively fast random read/write speeds".

Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of Flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, today announced a refresh to their Ultra Drive SSD series, the new UltraDrive MT. SuperTalent's new SATA II SSD is equipped with the new Barefoot controller-plus Indilinx Martini firmware, offers a host of attractive new features and performance, without breaking the bank. This new 2.5" SATA drive includes the latest reliability features including: Garbage collection, Trim support, Wear leveling and ECC, designed to keep this SSD running at optimum performance for the life of the drive.

"The UltraDrive MT offers an important balance between price and performance. Now is a great time to upgrade to an SSD"., said Super Talent COO, CH Lee. The Ultra Drive MT posts an impressive 255MB/s Read and 250MB/s Write speed. The new Barefoot controller, and Indilinx Martini firmware, offers a substantial increase random write performance over its predecessor. Performance of these smaller random blocks is important for OS and application performance and thus has a noticeable impact on the drive's overall performance. Available in capacities of up to 240GB, Ultra Drive MT is the optimal performance upgrade option at an attractive price.

Patriot Memory displayed its latest line of consumer SSDs in the 2.5-inch form factor, the Patriot Wildfire. The SSD uses the latest SATA 6 Gb/s interface, and is available in capacities of 60 GB, 120 GB, and 240 GB. Wildfire could use any of the many SATA 6 Gb/s compliant SSD controllers out there, the most notable being SandForce SF-2582 and Marvell 9174, to provide transfer speeds in excess of 500 MB/s.

OCZ Technology also displayed its second generation Optical HSDL (high-speed data link) interface, and its first enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) that uses it. Last year, OCZ introduced HSDL as a replacement drive interface to SATA and SAS, to mainly serve the purpose of overcoming bandwidth bottlenecks. The first generation HSDL used an electronic link to the host card. The optical HSDL uses a fiber-optic cable to transfer data between the host and the drive.

The new interface is said to provide gains in access times, IOPS, and bandwidth in general. Fiber-optic cable also allows for better cable management (since it's thinner and round compared to serial cables (such as SATA, SAS), it probably also allows the cables to be longer, to help connecting a number of drives in a rack with the drive cage being at a distance from the host machine. Internally, the IBIS XL 3.5-inch form-factor SSD is a RAID 0 on a stick of two SSD sub-units. It can store up to 4 TB of data, and provide transfer speeds of 1800 MB/s (read) and 1700 MB/s (write), with 200,000 IOPS 4K write performance.

OCZ's first SSDs based on the latest SandForce SF-2000 series controllers have taken shape. The Vertex 3 EX is one of the first of this kind by the company. The Vertex 3 EX is driven by SandForce SF-2582 controller. It comes in the 2.5-inch form-factor, and uses SATA 6 Gb/s interface. Available in various capacities between 64 GB and 512 GB (usable 50 GB to 400 GB), the SF-2582 churns out transfer speeds of 550 MB/s (read) and 525 MB/s (write), double that of SF-1200 driven SSDs. The drive also provides a staggering 80,000 IOPS in 4K random write. A power-loss data protection system mechanism protects the drives from loss of data in event of power failure when data is being written.

Super Talent is readying a new ultra high-performance "flash drive". In principle, it's a SandForce-driven SSD on a stick. The device consists of a SandForce SF-1222 SSD processor with MLC NAND flash chips occupying eight channels; the SF-1222 is connected to a SATA 3 Gb/s to USB 3.0 host bridge chip. While there have been such devices in the past, this is the first time anyone has put the SandForce controller into a device this compact.

Since the SF-1222 is operating with half its channels occupied, the performance is about half as well. A quick run of CrystalDiskMark yields about 143.3 MB/s sequential read and 63 MB/s writes.

Corsair showed off the first of its Performance 3 series solid-state drives (SSDs). The drives come in the 2.5" form-factor, and use the SATA 6 Gb/s interface. The drives are said to use a powerful processor made by Marvell, to achieve speeds in the SATA 6 Gb/s domain. Drives in the series are marked as "P3-X" (X= installed flash capacity in GB). The Performance 3 series will be part of Corsair's high-end SSD offer for 2011 and beyond.

Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced that it has developed a range of performance components that fully exploit the potential of the new Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor family, including the new LGA1155 Core i5 and Core i7 processors.

These components include the previously announced Corsair Vengeance DDR3 memory modules, which operate with a low VDIMM voltage of 1.5V, and include XMP-certified performance profiles for Core i5 and Core i7 processors. In addition, Corsair is also announcing the next-generation Performance 3 Series, a new range of solid-state drives, based on the Marvell 9174 controller and designed to take full advantage of the SATA 6Gbps (SATA Revision 3.0) support native to the new Intel chipsets.

Other World Computing (OWC), a leading zero emissions Mac and PC technology company, announced today its new Mercury Aura Pro MBA Solid State Drive (SSD) line, the first high performance SandForce processor based SSD available for all 2008-2009 Apple MacBook Air models. Announced today at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, this new product introduction establishes OWC as the most comprehensive U.S. manufacturer of industry leading SandForce processor based SSDs, with OWC Mercury Pro brand SSD models available for nearly every Mac and PC produced over the past decade. OWC will be demonstrating the new Mercury Aura Pro MBA and other first-to-market OWC Mercury Pro SSDs at CES Booth #3935, LVCC, North Hall.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) and memory modules for computing devices and systems, will showcase the Company's latest SSD solutions at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada January 6-8. OCZ's commitment to advancing flash technology for enterprise, professional, and consumer applications makes this year's CES an ideal opportunity to demonstrate the latest solid state storage solutions at the nation's most exciting CE tradeshow.

"We are pleased to introduce ground breaking solid state drive technology at this year's CES show, including next generation enterprise class SATA, SAS, Fibre Channel and PCIe SSDs that bring to the forefront both throughput levels and capacities that push speed, reliability and densities to previously unheard of levels," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. "These exciting products represent OCZ's commitment to driving solid state storage innovation in both the client and enterprise space to the highest levels."
Introducing an array of next generation storage, as well as power supplies during the show, OCZ will continue to exhibit solutions designed for a wide range of customers including gamers and prosumers to enterprise and OEM. OCZ will showcase live SATA 6Gbps MLC-based Vertex 3 Pro SSDs, built with the next generation enterprise SandForce controller technology with incredible new performance of up to 80,000 IOPS* and 550MB/s transfer rates.

Other World Computing (OWC), a leading zero emissions Mac and PC technology company, announced today its new Mercury Legacy Pro Solid State Drive (SSD) line as the first and fastest SandForce processor based SSD available for pre-Intel PowerPC based Mac notebooks, PCs, and other notebook/laptop computers that utilize an internal 2.5" sized IDE/ATA drive. This announcement establishes OWC as the most comprehensive U.S. manufacturer of industry leading SandForce processor based SSDs available today with OWC Mercury Pro brand SSD models available for nearly every Mac and PC produced over the past decade. OWC will be demonstrating the new Mercury Legacy Pro and other first-to-market OWC Mercury Pro SSDs in booth #3935, LVCC North Hall, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which begins tomorrow in Las Vegas, Nevada.