With the consumer availability of Microsoft Windows 8 operating system, Seagate Technology plc is helping to make the move as seamless as possible for those making the upgrade. Seagate Backup Plus family of drives is the essential upgrade tool to ensure that all your important files make the move with you. All of Seagate's external storage devices are compatible with current Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP, and will also work with the new Windows 8 OS.

According to Gartner's Forecast Analysis: PC OS Market, Worldwide, 2008-2015, 2011 Update, July 2011; "By the end of 2012 it is expected that 9.6 million of the installed base of personal computers will run Windows 8 and by 2013, it is predicted that 193.2 million personal computers in use will be running Windows 8."

Expanding its portfolio of cloud-enabled products, D-Link today announced its latest ShareCenter 2-Bay Cloud Storage 2000 (DNS-320L), offering a centralized storage solution with remote sharing, streaming, and management capabilities.

Delivering a complete home and small business cloud storage solution, the D-Link Cloud Storage 2000 enables users to remotely and locally download and upload files, delete files and folders from their storage device, and access files stored on their ShareCenter from any computer via the mydlink.com portal. Plus, with a free app for iPad, iPhone and Android devices, users can now easily view photos, and stream music and videos from their ShareCenter directly to mobile devices from anywhere in the world.

Seagate Technology plc. today introduced SuperSpeed USB 3.0 to the award-winning Backup Plus storage for Mac. Currently available through Amazon.com and from Apple Stores in November, both Backup Plus Portable for Mac and Backup Plus Desktop for Mac drives will feature the new USB 3.0 interface, which is also compatible with earlier USB 2.0 ports. This new interface means faster transfer of data, so you can backup more quickly, up to 10x that of USB 2.0, via TimeMachine or simply transferring a file from a computer to external storage.

Selected as the Editor's Choice portable external drive by PC Magazine, Seagate Backup Plus hard drives were first introduced in June of this year. Designed to work interchangeably with both Windows and Apple computers, these new drives deliver features to protect, share and save nearly every aspect of one's digital life. Seagate Backup Plus products include a software feature that makes them the world's first external hard drives to provide a way to backup content from social networks, such as Facebook and Flickr. The Seagate Dashboard software included on Backup Plus for Mac drives delivers a quick and easy path to Save and Share personal photos and videos on Facebook and Flickr.

Iomega Corporation, a global leader in data protection, today announced the worldwide availability of the latest additions to Iomega's award-winning lineup of network storage solutions: the new Iomega StorCenter px2-300d Network Storage, a high performance, Intel Atom powered double-drive desktop network storage device with up to 6 TB of storage; and the new Iomega StorCenter ix4-300d Network Storage, the next generation of Iomega's popular StorCenter ix Series of versatile and easy-to-use four-drive desktop network storage appliances.

Designed for advanced users, small offices, small to medium-sized businesses and distributed enterprise, Iomega's new StorCenter px2-300d and StorCenter ix4-300d utilize EMC's award-winning LifeLine operating system for cross-platform file-sharing with seamless integration of security and convenience features such as RAID data protection, hot-swappable hard drives (only with the px2-300d), virtualized environment support, multiple cloud options for offsite data storage, antivirus protection (Only on px2-300d), Active Directory integration, advanced media sharing features and more. Both products are shipping with the Iomega's very latest LifeLine release 3.4, which delivers significant enhancements and new features like improved Active Directory Support, a more efficient EXT4 file system, added MySQL Server support and added video surveillance capabilities.

Although the near-term prospects for ultrabooks have dimmed significantly, the solid state drives (SSDs) employed by these next-generation notebooks and other products are so diversified in their uses and so compelling in their value proposition that their growth outlook has decreased only slightly.

SSD shipments in the first half of this year amounted to 12.9 million units, according to the IHS iSuppli Memory & Storage Service at information and analytics provider IHS. Shipments reached 10.5 million in the third quarter and will rise to 17.5 million units in the fourth, amounting to a total of 28.0 million units in the second half-more than double the total shipped during the first six months of the year, as shown in the figure below. This is down from the previous forecast of 13.0 million in the third quarter and 20.0 million in the fourth.

Drobo, makers of award-winning data storage products for businesses and professionals, today introduced several new models of its fast-growing family of business storage systems. Included in the group are both higher- and lower-end models of Drobo's flagship product, the Drobo B1200i, which features a unique patent-pending tiering technology that allows customers to easily and affordably enjoy both the performance benefits of SSD technology and the capacity of traditional hard drives (HDD) in a single system.

The new models, which include several higher-capacity and lower-priced versions of the Drobo B800 series, also embrace 3 TB hard-drive technology, giving Drobo customers even more affordable capacity with the traditional Drobo ease-of-use.

Everyone knows the very famous Atom based NAS N4800. Following the success brought by the N4800, Thecus is now announcing the new N4800Eco. The N4800Eco features some of the best characteristics from the N4800 like the Intel Atom processor, USB 3.0 ports, eSATA port, HDMI output and dual display. This very powerful NAS will become a must-have for all small and medium businesses in need of centralized storage, application serving, and top-notch response time within multi-user environments. For the more demanding users, the N4800Eco will also have its use at home.

