ASUS today announced the compact Xonar U7 USB external soundcard and headphone amplifier, which offers powerful and clear 114dB SNR audio with USB convenience. It incorporates a headphone amplifier, Dolby® Home Theater v4 support, plus dedicated microphone and volume controls.

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Xonar U7 serves the needs of PC gamers who want to enjoy strong and clear sound via headphones, and is also ideal for listening to music as it produces much more impactful and detailed audio than onboard hardware. Connecting via USB, it requires no standalone power supply and works instantly setup-free with no need to open the PC case.

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WD, a Western Digital company, and a world leader in storage solutions for the connected life, today unveiled WD SmartWare Pro, an easy-to-use software tool that gives customers the power to back up their files to any USB external hard drive or the cloud using their personal Dropbox. Additionally, in the event that a file is deleted, lost, or a previous version of a file is needed, WD SmartWare Pro makes it easy to quickly restore and retrieve backed-up data.     

WD SmartWare Pro is simple to set up with an intuitive installation interface that lets customers get up and running in just a few simple clicks. Once the software is setup and the drives are connected, WD SmartWare Pro visually presents customers' files and folders in a control center where they can manage multiple external hard drives and their Dropbox account. WD SmartWare Pro is compatible with WD products such as My Passport® and WD Elements™ portable hard drives, as well as external USB drives from other manufacturers. Additionally, WD SmartWare Pro works seamlessly with WD network attached storage drives such as My Book® Live™.

The software has two easy-to-use backup settings, allowing customers to set up their preferred file backup process. The “continuous backup” setting sets up an automatic, continuous backup that works quietly in the background so that whenever a customer adds or changes a file it is instantly backed up on the external drive. The “scheduled backup” setting allows customers to set up a regular pre-programmed backup schedule, including an hourly, daily or monthly setting for easy backup to their external drive or Dropbox. With WD SmartWare Pro customers can also back up files located in their Dropbox to an external hard drive.

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Silicon Power, the world’s leading provider of memory storage solutions today unveils an ultra slim portable hard drive – Diamond D20. The all new D20 is built in a light-weighted and ultra slim design for easy carrying and fits perfectly in your pocket. Featuring a solid aluminum metal structure with unique carbon-like texture, D20 creates a new sense of digital fashion trend, ideal for those who looking for storage on the go.

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Unlike a traditional hard drive with rigid angles, the SP Diamond D20 is surrounded with curved edges for easy storage. With the solid aluminum metal structure and the anti-scratch surface, SP D20 can make you free from worrying about fingerprints, scratches or dents when carrying it around. Coated in contrasting colors of black and white, the D20 is elegantly simple and exquisite.

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Are you still spending your quality time waiting for your computer to boot up? Have you experienced lag problems while operating multiple applications? SP/Silicon Power, the world’s leading provider of memory storage solutions, today introduces an addition of the Velox series 2.5” SATA III SSD – Velox V50 to solve your problems. The Velox V50 features the latest controller technology to provide a brand new computer experience in excellent performance and cost effectiveness for those who are about to retire their traditional hard drives.

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Different from the other solutions in the market, SP Velox V50 is equipped with a brand new controller, delivering a more stable and more powerful user experiences. Combining with the latest firmware and advanced controller circuit design, Velox V50 is able to maintain a long-standing IOPS performance while using it under extended period.

The new Velox V50 features the SATA III 6Gbps interface, delivers four time faster performance than the traditional hard drives in computer’s boot time as well as in operating multiple programs. Built up with the advanced high speed NAND flash, V50 performs a high data transfer rate up to 530MB/s in read speed and 200MB/s in write speed.

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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced today that it has begun mass producing a 128-gigabit (Gb), 3-bit multi-level-cell (MLC) NAND memory chip using 10 nanometer (nm)-class process technology this month. The highly advanced chip will enable high-density memory solutions such as embedded NAND storage and solid state drives (SSDs).

“By introducing next-generation memory storage products like the 128Gb NAND chip, Samsung is extremely well situated to meet growing global customer needs,” said Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing, Device Solutions Division, Samsung Electronics. “The new chip is a critical product in the evolution of NAND flash, one whose timely production will enable us to increase our competitiveness in the high density memory storage market.”

Samsung’s 128Gb NAND flash is based on a 3-bit multi-level-cell design and 10nm-class process technology. It boasts the industry’s highest density as well as the highest performance level of 400 megabits-per-second (mbps) data transfer rate based on the toggle DDR 2.0 interface.

