While Hitachi-LG Data Storage makes pretty remarkable products as a team (like the recently unveiled HyDrive), Hitachi on its own is making moves in the desktop space, and its latest hard drive offering comes in 26% thinner than its predecessor.

Hitachi takes pride in its new Z-series hard drives for having a thickness of just a little over a quarter of an inch (0.27-inches, to be exact) while providing just as much storage space, speed and cache as its currently available 0.37-inch thick counterparts. The Hitachi Z-series is made up of a total of three different hard drives, namely, the Travelstar Z7K320 (a 7200rpm drive with 16MB cache), Travelstar Z5K320 (a 5400rpm drive with 8MB cache) and the CinemaStar Z5K320 (a 5400rpm drive with 8MB cache). The first one is intended for use in high-performance notebooks, the second one in low-power devices, and the third one for non-computing products such as set-top boxes, portable video players, DVR-enabled TVs and video surveillance systems.

Hard drives like this are just what manufacturers would need as they come up with new offerings, which for some reason seem to keep getting thinner and thinner with each new model. So don’t be surprised if you see any one of the three Z-series hard drive models in a new netbook or ultra-light laptop in the near future.

Via Computerworld

Hitachi launches quarter-inch thick Z-series hard drives for ultra-light notebooks and netbooks is a post from: Eee PC

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Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS), one of the world’s biggest optical drive manufacturers for desktop PCs and laptops, recently unveiled the world’s first Blu-ray Disc combo drive with a built-in SSD specifically for use in notebooks and other types of portable devices. They’re calling it the HyDrive, and from the looks of it, it just might be our ticket to widespread adoption of SSDs in notebooks and other portable gadgets.
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Read the rest of Asus to adopt recently unveiled Hitachi-LG DS HyDrive tech in next-gen Eee Top PCs (176 words)

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If you’re the kind of person who likes to say “pun intended” during random moments, you might actually like the latest batch of USB keys released by LaCie. Their basic models, called “iamakey” and “itsakey”, are USB 2.0 compatible and offer up to 8GB of storage. Meanwhile, a higher capacity model with an microSDHC card slot is also available in the LaCie Passkey. And as if that wasn’t enough, LaCie also offers what it called the “CurrenKey”, shaped in the form of a coin (as in currency). These USB keys start at £9 each.

Via RegHardware

LaCie’s latest USB keys would be right at home with the other keys in your pocket is a post from: Eee PC

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A report has been released by DRAMeXchange which highlights the use of SSD memory, or rather the lack of. Since the beginning of the year, more and more netbooks have opted to use HDDs instead of SSDs when it comes to storage. The start of the year saw 70% of netbooks released coming equipped with SSD, with Q2 of 2008 lowering that percentage down to 66. At the end of Q3, this figure was more than halved and now sees 30% of netbooks using SSD.

It’s predicted that this trend will continue, with the end of Q4 estimated to see 20% of netbooks having SSDs while next year, it could be as low as just 8%. An analysis puts some facts on these statistics, and it’s largely to do with the price of SSDs over HDDs. Netbooks which include SSD tend to increase the price of the netbook as SSDs are more expensive to produce. The more expensive price tag also doesn’t give you more storage space, but rather decreases it.

via

SSD netbook inclusion sees decrease is a post from: Eee PC

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According to this report in the Wall Street Journal, Asustek are planning to offer data storage for their customers which will be online storage and will be free of charge. Of course, Asus are the makes of the popular Eee PC so this news is bound to be welcomed by the Eee community. Asus are making determined effort to offer that little bit extra that their competitors (of which there are an increasing amount) don’t.

This is due to be a world wide service offering 20 gigabytes of free web storage and should be up and running by the end of the year, possibly early ’09.

This is a nice move by Asustek, the Eee PC has been a huge success for them and it’s good to see the company keep pushing forward in a bid to satisfy it’s growing number of customers.

Asus to Offer Free 20 Gb Online Storage for Eee PC is a post from: Eee PC

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