SandForce said on Tuesday that it’s currently demonstrating the use of its latest SF-2000 series SSD controller with Toshiba’s new 24-nm MLC Toggle Flash memory in a 2.5-inch SSD form factor. The union is producing balanced read and write speeds up to 500 MB/s and up to 60,000 IOPS with Toshiba’s memory operating at 166 MT/s.

So what does this mean for consumers? The combination enables “SandForce Driven” SSD manufacturers to produce more affordable SSD products which will further accelerate adoption in the enterprise, client, and industrial computing markets that demand optimized reliability, performance, and power efficiency.

“Our award winning DuraClass technology includes a number of features enabling the industry’s highest level of reliability, endurance, performance, and power efficiency in a single SSD Processor solution,” said Thad Omura, vice president of marketing at SandForce. “We worked closely with Toshiba to expand DuraClass with additional advanced read recovery techniques vital to the successful operation of SSDs that use more aggressive NAND Flash process nodes.”

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) originally introduced the 24-nm toggle-mode double data rate (DDR) NAND flash memory modules just weeks ago, ranging from 2 GB (Q1 2012) to 128 GB (Q4 2011). According to the company, these modules feature the world’s smallest geometry e-MMC, one of the highest capacities achieved in the industry, and offer full compliance with the JEDEC e-MMC Version 4.41 standard.

“Toshiba was the first company to succeed in combining 16 pieces of 64 Gbit die in e-MMC to achieve 128 GB of memory by applying advanced chip thinning and layering technologies to realize individual chips that are only 30 micrometers thick,” the company said. “Full compliance with the JEDEC e-MMC Version 4.41 (V4.41) standard for embedded MultiMediaCards supports standard interfacing and simplifies product design-in, reducing development burdens on product manufacturers.”

For those who want to see the SandForce controller and Toshiba’s new NAND in action together, the demo will be shown during the Flash Memory Summit exhibition hours at booth #407-409 located in the Santa Clara Convention Center. The convention is currently underway and will conclude on Thursday, August 11.

More than 99 percent of the suits were directly targeted at BitTorrent, while 1237 are aimed at users that allegedly used eD2k. More than 55,000 cases have been settled over the 20 months, which leaves the number of pending suits at 145,417 at this time.

Torrent Freak highlighted the download frenzy surrounding Hurt Locker, which triggered a massive wave of copyright infringement lawsuits – 24,583 against BitTorrent users. The publication notes that the copyright infringement trend could be turning into a significant business opportunity – not just for the lawyers drafting and submitting the filings, but also for the copyright holders themselves – especially those who are willing to settle for a few thousand dollars out of court to escape the threat of a $150,000 fine for each copyrighted title in question. This could be providing a decent windfall for the entertainment industry.

If that is the case, the RIAA may want to rethink its decision to curb illegal file downloading from sources such as BitTorrent. The organization announced in July that it is working with Internet Service providers to monitor the download activity of their users in an effort that is called Copyright Alert System. If you download copyrighted material, your bandwidth will be throttled. The RIAA calls this a mitigation measure to stop online content theft.

SOURCE via Torrent Freak

Increased security and reduced cost of implementation are key factors in the growth of Cloud services, according market researcher TechNavio, which projects the Private Cloud Server and Cloud Software Services sectors will expand at compound annual growth rates of 12.7% and 18%, respectively, through 2014 in a recent report.

Unlike Public and Community Cloud infrastructures, Private Clouds are intended, from a privacy standpoint, to serve individual companies. They can, however, be managed by a company itself or a third party and be hosted internally or externally. TechNavio’s impressive growth projection for the Private Cloud Server sector is due, in part, to the delivery of higher levels of security for customer applications by vendors such as IBM, HP and Dell.

Issues regarding performance and application availability may continue to hinder the market’s potential, however.

Cloud software services are the tools provided to organizations and individuals through the various types of Cloud platforms: Public, Community, Private or a hybrid of any of the three. Overall, they are expanding thanks to a general trend toward reduced corporate IT services. In addition, the cost of implementing these services has been reduced by a number of Cloud Systems Management Software vendors, further stimulating adoption in spite of ongoing concerns about data security, TechNavio said.

