News Bits: New Samsung SpinPoint Drives, OLPC Sugar Download, Quanta Record Shipments

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Samsung develops single-disk 160GB notebook drive

Samsung Tuesday announced its new SpinPoint M5 2.5&quot; series drive featuring 160GB of storage. The unique feature about this drive is that it only uses a single disk to achieve its capacity. A dual-disk drive is under development and will provide up to 250GB of storage space.

The SpinPoint M5 series uses perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, and the weight of the new drive has been reduced about 4%. The M5 series drives have a 5,400RPM rotational speed, 1.5Gbps SATA interface, and 8MB of cache memory. PATA models will be available in May.

Read More (Business Wire)

OLPC Sugar interface tour

Image courteousy Engadget

Engadget has a screenshot gallery of the OLPC's Sugar interface. It has an icon-driven user interface and is quite different from other interfaces (Windows, Mac).

The OLPC's Linux-based OS is available for download via a bootable LiveCD ISO. Users have reported it works well.

Read More (Engadget)

Download info (Engadget)

Quanta notebook shipments hit record levels in March

Notebook shipments from Quanta Computer reached a record high in March. A total of 2.4 million units were shipped, bringing the company's notebook shipments for Q1 to 6.2 million. Quanta's Q1 shipments reached 24.8% of the company's projected shipments; Quanta has said it is confident it will reach its shipment goal for 2007.

Read More (DigiTimes)

Sony VAIO G gets Solid State Drive

The Sony VAIO G series is an ultraportable 12.1&quot; screen notebook available in Japan and Europe that was released at the beginning of this year. In Japan the VAIO G will now be offered with a Solid State drive (SSD) with 32GB capacity. While that's less capacity than the standard hard drive offering with the VAIO G, it is of course a faster, more power efficient and more secure form of storing your data.

We expect to see more and more of the ultraportable crowd notebooks adopting SSD drives in the near future, so stay tuned for more similar announcements from major notebook vendors!

Sony VAIO G (Japanese)

Dell discontinues Axim handheld

Dell is finally discontinuing its Axim Pocket PC lineup after 5 years on the market. Dell announced last August that it was stopping PDA development. The X5 was Dell's first Axim in 2002, and the X51 was its last. Part of the reason Dell is dropping its PDA lineup is because the demand for the standalone PDA over the last few quarters has been steadily declining.

Read More (Brighthand)

 

I am soo tempted to get the 200gb 7200rpm 2.5" drives for my notebook, 120gb is not enough (especially since I use RAID-1).

The storage technology [for notebooks] is finally getting improved to catch up with the desktop counterparts. About time.

 

Good news about the Samsung HDD announcements. I guess the single platter 160GB is coming first because it will have a lower production cost, but I need more space than 160GB.

I've already got the 160GB 2-platter Samsung HDD and it is the quietest HDD I've every owned. It is not at the top of the performance charts but represents a good low noise lower power alternative.

Samsung seem to be moving from being just another HDD manufacturer towards being one of the technology leaders.

John

 

Hmm

Does that mean the new Samsung is gonna kick Seagate 7200.2 new 160GB 7200rpm drive?

 

Im wondering that myself.

Because it literally must have twice the data concentration on the platter.

2 x the transfer speed / 1.3 times the spinning speed.

It should be faster

the 250 gb version should be great
but shouldnt it be a 320 gb 5400 rpm hd?

 

Access time will still be worse than any 7200 drive (even the tinniest ones).
As for space. I already got 1TB of storage. The laptop doesn't need storage. It needs speed. Just waiting for a SATA SSD.

 

I really like the style of that sugar interface. Trademarks notwithstanding, NBR should adapt it. The fun would be in learning what symbols do

As for SSD, I look forward to a x years time when it will be cheaper and be in larger capacities. I put this in the bracket of "cool" technology

 

Sony one step forward, one step back. What happened to widescreen? No internal DVD drive? Still Core Solo? Geekstuff has 'em though.

http://www.geekstuff4u.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=&products_id=506

Although I just don't see buying one yet.