ioSafe today announced the availability of the new ioSafe Solo SSD - a solid state, highly ruggedized model of the award-winning ioSafe Solo desktop external hard drive. Combining ioSafe’s new proprietary ArmorPlate, a military grade steel outer casing with SSD technology, the new ioSafe Solo SSD adds unprecedented shock, drop and crush protection to the existing fire and water protection.

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The ioSafe Solo SSD combined with ArmorPlate helps to protect data in a two story building collapse, 5000 lb. crush forces, 20’ drop into rubble and up to a 1000g shock. In addition the original HydroSafe™, FloSafe™ and DataCast™ work to keep the drive cool during normal operation and protect the data from fires up to 1550°F for 1/2 hour and complete water submersion of 30’ for 30 days in fresh or salt water. Like all ioSafe products, the ioSafe Solo SSD comes with ioSafe’s Data Recovery Service, a “no questions asked” policy to help customers recover from any data disaster including accidental deletion, virus or physical disaster.

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Sonic Solutions today announced they will be demonstrating a broad array of next-generation technologies for the enhancement of over-the-top video services to home and mobile devices. Building on the robust digital content delivery platform that powers services from Blockbuster and Best Buy, Roxio CinemaNow™ 2.0 will include capabilities designed to further enhance consumers' digital entertainment experience with high definition entertainment, 3D content, and interactive services. The new CinemaNow 2.0 platform is being demonstrated by invitation at the Renaissance Hotel, Chairman Room, as part of the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7-10, 2010.

"Our goal over the last year was to establish our digital delivery platform on leading consumer electronic devices and with major retailers," said Mark Ely, executive vice president of strategy, Sonic Solutions. "Having achieved that goal, our plan for 2010 is to further advance the Roxio CinemaNow entertainment platform and enable our partners to deliver an exceptional user experience through rich interactivity, and amazing high definition video and audio quality."

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Compared to a standard DVD, Blu-ray's 50GB of storage capacity seems fairly large. Nevertheless, companies have continued to look for ways to squeeze more data onto a single disc. Along with the multi-layer discs developed by Pioneer, Hitachi and TDK, companies are now looking at partial response maximum likelihood (PRML) signal processing as a possible way to store up to 33.4GB of data per single layer. Thanks to Sony and Panasonic, PRML is one step closer to becoming a reality. The two companies recently announced that they've developed a new evaluation technique known as i-MLSE (Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation) that can be used to judge the optical quality when reading and writing to 33.4GB media.

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Sony and Panasonic Corp. resolved this by developing the i-MLSE (Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation) evaluation index. Details of i-MLSE were announced at International Symposium on Optical Memory 2009 (ISOM '09), held in October 2009. The first of the two key characteristics is that i-MLSE has a strong correlation with the error rate (Fig. 1) even in read/write at 33.4 GB using PRML. The second, according to Sony, is that "i-MLSE exhibits the same relationship to signal quality as conventional jitter." In other words, it will be relatively simple to estimate the read error rate from the i-MLSE, just as can be done now with jitter.

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QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class NAS servers, NVR Video Surveillance Systems, and Network-based Video Players today unveiled its new series of ultra-high performance Turbo NAS servers TS-259 Pro, TS-459 Pro, TS-659 Pro and TS-859 Pro (a QNAP exclusive) that have been certified as compatible with VMware's vSphere4 (ESX 4.0) virtualization platform, ideal for departmental file sharing, storage, and advanced server applications in the office environment. VMware's vSphere is the industry's first cloud operating system that offers a way to reduce IT costs and increase responsiveness. Shared networked storage is an essential component of a Cloud Computing infrastructure.

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The new Turbo NAS series incorporates the Intel® Atom™ D-510 dual-core processor, which delivers exceptional performance and maintains high reliability for multiple concurrent tasks and intensive data transfer with very low power consumption. Businesses of all sizes are able to enjoy the interoperability between VMware virtual machines and QNAP high performance, low power consumption certified storage, take the advantages of VMware Cloud Computing environments.

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According to DigiTimes, CMC and Ritek recently signed new licensing contracts with Philips that are effective for the next 10 years. In return, Philips reduced the royalty rate for CD-RW, DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW and DVD-RW media by more than 70% from US$0.035-0.036 per disc to US$0.01.

Royal Philips Electronics has reduced royalty charges for CD-RW, DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW and DVD-RW optical disc formats by 71.4-72.2% from US$0.035-0.036 per disc originally to US$0.01 for CMC Magnetics and Ritek, Taiwan's two largest optical disc makers. The new licensing contracts are effective for 10 years from December 31, 2009 to December 30, 2019, according to industry sources in Taiwan. Both CMC and Ritek confirmed the new licensing but did not confirm the rates.

