Samsung has released a new firmware for their SSD 830 line of drives. According to the release notes, firmware CXM03B1Q offers improved compatibility and stability of the firmware update tool, which some users had issues with when upgrading to the CXM02B1Q firmware. Samsung also made the firmware available through Samsung Magician or bootable USB/CD option.

In their Q2 2012 quarterly earnings call, Western Digital indicated drive shipments in the quarter that ended in December were roughly 119 million units, which included a pre-flood inventory of 11 million drives. Of those drives, WD shipped 28.5 million, compared to 52.2 million in the same quarter a year ago. While WD recovers more

OCZ has released a new firmware for the Octane SSD family that up to doubles random write IOPS performance in some capacities. Firmware v1.13 is designed for Octane SATA 6Gb/s SSDs and is available for download now. 

Mellanox has announced a new pricing structure and expanded channel for their line of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) solutions. Good timing, considering Crehan Research estimates market penetration of 10GbE to be about 13% today, with growth in 2012 to scale to 37% of the total annual market shipments.

Nexenta Systems, supplier of OpenStorage solutions, has announced that it has secured over $21 million in Series C financing, with Menlo Ventures– experienced investor in the storage space industry–as its new lead investor. Sierra Ventures and Razor’s Edge Ventures were also chosen for partnership in this round, joining current investors Javelin Venture Partners and TransLink

Micron Technology has announced an agreement to acquire the assets of privately held Virtensys Ltd., a provider of PCIe-sharing solutions based in Manchester, England and Beaverton, Ore. The move helps Micron to strengthen their storage portfolio as they fold in Virtensys’s PCIe virtualization technology. Micron currently offers the RealSSD P320h PCIe SSD solution in 350Gb

A new report from IDC shows EMC leading the Purpose Built Backup Appliances (PBBA) market with a 62% market share for the first half of 2011 thanks to their Avamar, Data Domain and Disk Library for Mainframe products. That translates into a 3X lead over the second place finisher IBM. The rest of the PBBA

Kingston released the new SandForce SF-2200 based SSDNow V+200, replacing the Toshiba-powered SSDNow V+100, and bumping speeds to take advantage of SATA 6.0Gb/s interfaces. The new V+200 will be available in a wide range of capacities, including 60, 90, 120, 240, and 480GB versions with peak read speeds topping out at 535MB/s and write speeds

pureSilicon has announced the Kage family of SSDs comprising a standard 2.5" SATA form factor, along with a slim USB 3.0 drive. The Kage K1 SATA SSD is aimed at workstation and light enterprise users and delivers on both endurance and performance with eMLC NAND, read speeds of 540 MB/s and writes of 520 MB/s.