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 the Z-Drive m84, a PCI-Express Solid State Drive (SSD) designed to offer the performance of OCZ’s Z-Drive product line to enthusiasts for a more affordable price point and availability in the mainstream market segment versus the enterprise channel. The Z-Drive m84 is the answer to the demand from end-users to have access to this state-of-the-art storage solution.

“The OCZ m84 Z-Drive is the newest addition to our line of PCI-E solid state drives and is designed to offer consumers a high performance yet aggressively priced solid state solution,” said Eugene Chang, Vice President of Product Management at the OCZ Technology Group. “While the previously released p84 and e84 Z-Drives were intended specifically for enterprise applications, the m84 delivers much of the same performance but at a price point that is competitive with standard SSD drives. This is the first time that such a high performance PCI-E based SSD that is optimized for media editing, gaming, and workstation productivity, has been so within the reach of power users.”

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Active Media Products, manufacturer of SSDs and innovative USB drives, today announced the Aviator 312 line of SuperSpeed USB 3.0 external SSDs.

SuperSpeed USB 3.0 supports transfer speeds up to 4.8Gbits/sec -- ten times faster than USB 2.0. A312 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 external SSDs take advantage of USB 3.0's massive bandwidth, delivering unprecedented transfer speeds in an extremely compact mobile flash storage device. Measuring less than 3 inches long and only 0.2 inches thin, the A312 is smaller than a credit card and is designed to fit in a pocket. A312 SSDs can save a 25GB full-length HD movie in about two minutes. What used to take an hour to save will take only seconds with the A312 thanks to its scorching write speeds of up to 160MB/s and read speeds up to 240MB/s.

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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 expanded their Turbo NAS lineup with the addition of the TS-410 desktop NAS server targeted specifically at the SOHO and Prosumer market segments. The TS-410 features 4 hot-swappable SATA hard drives with up to 8TB of total capacity (with 2TB drives) and supports 2.5" or 3.5" hard drives, giving users more flexibility in selecting drives for installation.

The TS-410 features a Marvell 800MHz CPU and 256MB DDRII memory which provides sustained high performance with low power consumption. The TS-410 can be configured for RAID 0/1/5/6/5+ spare, and JBOD with online RAID capacity expansion and online RAID level migration for high data redundancy. The TS-410 also supports iSCSI Target service with Thin Provisioning and dual Gigabit LAN ports, features generally found on much higher end NAS servers. The TS-410 also features 4 USB ports (1 front, 3 back panel) and 2 e-SATA ports for expanding the storage capacity or backing up the TS-410.

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While TDK's 100GB and 200GB Blu-ray Discs never made it past the prototype stage, this hasn't stopped the company from pushing the technology to new limits. According to the Japanese website, Tech-On!, TDK has now developed a 320GB optical disc. These discs contain 10 layers, with each layer capable of storing 32GB. TDK plans to exhibit this new technology at CEATEC 2009.

The new optical disc has a larger capacity than the Blu-ray disc, which has a capacity of 25 Gbytes per layer. And it is possible to write and read data on and from the disc by using a blue-violet semiconductor laser with an oscillation wavelength of 405nm and an objective lens with a numerical aperture (NA) of 0.85, which are currently used for the Blu-ray disc...

...The structure of the new disc is as follows. A cover layer and a hard coat layer, which protects the surface from scratches and dirt, are formed on recording layers (the innermost L0 layer to the outermost L9 layer). A Si-Cu alloy layer, which is inorganic, is used for the L0 layer.