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In the digital age, people are creating and accessing digital content like never before. As such, they require a storage device that is powerful enough to store and serve this content, but friendly enough to manage quickly and effortlessly. Today, digital storage leader Thecus® Technology is proud to announce the Thecus® N4200. Fast, secure, and incredibly easy-to-use, the N4200 is the ideal home NAS for the digital lifestyle.

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The N4200 was designed to enable users to access their data both quickly and easily. It begins with the new Intel® Atom™ dual-core processor D510, which runs at 1.66GHz and, in combination with 1GB of DDR2 memory, delivers both blistering data transfer speeds and increased system response. Users can easy manage their unit with the N4200’s dual displays. The LCD offers a wealth of system information, including hard disk and network status, while the big and bright 2.8” OLED display allows users to modify a number of settings directly on the device including WAN, LAN, Link Aggregation, languages and more, making the N4200 the friendliest Thecus® NAS ever.

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via vl810 hub controller.pngVIA Technologies, Inc., a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today unveiled the VIA VL810 SuperSpeed Hub Controller, the industry’s first integrated single chip solution that supports the higher transfer rates of the new USB 3.0 specification.

USB 3.0 (also known as SuperSpeed USB) allows for a maximum data transfer rate of up to 5Gbps, or ten times the throughput available to USB 2.0 based devices. Other enhancements provide for improved interaction between device and host controller, including important advancements in power management.

Developed by wholly owned subsidiary company VIA Labs, the VIA VL810 expands a PC's USB capability by allowing more than one device to be connected to each host port. One upstream port and four downstream ports support not just SuperSpeed transfer, but are also backwards compatible with previous USB specifications and offer support for Hi-Speed (480Mbps), Full-Speed (12Mbps), and Low-Speed (1.5Mbps) traffic.

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Technology advances constantly! When the speed of USB 2.0 can no longer fulfill the expanding demand of modern people, storage technology with faster speed, lower power consumption and greater convenience emerges out of consumer demands. Eyeing at the developmental potential of e-SATA, Team Group Inc launches the X092 USB disk Fire Shadow as its masterpiece for the year. A shining red and black appearance, this dual-color design inoculates the idea of fire and shadow. Equipped with the e-SATA and USB interfaces, Fire Shadow allows users to enjoy the ultrafast speed of e-SATA and the no-external-power-required convenience of USB devices all in one disk.

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The X092 from Team is designed with the quadruple channel technology to evenly distribute data reading and writing task to four storage devices in order to effectively enhance the read-write speed. As the read-write speed of e-SATA is 110MB/s and 40MB/s respectively, i.e. triply faster than USB 2.0, it takes only 42 seconds to copy a 4.5GB movie file, making it the dream option among all PnP storage devices. In addition to the 16GB and 32GB models, the X092 has the 64GB model tailored for power users, allowing them to download and store valuable data anywhere anytime. Therefore, the X092 is tailored for consumers demanding super capacity and super speed mobile storage in great convenience.

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NEC Electronics America, Inc. today announced it will highlight the latest generation of Universal Serial Bus (USB) technologies at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES®) January 7-10 in Las Vegas. A working demonstration of the company’s USB 3.0, or SuperSpeed, capabilities will be showcased in the USB TechZone, located in the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) South Hall 3, booth #30769.

Daily demonstrations of NEC Electronics’ USB 3.0 host controller (part number µPD720200), the industry’s first USB-IF-certified USB 3.0 product, will feature a laptop computer with two USB 3.0 ports, with one port sending a video file at the SuperSpeed transfer rate to a USB 3.0 external storage device. To demonstrate the backward compatibility of the USB 3.0 host controller, the second port will send the same video file to a USB 2.0 external storage device for comparison. Samples of customers’ motherboards and cards using NEC Electronics’ USB 3.0 device also will be on exhibit.

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OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and flash-based storage as an alternative to hard disk drives (HDDs), today announced that enterprise solid state storage provider WhipTail Technologies will utilize OCZ’s premium solid state drives to meet its customers’ needs for ultimate productivity in conjunction with its solid state storage appliances. By teaming with industry leaders such as WhipTail that combines its own software innovations with cutting-edge hardware, OCZ continues to leverage its SSDs across various applications while meeting the needs of mission-critical systems and IT environments.

“We are proud to support WhipTail with our enterprise class OEM SSD products,” commented Ryan Petersen, CEO at the OCZ Technology Group. “WhipTail’s unique Racerunner solution takes full advantage of all the benefits of solid state drives to provide their customers with an exceptional storage appliance that gives their customers a competitive advantage.”

“OCZ’s OEM division has provided an excellent product built to our specifications, allowing WhipTail to focus on building a better appliance, rather than having to build custom SSDs,” said James Candelaria, CTO of WhipTail.

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