Select the directory option from the above "Directory" header!

Stories by Lucas Mearian

  • Hospitals with better IT have fewer deaths, study shows

    The level of technology deployed by hospitals to help doctors and nurses automate their work can mean the difference between life and death, according to a recently-reported study. The study, involving more than 167,000 patients in 41 hospitals across the US, also showed that better IT lowered costs.

  • Samsung unveils 4Gbit DRAM

    Samsung Electronics announced Thursday that it has developed the first 4Gbit DDR3 DRAM chip using a 50 nanometer (nm) lithography process. The new chip doubles the density of earlier DRAM chips, yielding modules with up to 32GB capacity.

  • Coming soon: Full-disk encryption for all computer drives

    The world's six largest computer drive makers Tuesday published the final specifications for a single, full-disk encryption standard that can be used across all hard disk drives, solid state drives (SSD) and encryption key management applications. Once enabled, any disk that uses the specification will be locked without a password -- and the password will be needed even before a computer boots.

  • Brocade launches smaller, modular backbone switch

    Brocade Communication Systems on Tuesday announced the DCX-4S Backbone, a smaller, modular version of its multipurpose core network switching platform designed to consolidate server, storage area network (SAN), and data center networks.

  • Complaints flood Seagate over hard drive problems

    Seagate's <a href="http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&amp;thread.id=3668&amp;view=by_date_ascending&amp;page=1"> online support forum </a> has been riddled this week with complaints from owners of the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive, which in recent months has already drawn complaints that the drive has been freezing up during data transfers.

  • What your hard drive will look like in five years

    As solid-state disk (SSD) technology closes in on hard-disk drive (HDD) capacity and price, experts say it may not be long before spinning disks are a thing of the past and a computer's storage resides in flash memory on the motherboard.

  • Memory card standard could provide up to 2TB on SD cards

    The SD Association unveiled a new SD card specification last week at the 2009 International CES that it said can support data storage capacities of up to 2TB with read/write speeds to 104MB/sec. The specification, called SDXC (eXtended Capacity), uses Microsoft's exFAT file system to support the large capacity and interoperability in a broad range of PCs, consumer electronics and mobile phones.

  • SanDisk unveils new SSDs for laptops and netbooks

    SanDisk unveiled its next-generation solid-state drives (SSDs) at the International CES. One series is aimed at the hot netbook market and the other at laptops. The company's new higher-performance SSD for laptops are priced at less than US$250 for a 120GB model and are being positioned as a "drop-in replacement" for hard disk drives to extend the life of existing hardware.

  • Samsung rolls out 2.5-inch, 100GB solid-state drive

    Samsung Electronics announced Tuesday that it has developed a 2.5-in., 100GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive with enhanced performance for use in servers running applications such as video-on-demand, internet data centers and online transaction processing.

  • Seagate ships highest density desktop disk drive

    Seagate is now shipping its densest desktop hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.12, which offers 1TB of capacity on two disks. The drive is a 3.5-in. disk that spins at 7,200 rpm and has an areal density of 329 gigabits per square inch. Seagate said it expects to add platters using the same technology later this year to achieve even larger total capacity.

  • Kanguru eSATA flash drive provides speed

    Last month, Kanguru Solutions announced the first USB flash drive that also offers External Serial ATA (eSATA) connectivity. This month, OCZ Technology also announced an eSATA-enabled flash drive with up to 32GB capacity, as did Advanced Media's Ridata-brand.

  • Little tech wins big as nanocar inventor takes science award

    The inventor of a car slightly wider than a strand of DNA took the top prize in nanotechnologies this week. James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University, won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for experimental nanotechnology for his nanocar, which is four nanometers across and includes a chassis with an engine, a pivoting suspension, and rotating axles attached to rolling buckyball wheels each made of 60 carbon atoms.