A year after the Thailand flooding disaster partially derailed production, the global hard disk drive (HDD) industry has fully recovered, with shipments to the computer market expected to hit a record level this year, driven by the enterprise market as well as the arrival of the Windows 8 operating system.

HDD shipments in 2012 for the overall computer market, including PCs, are forecast to reach 524.0 million units, up 4.3 percent from 502.5 million units last year, according to an IHS iSuppli Storage Space Market Brief from information and analytics provider IHS.

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.

Today LaCie announced that its professional 2big and 4big Quadra multi-bay RAID solutions, designed by Neil Poulton, now feature USB 3.0 technology. LaCie completely re-engineered these external storage solutions for optimized performance with new Mac computers. Thanks to UAS (USB-Attached SCSI Protocol) compatibility and 7200 rpm hard drives, these products reach speeds up to 210 MB/s and 245 MB/s respectively. With these speeds the user can transfer 10GB of data in less than one minute.

Built for Creative Professionals
The LaCie 2big Quadra USB 3.0 and LaCie 4big Quadra USB 3.0 are ideal storage solutions for intensive content creation, secure backup, or massive desktop storage. With speeds twice as fast as Firewire 800 these products help professionals get their work done faster. Video editors can play back multiple HD video streams at the same time with Final Cut Pro X or Premiere. Additionally, photographers can browse large photo libraries and edit in Apeture or Lightroom 4 without delay.

D-Link today announced its newest installment to its high-performance ShareCenter storage solutions - the 4-Bay Cloud Storage 4000 (DNS-345) - is now available. Offering superior performance with a fast CPU to simultaneously support multiple user streams, more memory to boost performance, four drives for up to 16 TB of storage, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports for high speed data transfer and failover, the Cloud Storage 4000 is a robust storage, back-up and recovery solution. When combined with D-Link Cloud Cameras, the Cloud Storage 4000 also enables a full-featured network video recorder (NVR) which supports real-time monitoring, recording and playback of surveillance video.

The Cloud Storage 4000 creates a personal Cloud portal via the free and user-friendly mydlink cloud app, enabling users to store, safeguard, share, and remotely access or stream their digital documents, music, videos, and photos from anywhere in the world on their iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, or Microsoft Mobile OS device. In addition, the mydlink cloud app supports two-way data syncing, ensuring users have the latest data on their ShareCenter and computers.

Six months after losing the top spot in the global hard disk drive (HDD) segment due to the Thai flooding disaster, Western Digital Corp. in the second quarter recovered its market lead from chief rival Seagate Technology, according to an IHS iSuppli Storage Space Market Brief from information and analytics provider IHS.

Western Digital produced approximately 71.0 million HDD units in the second quarter, including production from Hitachi GST, a company acquired by Western Digital earlier in the year. Revenue for Western Digital amounted to $4.8 billion-a company record.

In comparison, Seagate shipped 65.9 million HDD units during the same period, with revenue reaching $4.5 billion-also a record in Seagate's books.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has now begun volume production of an ultra-fast embedded memory for smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices in 16-, 32- and 64-gigabyte (GB) densities.

The new Samsung eMMC (embedded multimedia card) Pro Class 1500 delivers the industry's fastest speeds for an embedded memory device, reading data sequentially at up to 140 megabytes per second (MB/s) and writing it at up to 50 MB/s. For random reading and writing, it can process up to 3500/1500 IOPS (inputs and outputs per second), four times the speed of previous eMMC solutions.

Lenovo and EMC Corporation today announced a broad partnership that enhances Lenovo's position in industry standard servers and networked storage solutions, while significantly expanding EMC's reach in China and other key, high-growth markets. The new partnership is expected to spark innovation and additional R&D in the server and storage markets by maximizing the product development talents and resources at both companies, while driving scale and efficiency in the partners' respective supply chains.

"Today's announcement with industry leader EMC is another solid step in our journey to build on our foundation in PCs and become a leader in the new PC-plus era," said Yuanqing Yang, Lenovo chairman and CEO. "This partnership will help us fully deliver on our PC-plus strategy by giving us strong back-end capabilities and business foundation in servers and storage, in addition to our already strong position in devices. EMC is the perfect partner to help us fully realize the PC-plus opportunity in the long term."

Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX) today announced that Gary Gentry has rejoined Seagate to lead its solid state drive (SSD) business as senior vice president, SSD. Mr. Gentry will have responsibility for driving Seagate leadership in the SSD space, with time-to-market, competitive product offerings. He will be located in Longmont, Colorado and will report directly to Rocky Pimentel, chief sales and marketing officer.

Mr. Gentry has over 25 years of experience in the storage industry, including most recently as the general manager of the Enterprise SSD Division of Micron Corporation. Prior to rejoining Seagate, he held leadership positions focusing on solid-state technologies at Spansion Corporation and Storage Genetics. He also served as chief marketing officer for Maxtor, and provided strategic consulting to Hitachi Global Storage Systems. While at Seagate he held various management positions including vice president, strategic marketing and planning.

