First Look: New WD VelociRaptor Hard Drive Cruises Through Speed Tests

Western Digital’s 10,000 rpm, 300GB high-performance hard drive chomps through the competition.
Western Digital picked an extremely appropriate name for its new 10,000 rpm (rotations per minute) hard drive. Dubbed the VelociRaptor, this new drive screamed through the PC World Test Center’s performance tests. Velocity is clearly the raison d’etre for this drive: The VelociRaptor handily [...]

Intel cuts chip prices up to 50 percent

Intel posted price cuts on Sunday that included reductions of 50 percent on select quad-core processors. The chipmaker also introduced new Celeron and Core 2 Duo processor models.
he price of the Core 2 Quad Q6700 (2.66GHz) fell 50 percent from $530 to $266, while the quad-core Xeon X3230 (2.66GHz) saw an identical cut: from $530 [...]

Seagate Sues Solid-State Storage Maker STEC For Patent Infringement

SSDs remain significantly more expensive than hard disk storage, and the theoretical performance advantage is still largely unrealized.
Seagate Technology, the world’s largest maker of hard disk drives (HDDs), on Monday said it had filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against STEC, a maker of solid-state drives (SSDs) and computer memory products.
Seagate CEO Bill Watkins announced the lawsuit [...]

Hitachi Readies Monster 500GB Mobile Hard Drive

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, hitting hard in the days leading up to CES, announcied a hard drive for notebooks and other mobile devices that offers Godzilla-sized storage ” a half-terabyte, or 500GB — capable of holding 178 movies, 500 hours of digital video, 250 games or 125,000 four-minute songs.
The Travelstar 5K500, the 2.5-inch mobile hard [...]

USB 3.0 To Boost Peripherals to Multi-Gigabit Speeds

The “SuperSpeed” USB Promotions Group was announced Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum. The promotions group will get together with contributors over the next year to finalize a USB 3.0 spec that will, they hope, take care of our wired peripheral and syncing needs for another five years or more.
USB 3.0 is built upon, and [...]

HP develops mobile document-printing service: New York Times

HP has unveiled a free service designed to make it possible to print documents on any printer almost anywhere in the world, The New York Times reported on its Web site late Sunday.
Cloudprint, which was developed over a period of several months by a small group of H.P. Labs researchers, makes it possible to share, [...]

Tilera unveils 64-core microchip

SAN FRANCISCO: Tilera, a Silicon Valley semiconductor start-up, is unveiling a single microchip with 64 processing units, or cores, in a technological jump generations ahead of the mainstream.
In recent years, microprocessor makers like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have had to grapple with ever-increasing amounts of power consumed as they cranked up the basic clock [...]

Intel Works Its Quads

In an effort to keep the pressure on rival Advanced Micro Devices, Intel on Monday launched a pair of new quad-core server processors that promise to crank out more performance per watt.
While the quad-core war between Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) and AMD may seem esoteric, technology sold at a premium for [...]

Wireless USB Makes a Splash

Interested in Wireless USB? Check out Certified Wireless USB kits from D-Link and Iogear.
Cables connecting USB devices to PCs may soon disappear thanks to Wireless USB, a short-range wireless communications technology developed by nonprofit USB Implementers Forum Inc. (USB-IF), which also developed the USB 2.0 standard.
Combining wireless and USB (Universal Serial Bus) connectivity, this technology [...]