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 If Seagate will start mass production of hybrid hard drives, Samsung has started shipments of the first models of the MH80 series. These 2"1/2 discs will have 128MB or 256MB of flash memory and storage capacities of 80GB, 120GB and 160GB.
Prices aren't yet communicated but they will be significalty higher than standard hard drives. Considering, however, the product's caracteristics (we heard so far that hard drives will have at least 256 MB of flash memory) and the recentes criticism of Lenovo's engineers, we fear that these first models will not unleash the greatest passions. |
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 iSuppli has published estimations of hard driver manufacturers maket shares for 2006. With 434,2 million units shipped and a progression of +15,5% in a year, manufacturers must be quite pleased with the situation even if the price war started by Seagate during the first half of the year and the shortage of some components must have cut profit margins.
The head of the list is Seagate with 33.1% shares. The acquisition of Maxtor doens't seems to have had the impact expected by the manufacutrer. For the entire year, the shares of the two companies is 36.8% instead of 42.8% last year. Far behind, Western Digital and Hitachi repectively progressed to 19.6% and 16.1% from 17.1% and 15,5% last year.
The best progressions is made by Samsung which jumped from 7.2% to 10% in twelve months. With 9% for Toshiba and 6.9% (+0,5%) for Fujitsu, Japanese manufacturers have also beneficiated the disparition of Maxtor. The latter, which acquisition has been finalised end of May, plunged to 3,7% but has only operated 5 months. Finally, witha modest 1,4% and 0,4% improvement Excelstor is the last of the list. |
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 Creative has released official drivers for Sound Blaster X-Fi cards (except for the X-Fi Xtreme Audio) for the 32-bit et 64-bit versions of Windows Vista.
At this date, the drivers do not support Dolby Digital and DTS decoding, audio DVDs and 6.1 speaker configurations. Also, they aren't compatible with applications included to the CD delivered with the cards, the SPDIF interface will only be exploited with the 32-bit version of the OS and the ALchemy driver will still be required to have DirectSound 3D and EAX acceleration in games.
The official support of most of the SB X-Fi with Windows Vista is good news, but the restrictions are quite important as much for the the level of functionalities than for the cards supported. |
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Microsoft France and several manufacturers told us: HDCP protection won't be activated before 2010 and maybe even 2012.