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Rovi Corporation, driving digital entertainment innovation, today announced DivX Video Service, an end-to-end video solution for high-quality multi-screen video delivery that is designed to integrate with and enhance TV Everywhere and over-the-top entertainment services. Building upon core DivX video technologies and DRM, as well as MainConcept professional encoders, DivX Video Service offers components for managing the entire video distribution chain from creation and secure delivery to multi-screen playback. This end-to-end approach enables video services to offer the highest possible level of consistency, flexibility, and interoperability.

DivX Video Service is available now and supports a range of entertainment distribution models including digital downloads and connected-device streaming. Later this year, Rovi plans to update DivX Video Service to support HEVC/H.265, the latest compression standard set to enable the broader availability of HD video and delivery of 4K entertainment.

“DivX Video Service brings together established and proven technologies to streamline the otherwise complex and costly task of delivering video entertainment across multiple devices,” said Kanaan Jemili, SVP, Product Management, Rovi Corporation. “With upcoming support for HEVC, we believe DivX Video Service is not only a solution for high-quality video distribution today, but also set to drive a new-generation of advanced entertainment experiences in the future.”

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addonics_msata_micro_ssd_duplicator.pngAddonics Technologies today announced a family of  high speed duplicators that make multiple copies of mSATA SSDs, 2.5-inch SATA HDD/SSDs or micro SATA drives from a single master drive.

Each duplicator comes bundled with a set of 2.5-inch mSATA flash drive kits that turn a mSATA SSD into a 2.5-inch SATA SSD. Depending on model, you can mix and match the mSATA SSD and 2.5-inch SATA hard drive, or the mSATA SSD and micro SATA drive in the duplicator, which makes it a handy tool for transferring the content between the mSATA card and 2.5-inch hard drive or the mSATA card and micro SATA drive.

These stand-alone duplicators offer a distinct advantage because they do not tie up computer resources. They are also operating system independent with a maximum copying speed of 90 MB/sec depending on the media. To start copying, just open the drive bays, load the master media into the source bay, and load equal or larger capacity target media into the target bay. The result is an exact sector-by-sector duplicate including the master boot record. The cloned drive works just like the original.

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HGST today announced the industry's fastest and most advanced enterprise-class, multi level cell (MLC) SAS SSD family – the Ultrastar SSD800MH, Ultrastar SSD800MM and Ultrastar SSD1000MR. From the market share leader in enterprise SAS/FC SSDs, these HGST drives are the first to double today's SAS interface speed. Designed for the most demanding applications where "hot" data is accessed frequently, such as high-frequency trading, online banking, cloud computing, online gaming, and big data analytics, HGST's new 12Gb/s SAS SSDs help increase input/output per second (IOPS) and improve response times to mission-critical data in cloud and traditional IT datacenters environments.

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Due to their rich SCSI heritage, SAS SSDs and high performance, high capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) will continue to be the building blocks of choice for future generations of high-performance enterprise servers and storage arrays. Leveraging HGST's SSD market success, the new Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS SSD family combines enterprise-grade, 25nm, highest-endurance, MLC NAND flash memory, industry-leading performance, advanced endurance management firmware and power loss data management techniques to extend reliability, endurance and sustained performance over the life of the SSD.

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Today, at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, LaCie announced it has the largest range of Thunderbolt solutions certified for use with Thunderbolt equipped Mac or PC. As the preeminent provider of Thunderbolt peripherals, LaCie is the only manufacturer to ensure five products in its Thunderbolt Series are compatible with Mac OS X and Windows 7 and 8 computers.

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Intel's Thunderbolt certification program is a thorough process put in place to ensure an optimal end user experience with both Mac and PC. As a result, LaCie ensures its Thunderbolt product family offers universal compatibility and delivers reliable performances up to 800MB/s for the most challenging media applications.

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G-Technology, a leader in delivering premium storage solutions for audio/video production, photography and the creative professional market, announced today the first solutions in its new Evolution Series family – the G-DOCK ev with Thunderbolt, and the G-DRIVE ev and the G-DRIVE ev PLUS external hard drive modules with USB 3.0. Together, they provide quick content transfers for photography, 2K and 4K digital cinema workloads with easy storage expansion, high performance and high reliability in a user configurable solution. The G-DOCK ev with Thunderbolt is the only two-bay solution with interchangeable and rugged storage modules that have the flexibility to be taken into the field and used as true standalone external drives.

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Whether in the field or in the studio, the Evolution Series design allows for various storage system configurations, including JBOD, RAID 1 (redundancy), RAID 0 (performance) or used as standalone external drives modules to meet the most demanding digital content workflow and data management needs. As capacity or performance needs grow, simply expand and scale by using more high-capacity, high-performance external hard drive modules with the same docking station for quickly creating camera card backups, easily separating and organizing projects, shuttling dailies or proxies, or delivering final work to clients.

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