Toshiba Releases AL13SE Series 10K RPM Enterprise HDDs

Toshiba launched theAL13SE series of enterprise hard drives, built in the 2.5-inch form-factor, with SAS 6 Gb/s interface. The drives come in capacities as high as 900 GB, and with spindle speeds of 10,500 RPM.

TheAL13SE series consists of four models based on capacity, the 300 GBAL13SE300, 450 GBAL13SE450, 600 GBAL13SE600, and 900 GBAL13SE900. All four models offer read/write seek times of 3.7 ms and 4.1 ms, respectively. Although with a typical spindle speed of 10,500 RPM, the drives featureSupported Enhanced Power Condition State (SEPCS) technology, which lowers spindle speed in tune with the amount of drive activity, to conserve power. All four models pack 64 MB caches.

Measuring69.85 mm x 100.45 mm x 15.00 mm, (W x D x H), the drives weigh about 240 g, and feature typical power draw of 4.7W. The company did not release performance numbers of its own, but recommended the use of 512 bytesector size.

Joel Hagberg, vice president of marketing at Toshiba’s Storage Products Business Unit, said "The AL13SE Series provides enterprise customers with capacities up to 900GB that support a broad range of enterprise applications,” adding“The increased performance and reliability of the AL13SE reflect our collaboration with our key partners to deliver small form-factor hard disk drives that address market requirements for mission-critical storage.”

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Wi-Fi Display coming by mid-year, partners already working on it

Last week we wrote about Intels plans for its WiDi technology and one of the new additions this year will be support for Wi-Fi Display, although we didnt know much about it at the time. Now some additional details have emerged at CES and as we suspected, Wi-Fi Display is a standard by the Wi-Fi Alliance which could drive Wi-Fi enabled display products into the mainstream.

The details are still fairly slim with a short mention in a press release by the Wi-Fi Alliance. It mentions support for “rich video and audio content, including HD video” but doesnt go into any details. We presume itll rely on Wi-Fi Direct as the press release goes on to mention that theres no need for a traditional Wi-Fi network to use Wi-Fi Display.

Thankfully Marvell also issued a press release that talks a bit more about Wi-Fi Display and the company is apparently running demoes at its booth at CES. From this press release its pretty clear that its Wi-Fi Direct based as it mentions peer-to-peer connectivity. Even though the technology is labelled Wi-Fi Display, it will support audio streaming, so wed expect to see this in Hi-Fi equipment as well as built into TVs, projectors and what not. In fact, Marvell is expecting Wi-Fi headphones that connect to your home stereo, although were not so sure about this one.

Marvell will implement support for Wi-Fi Display into its range of Avatar Avastar Wi-Fi solutions and the company is working on a new Wi-Fi stack to add features such as link provisioning and management, video transcoding, 1080p HD video transport over Wi-Fi and of course DRM. Marvell is expecting to add support to Android and Windows based mobile devices as well as HDMI dongles with Wi-Fi Display, Blu-ray and set top boxes and even throws in a mention of Google TV which makes sense as the company is making the chips for the second gen Google TV hardware.

Wi-Fi Display should have a couple of advantages over any current wireless display technology, as for one Wi-Fi can be found in just about any type of device these days. Secondly its cheap to implement, something that guarantees a widespread adoption and something thats preventing technologies such as WHDI which has proven to be quite costly. There are of course limitations, but considering Intel claims to be able to do 3D video over WiDi, we see no reason why this shouldnt work over Wi-Fi Display in the future. We wouldnt expect higher resolution video or 1080p60 video to work, nor does multiple video streams work, yet.

This is something the recently announced 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard would be able to address and again shows that going down the Wi-Fi route makes sense, as theres no reason why 802.11ac wouldnt get support for Wi-Fi Display. Well keep an eye on things as they develop, as there are still a good six months until the first devices will start to appear with Wi-Fi Display support.

Source: Wi-Fi Alliance, Marvell

PCI-E Chipsets (SB) For Athlon 64

ATi

SB400 : 4 ATA 133, 4 S-ATA, USB 2.0 x 8, PCI, AC'97, RAID, PCIE NB Link,Sampling Now, Production Q4'04

SiS

966 : MuTIOL 2G, 10 x USB 2.0, 4 PCIE x1, 10/100/GbE, Hi Def. Audio/AC'97, 4ATA-133, 4 SATA, Smart Clock Gating, Sampling Q3, Production Q4'04

ULi

M1566 : HyperTransport, PCIE, S-ATA AHCI, USB 2.0, RAID, UAA/AC'97, IrDA, 10/100MAC, Sampling Q3'04, Production Q4'04
M1569 : HyperTransport, 4 PCIE x1, PCIE x16, S-ATA AHCI, USB 2.0, RAID, UAA/AC'97,IrDA, 10/100/GbE MAC, Sampling Q4'04, Production Q1'05
M1573 : For ATi PCIE Chipsets, PCIE I/F to NB, S-ATA, USB 2.0, UAA/AC'97, 10/100MAC, RAID, Sampling Now, Production : TBD
M1575 : For ATi PCIE Chipsets, PCIE I/F to NB, S-ATA, USB 2.0, UAA/AC'97,10/100/GbE MAC, RAID, 4 PCIE x1, Sampling Q4'04, Production : TBD

VIA

VT8251 : Ultra V-Link 1GB, 4 S-ATA, 4 ATA-133, 2 PCIE, 8 x USB 2.0, 10/100Ethernet, UAA, Production : Q3'04

It is interesting to see that ATi is using SB from ULi to pair up with theirNB. Also M1566/69 and M1573/75 share pretty similar features except that thelink to the NB is different, M1566/69 is using HyperTransport while M1573/75 isusing PCI Express. SiS966 sports a nice feature call smart clock gating whichprobably make overclocking easier.