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, today announced the publication of key updates to its Universal Flash Storage (UFS) standard. Specifically tailored for mobile applications and computing systems requiring high performance and low power consumption, the new UFS v1.1 standard is an update to the v1.0 standard published in 2011, incorporating feedback from industry UFS technology implementers. JESD220A Universal Flash Storage v1.1 contains important amendments and references to the latest related MIPI Alliance specifications, and may be downloaded free of charge from the JEDEC website here.

JEDEC has also published a complementary standard, JESD223A UFS Host Controller Interface (HCI) v1.1. JESD223A defines a standard host controller interface on which system designers can create a common host controller software driver layer to work with UFS host controller hardware from different manufacturers. The HCI functionality also enables higher performance and power efficiency by minimizing the involvement of the host processor in the operation of the Flash storage subsystem. JESD223A Universal Flash Storage Host Controller Interface v1.1 may also be downloaded free of charge here.

Today CM Storm, Cooler Master's gaming brand, releases a new full tower case which is based on the highly popular CM Strom Trooper: The Stryker. Built to be amongst the most agile full-towers, Stryker becomes the second in its class to include an ultra-strong carrying handle; allowing a gamer to travel with the finest system configurations available with relative ease. CM Storm Stryker includes the features that are most desired by gamers like a windowed side panel, full dust filter coverage, a fan controller, an external SSD drive hot-swap dock and two uniquely designed modular hard drive cages and this in a full, stylish white color.

Seagate Technology plc., today introduced Backup Plus storage devices - its reinvented consumer storage product family that delivers the easiest setup, one-click backup and the ability to save and share your content on Facebook and Flickr.

Seagate Backup Plus hard drives are newly designed external storage that work interchangeably with both Windows and Apple computers and deliver new features to protect, share and save nearly every aspect of one's digital life. These products come loaded with the new hassle-free Seagate Dashboard software for one-click local backup making it easier than ever to eliminate excuses or apprehensions about backing up one's most valuable digital content. Seagate Backup Plus products are the world's first external hard drives to provide backup for content on social networks, such as Facebook and Flickr. Storing a local duplicate copy of photos from social networks is now as easy as backing up files on your computer. Seagate Backup Plus will provide the peace of mind that every aspect of one's digital life is safe from loss.

SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today introduced Lightning PCI Express (PCIe) Solid State Accelerator (SSA) cards designed to boost the performance of workstations and servers used in data centers, server farms and cloud computing environments.

The new SanDisk Lightning PCIe SSA products can be added to workstations and servers to provide balanced, predictable performance for enterprise applications, delivering the ideal combination of speed, reliability and cost-savings. The cards provide rapid access to the most frequently used data and applications in order to more effectively manage heavy workloads. They are part of SanDisk's growing portfolio of solid state drive (SSD) solutions for the enterprise.

Eurocom Corporation, a developer of long lifespan, fully upgradable notebooks, Mobile Workstations and Mobile Servers is offering a full line of Ivy Bridge based notebooks with support for professional graphics from NVIDIA Quadro 5010M, 4000M and 3000M. Eurocom offers a complete line of NVIDIA Quadro powered Mobile Workstations from 15.6" to 17.3" that are specifically designed for professionals of all kinds.

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.

Western Digital Corp. today announced that it has completed its divestiture of certain 3.5-inch hard drive assets to Toshiba Corporation, as required by regulatory agencies that conditionally approved the company's completed acquisition of Viviti Technologies Ltd. (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies).

The assets will enable Toshiba to manufacture and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for the desktop and consumer electronics markets and will enhance its ability to manufacture and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for near-line (business critical) applications.

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.

Thecus is proud to present itself as a technological innovator. Once again, Thecus releases an all new 5-bay N5550 server to lead the competition. The past proves merit: link aggregation, LCM display, USB 3.0, multi RAID functions and so on. Impressive technologies have been used to develop the new N5550 NAS to serve one single purpose: improve user experience and satisfaction.

Intel Atom CPU: silent power
Intel Atom CPUs are designed to work without fans. This will dramatically reduce NAS noise and power consumption. Associated with large amounts of DDR3, Intel Atom CPUs will provide much better performance. Don't be restricted to a 4-bay NAS, bring it up a notch, Thecus N5550 is available and boosts the best performance with a great price, without entering larger bay units. Multi-users environment, web hosting, intense backup, data encryption, application serving, heavy RAID computations, and HD multimedia streaming: welcome to the world of smooth multi-tasking!

Other World Computing (OWC) www.macsales.com, a leading zero emissions Mac and PC technology company, announced today it will showcase its new line of Jupiter mini-SAS shared storage solutions at NAB this week. Built upon the mini-SAS interface for blazing bandwidth up to 48 Gb/s, the Jupiter family of racks, towers, and workgroup switches combine the highest level of data sharing performance and scalable capacity of up to 3600 TB at a cost that is up to 6x less than fibre channel infrastructures.

The Jupiter mini-SAS solutions also offer straight-forward installation in Mac and Windows OS environments with the simplicity of direct attached storage (DAS) using a single cable connection. OWC will demonstrate the high performance and scalability of the Jupiter mini-SAS shared storage solution at its NAB booth #14110 in the lower level of the LVCC's South Hall.