OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory, power supplies, and solid state drives, today unveiled the OCZ Agility EX Series which makes SLC (single-level cell) NAND-based storage truly affordable in a solid state drive for the first time. The Agility EX provides the best of both worlds —the performance and advantages of SLC NAND technology at an incredible value. Based on the quality Indilinx controller, the Agility EX Series delivers an enhanced computing experience with faster application loading, snappier data access, shorter boot-ups, and longer battery life.

“Though SLC has traditionally been more expensive than MLC flash there are both performance and lifespan advantages to SLC based solid state drives, it is for consumers that require the extended reliability of single level cell flash that we are now introducing the Agility EX series of SSDs,” commented Eugene Chang, VP of Product Management at the OCZ technology Group. “The Agility EX offers consumers the most cost effective SLC solid state storage solution on the market, and when customers take all the benefits of SLC into consideration the total cost of ownership of these drives truly shines through.”

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Elecom Japan sent out a press release today, announcing its new ESD-IDSAA series of solid state drives. What makes this "nanoSSD" unique is that instead of taking up a drive bay, it plugs directly into one of the SATA ports on your motherboard. Elecom's new drive also gets its power directly from the SATA port. However, an auxiliary power cable is included in case it cannot get enough juice. The ESD-IDSAA series is available in 8GB (ESD-ID008SAA) and 16GB (ESD-ID016SAA) capacities and is capable of 75MB/s read and 30MB/s write speeds. No word on pricing or availability at this time.

Despite a rapid rise in the sales of consumer Blu-ray players, a fall in their prices and an increase in the number of high-definition movie titles, Blu-ray Drives (BDs) in PC systems have been left singing the blues, according to iSuppli Corp. By 2013, BDs will be found in only 16.3 percent of PCs shipped, up from 3.6 percent in 2009.

“BDs won’t be replacing DVDs as the primary optical drive in PC systems through at least the year 2013,” said Michael Yang, senior analyst for storage and mobile memory at iSuppli. “They eventually will find success, but during the next five years, that success will be limited in the PC segment. According to Yang, the two main reasons hampering the adoption of Blu-ray drives in PCs include costs as well as the lack of a library of movies that justifies the need for consumers to move to a different drive in their PCs.

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Roxio®, a division of Sonic Solutions® today launched Roxio Creator® 2010, a comprehensive upgrade focused on streamlining and accelerating the process of capturing, editing and enjoying personal video, including high-definition content. Building on Creator’s already extensive feature set for editing and sharing digital video, Roxio Creator 2010 now offers automatic smart encoding to dramatically decrease rendering times while maintaining optimum video quality, and leverages ATI Stream and NVIDIA® CUDA™ technologies to make project encoding up to five times faster. Creator 2010 also adds a range of Blu-ray Disc™ (BD) features including AVCHD Archiving, BD-RE on-disc editing, and complements its comprehensive Blu-ray Disc authoring capabilities with a new array of high-definition motion menus.

Roxio Creator 2010 also makes it easier to enjoy video on a range of mobile devices with a newly simplified and reorganized output display that enables users to quickly transfer videos that are automatically optimized for the display characteristics and playback features of their particular device. Adding to Creator 2010’s versatile video capabilities is a Web video capture feature that allows consumers to grab streaming video, such as user-generated content on YouTube®, for viewing offline on portable devices and DVD players.

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