No surprise there, as security and privacy concerns should always be at the top of any IT professional’s checklist when a evaluating a software, hardware or service platform—Cloud-based or otherwise.

Images of Acer’s answer to Apple’s MacBook Air – the Acer Aspire 3951 sporting Intel’s ultra-sleek ultrabook design – have found their way online. The shots were provided by Vietnamese site Sohoa, and reveal an extremely thin chassis that looks too brittle to be real. Still, that’s the point of Intel’s sexy ultrabook design: a hot, super-thin body packed with impressive hardware for under $1000 USD.

The Acer ultrabook is reportedly slated for October (seems to be a hot month for gadgets) and will sport a 13.3-inch screen, an aluminum chassis and an overall weight of less than 3.09 pounds. It will also supposedly measure just 0.51-inches thick – roughly the equivalent size of Apple’s impressive MacBook Air 13-inch model. The images provided by Sohoa confirm that most of the device’s ports are located on the rear just under the hinge.

Under the keyboard, the ultrabook will feature Intel’s second-generation Core CPU, 250 GB or 500 GB of HDD, optional 160 GB of SSD storage, a memory card reader, HDMI output, USB ports, Bluetooth 4.0, an HD webcam and more. The device will jump out of sleep mode in 1.7 seconds and even have a standby time of 30 days. Actual runtime should be around 6 hours.

So far rumors are pointing to a pricetag ranging from $768 to $960 USD, depending on the configuration. In the meantime, to see the full gallery, head here.

BGR has reportedly received word that Google is pushing to get Android 2.4 “Ice Cream Sandwich” out the door by early October.

Although no sources were specified, the report claims that Google wants the OS on the market in time for Apple’s launch of the supposed iPhone 5 in the later September / early October window. The fear is that potential customers coming out of their 2-year contracts – especially those of us who signed up for the original (and now horribly decrepit) Motorola DROID – may find themselves drooling over the new Apple smartphone.

The big deal with Google’s rather ambitious Ice Cream Sandwich build is that it promises to help eliminate Android’s frustrating fragmentation. The OS will supposedly work seamlessly across various devices including smartphones, tablets and computers – possibly Google’s answer to Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 platform.

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Last week Village Instruments used its Facebook page to poll customers about a Thunderbolt version of its ViDock expansion for the PC and Mac platforms. The post claimed that if more than fifty people posted a comment in favor of the device, then development would commence. So far 509 people have responded.

“ViDock Thunderbolt is a go!” said CEO Hubert Chen last week. “Thank you to everybody in this wonderful community! Special thanks to Manu Marea, Nino Ri and Jim Atchue! My in boxes are flooded. Please allow me a day or two to get back to everybody and to work with engineering and production to make a project schedule for ViDock Thunderbolt.”

For the uninitiated, ViDock could likely be the answer for many laptop gamers who simply can’t afford to purchase the more expensive gamer-oriented configurations. ViDock is essentially an extension chassis that connects to a laptop via an ExpressCard slot and allows the consumer to use a discrete PCI Express-graphics card. Of course, this doesn’t help in dealing with upgrading the CPU at a later date, but at least the current laptop can be extended a few more years simply by swapping out the external graphics card for something newer.

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IBM’s ambitious Blue Waters supercomputer project apparently drowned in complex technology and a flood of unexpected costs.

IBM, which was contracted by National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, is said to have abandoned the project as the “technology […] was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support by IBM beyond its original expectations.”

A press release indicated that the two parties could not find a mutual plan that would accommodate the changed environment. As a result, the NCSA is getting its money back. IBM will also get back all equipment that had been already delivered.

Blue Waters was originally planned to become NCSA’s new flagship supercomputer with a peak performance of 10 PFlops that should have been delivered by at least 300,000 IBM Power7 cores. The original core architecture promised a quad-CPU module, which holds four 8-core Power7 processors. Each processor was promised to deliver a peak performance of 256 GFlops and each module about 1 TFlops. Other specs included more than 1 PB of memory, more than 25 PB of storage, 500 PB of archival storage and more than 100 Gbps of bandwidth. The NCSA said that it has not abandoned the project, but is looking for other ways to realize its next supercomputer.

SOURCE via NCSA