Science and technology news blog

Samsung on March 7 shipped what it called the “world’s first hybrid hard drive” to the commercial marketplace, but it will get an argument from Dynamic Network Factory, which started shipping its own hybrid storage hard drive on Feb. 1.

Hybrid hard disks combine a standard disk drive with solid state—usually NAND flash-based—random-access memory in a design that is energy efficient.

Samsung’s MH80 Series hybrid hard drive is offered in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities, said a spokesperson for the company, which is based in Seoul, Korea.

The MH80 hybrid hard drive is currently shipping to select OEM customers and will soon be available in retail and commercial outlets, the spokesperson said. Details on pricing and availability will be released soon, the spokesperson said.

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Seagate has found yet another use for its tiny hard drives. Their hope is that starting this summer, you’ll be able to tote 10 GB of data with you wherever you go—accessible through your cell phone.

The company’s showing off the technology at the DEMO 07 conference, under the moniker DAVE (Digital Audio Video Experience). DAVE products are promised to be about the size of a credit card and less than 0.5’’ thick.

Now why would you want to attack something that size to your cell phone? Actually, you wouldn’t. You’d connect to the DAVE device through Bluetooth, or possibly Wi-Fi. Files would be accessed through a small Java application on the phone. Think about it—you’d be able to keep all your data in your pocket, but be able to access it at any time with a few button presses.

Seagate expects the first 10 GB DAVE devices to sell for about $150 this summer, with 20 GB devices to follow. The question that remains is, whatever will you do with all that data always available at your fingertips?

Hitachi Data Systems claims to have increased the performance of its storage by 20 percent with a new TagmaStore storage system.

The Adaptable Modular Storage 1000 (AMS1000) array has 32 logical cache partitions as well as support for iSCSI , network-attached storage (NAS) and Fibre Channel . It also can be used to migrate data across tiers of storage without disrupting operations, the company said.

It features RAID -1, 1+, 5 and 6 data protection and 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel connectivity. The AMS1000 joins the AMS200 and AMS500 in Hitachi’s family of midrange arrays.

Customers can intermix 73, 146 and 300GB Fibre Channel drives with 500GB Serial ATA drives and will scale from 1TB to over 200TB of data. It can serve as back-end storage for Hitachi’s Network Storage Controller NAS gateway or the high-end Universal Storage Platform.

The performance increase is due to its use of multi-processing technologies, the company said. Prices start at around $80,000.