Intel RST 9.6 & TRIM VIA announces the VX900 Seagate heads HDD sales

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Intel RST 9.6 & TRIM   Posted on 24/03/2010 at 19:41 by Marc

	Following the embroglio around the latest RST 9.6 drivers and support or otherwise for TRIM on an SSD RAID, Intel has come back to us: Intel® RST 9.6 supports TRIM in AHCI and pass through modes for RAID. A bug has been submitted to change the string that indicates TRIM is supported on RAID volumes (0,1,5,10). Intel is continuing to investigate the ability of providing TRIM support for all RAID volumes in a future release. Mention of full support was therefore an error in the help file. These drivers therefore only allow the TRIM command with a single SSD, but used on an Intel controller configures in AHCI or RAID mode. Up until now, in an AHCI configuration you had to make do with Microsoft’s Windows 7 drivers and having an HDD RAID array meant that there was no TRIM support for the SSD. We’ll have to wait for forthcoming drivers for the TRIM command to function on an SSD RAID.

VIA announces the VX900   Posted on 24/03/2010 at 16:47 by Benoit

	VIA has added a new chipset to its range designed for its own CPUs. The VX900 has been designed for the C7, Eden and Nano and takes over from the VX855. It adds support for DDR3-1066 (in addition to DDR2) as well as PCI-Express 2.0 (1 x8 lane and 3 x1 lanes) and SATA. The VX900 has an IGP compatible with DirectX 9, even if you’d be fooling yourself to think you could expect to launch the least game at any sort of fluidity with this chip alone. Nevertheless the built-in ChromotionHD 2.0 engine allows you to decode HD videos so as to read 1080p in spite of the lack of power of the processors. Following the example of Intel, you can now mount a 100% VIA platform designed for SFF (Small Form Factor).

Seagate heads HDD sales   Posted on 24/03/2010 at 16:29 by Benoit - source: Twice.com

	While most new announcements on storage devices concern the SSD market, standard hard drives aren’t out yet. With higher storage capacities and much lower pricing they still have some good days ahead. Seagate and Western Digital are the two major players in this still vigorous market. Some figures out today give a measure of the two brands. In the fourth quarter of 2009, Seagate sold approximately 49.9 million drives against 39.5 million for Western Digital. So Seagate is still the market leader with 31% of sales but is closely followed by its competitor with a 30% market share. At 25.2 million units Hitachi is some way behind with 16% of the market. Next come Toshiba/Fujitsu with 13% and Samsung who, in spite of its very good F1 and F3 series, only sold 14.6 million drives, which represents barely 9% of global sales over the period.