With the advent of solid-state-disk technology, shrinking costs of high speed volatile memory, the low cost of SATA, and the reliability of SAS, optimal organization and integration of new storage technologies has become more difficult. Opportunities exist to place frequently accessed “hot” data on lower latency, faster media, while leaving rarely accessed data on higher

Plextor has announced a new Blu-ray burner with write speeds up to 12X, the highest speed available today. The PX-LB950UE has USB 3.0 and eSATA connections and includes Blu-ray playback software, including support for 3D.

Paragon Software Group has announced its new Hard Disk Manager 11 Professional software. The software provides users with tools for data safety and recovery, data migration for physical and virtual environments, partition alignment and management, wiping technologies, and partition conversion.

Crucial’s m4 SSD is now shipping, complete with SATA 6Gb/s interface, Marvell 9174-BLD2 processor and homegrown Micron 25nm NAND. While the top speeds are posted at 415MB/s reads and 260MB/s writes, the most interesting factor may be price. The m4 comes into a crowded market with the most aggressive SATA 6Gb/s pricing yet, starting at

Today Crucial quietly released the latest firmware for the popular RealSSD C300. Aptly named 0007 (replacing version 0006) this firmware is intended to fix an outstanding issue that caused some performance issues for some users. The most common reason for upgrading to the latest firmware is if your C300 suffers from a stuttering issue that

OCZ has released and is now shipping a Max IOPS version of their popular Vertex 3 SSD. The drives increase random write performance of the original Vertex 3, ideal for applications where increased IO throughput is critical. The OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS SSDs leverage the SandForce SF-2200 series processors to deliver 4K random write performance

Following hot on the heels of Intel and Micron with their new 20nm NAND, SanDisk has announced they will start production of 19nm MLC NAND in the 2nd half of this year in a partnership with Toshiba. The new chip is a 64Gb, 2-bits-per-cell (X2) design targeted at smaller embedded designs and removable storage.

Hitachi GST is expanding its line of external storage devices with its Touro Pro series desktop and mobile external hard drives. 3GB of cloud storage is included for free. Other highlights include 7200RPM drives and USB 3.0 connections.

Seagate and Samsung are calling it a "Broad Strategic Alignment" but it more common terms, Samsung has more or less sold off their hard drive storage division to Seagate. The deal was rumored over the weekend by the Wall Street Journal, now it’s official. As part of the deal Samsung will combine its hard drive