"Japan's massive earthquake affected operations at dozens of semiconductor factories, raising fears of shortages or price increases for a number of widely used components—particularly the chips known as flash memory that store data in hit products like smartphones and tablet PCs. The quake struck hundreds of miles from many key chip plants, including most of the factories that account for the bulk of Japan's flash-memory production.

"Firmware built into many solid state drives (SSDs) to improve their storage efficiency could be making forensic analysis at a later date by police forces and intelligence agencies almost impossible to carry out to legally safe standards, Australian researchers have discovered.

"When it came to managing most of AOL's 6 petabytes of data, a Fibre Channel SAN sufficed. But for its most critical relational database, AOL found that the SAN was too constrained and caused its IT shop to fail to live up to its service level agreements with business units more than 50% of the time. After investigating what may have been causing I/O bottlenecks, AOL found the problem was back-end storage.

"Tuesday Samsung announced that it had begun mass-producing the industry's first 3-bit-per-cell, 64 Gb (8 GB) MLC NAND flash chip using 20-nm-class processing. The news follows Samsung's introduction of 32 Gb (4 GB) 3-bit NAND flash using 30-nm-class processing last November, and the company's 32 Gb MLC NAND using 20-nm-class processing unleashed in April." | more

"OCZ tells us that the IBIS product family will be offered in a range of densities, as you can see in the chart above. We've tested the 240GB model that offers up to 720MB/sec max read throughput and 720MB/sec maximum write throughput. Of course, blazing fast SSD technology like this also comes at a premium, as you'd expect. With the average higher-end 256GB SSD weighing in right around $579 or so for a Sandforce-based drive or the likes of Micron/Crucial's 6G SATA C300 SSD, you're looking at roughly a 30 - 50% premium for the IBIS drive.

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