Back in July, OCZ announced that it was working on its next generation SSD controller, the Indlinx Barefoot 3, and that it would begin sampling SSDs on this new controller in the August to September timeframe. Apparently, things are on schedule as Jess Luken, OCZ's Global Marketing Director, posted a picture of the Barefoot 3 on Twitter.

The Indilinx Barefoot 3 (IDX500M00-BC) is manufactured using TSMC's 65nm process technology. It also utilizes OCZ's internally designed Aragon 400 megahertz 32-bit processor which supports an SSD specific RISC instruction set. This allows most instructions and branches to be executed in a single cycle.

OCZ has not announced any Barefoot 3-based products yet. However, the company has said that we can "expect SSD sales related to Barefoot 3 in the third fiscal quarter", which should be sometime before the end of the year.

WD, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corporation, today announced that it has added the USB 3.0 interface to its line of My Passport for Mac portable hard drives and increased capacity for Mac computer users up to an unmatched 2 TB. Popular among students and other Mac users who take their digital content everywhere, the My Passport for Mac with USB 3.0 allows users to quickly and conveniently take advantage of the faster transfer speeds USB 3.0 provides when connecting the drive to their MacBook® computer or MacBook Air® computer with that interface.

While continuing to provide a sleek and slim design, the My Passport drive also has been a favorite among consumers and professionals who have safety and security at the top of the list of requirements for portable drives, which is why the My Passport for Mac includes password protection and hardware encryption features to protect content from unauthorized use or access. The My Passport for Mac drive is also compatible out of the box with Apple Time Machine for easy backup to further protect valuable files.

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WD, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corporation, and a world leader in external storage and connected home solutions, is combining two high-speed technologies to produce one the fastest and most robust dual-storage system ever offered. Supported by the Mac OS X operating system, the new My Book VelociRaptor Duo dual-drive storage system becomes the ultimate storage drive for performance hungry Mac computer users and creative professionals.

My Book VelociRaptor Duo provides ultimate speed and performance with two 1 TB 10,000 RPM WD VelociRaptor drives along with two Thunderbolt ports. The 2 TB dual-drive storage system is ideal for editing high resolution video, 3D rendering, graphic design, and other demanding digital media applications. This boost in performance delivers solid state drive (SSD) -like data transfer rates of up to 400 MB/s for greater work-flow productivity. The dual-drive storage system offers RAID 0 for performance or RAID 1 for protection; and the twin Thunderbolt ports offer daisy-chaining multiple My Book VelociRaptor Duo drives and other high performance peripherals without impacting data transfer speeds or performance. The My Book VelociRaptor Duo also comes complete with a Thunderbolt cable in the box and is user-serviceable.

Photographers, graphic designers and post-production professionals can conduct several high intensity tasks such as video editing, 3D rendering, while completing other graphics-intensive projects. My Book VelociRaptor Duo customers will now have the ability to transfer 22 GB full-length HD movies in less than 65 seconds, 2000 5 MB pictures in less than 33 seconds and over 500 5 MB songs in less than 8 seconds.  

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World renowned memory and flash drive manufacturer KINGMAX recently launched super mini flash drive – PI-01. Its tiny size fits car audio, tablet and notebook well; and it is so short that users might even forget its existence. PI-01 comes with two colors: sapphire blue and mist silver, and capacity of 4GB/8GB/16GB/32GB.

The tiny size of PI-01 protrudes only 0.7 cm long from USB port. For drivers, even under the circumstance of limited car interior space, which surrounding by many connecting devices or wires, PI-01 is so mini and short that it could fit USB port without being hit or getting stuck with other objects. PI-01 is tiny but capacious; the largest capacity 32GB model is able to save around 8,000 MP3 songs. With PI-01, drivers and passengers can enjoy a steady stream of music and don’t need to change disks anymore.

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Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced the SSDNow E100 SSD, the company’s new enterprise-class solid state drive (SSD). The new drive enables enterprises to accommodate the performance demands required in support of big data and virtualization initiatives. The new Kingston E100 SSD achieves up to 10X improvements in endurance and reliability over client SSDs on existing hardware, while drastically reducing the physical footprint as significantly fewer SSDs are needed to handle the tasks of many traditional hard-disk drives (HDD).

The performance and processing requirements required in the rapid analysis of massive data sets and large collections of virtual systems have pushed many servers far beyond their breaking point. The next generation E100 SSD provides vastly higher IOPS compared to HDDs, dramatically reducing processing bottlenecks, computer latency and physical system limitations.

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CDRLabs kicks off the week with a review of SanDisk's first USB 3.0 flash drive, the Extreme. Available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities, this new flash drive sports a compact, slim design and is capable of delivering up to 190MB/s sequential read and 170MB/s sequential write speeds. The Extreme is also covered by a lifetime limited warranty and ships with SanDisk's SecureAccess software, which protects files against unauthorized access by creating an encrypted, password-protected folder, or "vault," on the drive.

At the beginning of August, Plextor announced the first details for the M5 Pro. Plextor now confirms it will start rolling out the M5 Pro series in several European countries in September and reveals more details about the new SSD line.

The M5 Pro is designed and engineered with prosumers, businesses, and small / medium enterprises in mind. The combination of the latest generation Marvell 88SS9187 controller and quality Japanese Toshiba Toggle NAND flash gives M5Pro enterprise-class performance. The M5 Pro boosts sustained random read / write speed up to 94,000 / 86,000 IOPS as well as continuous read/write speeds up to 540/450 MB/s. The drive also makes use of True Speed technology, which prevents the drastic performance drops seen in some SSDs after intense or long-term usage.

The Plextor M5 Pro introduces True-Protect: a unique protection system consisting of two layers to protect the integrity of your data. To confirm that each piece of data is correctly stored with 100% accuracy a 128-bit error correction code (ECC) built into the latest Marvell controller is used. This is complemented by a second layer of read protection offered by the Robust Data Hold-out algorithm in Plextor's exclusive firmware, allowing the drive to achieve total data accuracy even in the long-term.

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