Hitachi: 500 GB in 2'' 1/2 ASUS: start of a new era

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Hitachi: 500 GB in 2'' 1/2   Posted on 03/01/2008 at 14:55 by Nicolas

	Hitachi has just announced a hard dive in 2" ½ format with a capacity of 500 GB while Samsung, Toshiba, Fujitsu and Western Digital currently offer drives with a capacity of 320 GB. Once again, the «trick» consists of using not two platters as the competition does but rather three. This means that the height of the drive is 12.5 mm versus the 9.5mm of standard 2"1/2 models. Rotation speed is 5400 tpm, there is an SATA-II type (3.0 Gbits /s) or SATA-I (1.5 Gbits /s) interface, a cache of 8MB, and access time in reading is 12ms for an average consumption of 1.9 Watts in reading/writing. The sound level in stand-by is at 22dBA. Moreover, a 400 GB version will also be offered. They should be available next month and will be found in ASUS M50 and M70 laptops amongst other products. These Asus laptops can take two hard drives which means a maximum storage capacity of up to 1 TB.

ASUS: start of a new era   Posted on 03/01/2008 at 00:07 by Nicolas - source: divers

	The first rather ironic consequence of ASUSTeK’s reorganization which took effect the 1st of January is that it could make Foxconn the top motherboard manufacturer. In fact, these will now be produced by two distinct entities in the group. ASUSTeK will continue to make all products sold under the ASUS brand name (13 million motherboards in 2007) while Pegatron Technology will be an original design manufacturer producing products which will be branded by other companies (46 million motherboards last year). As for Foxconn, they had a total of 45 million units and there has been rapid growth for them in the last few years. Note that a third company, Unihan Technology, has been created as a product of this reorganization. It handles the production of casings and ODM activity unrelated to PCs. Finally, ASRock intends on offering more high end products and has recently launched three motherboards equipped with Intel P35 chipsets certified to officially support an FSB of 1600 MHz. Other models based on the nForce 680i and 650i should follow.