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Denmark pledges ‘green’ domestic flights by 2030
Denmark's Prime Minister has committed to "green" domestic flights by 2030, but that's easier said than done.
An enterprise SSD flaw will brick hardware after exactly 40,000 hours
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has warned that certain SSD drives could fail catastrophically if buyers don't take action soon. Due to a firmware bug, the products in question will be bricked exactly 40,000 hours (four years, 206 days and 16 hours) after the SSD has entered service. "After the SSD failure occurs, neither the SSD nor the data can be recovered," the company warned in a customer service bulletin.
OCZ Ibis touts 2GBps High Speed Data Link, vanquishes SSD competition
What's after ludicrous speed? If you ask OCZ, the answer is HSDL speed, which is the company's new interface idea for bypassing the bandwidth limitations of standard SATA/SAS interconnects. Using a high-quality SAS cable to hook up its new Ibis drive to a PCI Express host card, OCZ has managed to deliver a cool 2GBps of total bandwidth -- that's one gigabyte up and one gigabyte down... every second. In order to feed this massive data pipe, the company's gone and stacked four SandForce SF-1200 controllers inside the Ibis and RAIDed them together for good measure too. The upshot isn't too dramatic for desktop applications, where'll you'll see performance that's merely world-beating -- reading at 373MBps and writing at 323MBps -- but if you throw in some deeper queues and enterprise-level workloads you'll be able to squeeze out 804MBps reads and 675MBps writes. Needless to say, the Ibis scooped up many a plaudit in early reviews, and though it may be expensive at $529 for 100GB, it still seems to represent good value for those who have the workloads to saturate its High Speed Data Link.
Former SAS op Chris Ryan handling Medal of Honor prequel novel
EA has tapped British author Chris Ryan to write a prequel novel to Medal of Honor, which will use in-game missions as the basis for "an authentic and respectful account of an elite soldier fighting in Afghanistan." Ryan is the author two bestselling novels, in addition to The One That Got Away, a narrative account of his time as a Special Forces operative on the Bravo Two Zero patrol in Iraq. Presumably he'll use both his combat experience and storytelling prowess to do the game franchise right. Hopefully his first line will be better than the one we came up with: "They loaded their guns carefully, knowing that soon, they'd be shooting a lot of people." The creatively named Medal of Honor: The Book will be offered as a bonus with preorders of the game from UK retailer HMV, but we're not sure if it will be available for sale elsewhere -- we've contacted EA for comment and will update if we hear more. We sure hope it sees print in the US, if only to find out what a former British operative thinks of the Medal of Honor, a uniquely American military decoration.
Seagate's 2TB Constellation ES is rife with potential space puns
It's been a long time coming, but Seagate's finally unveiled its first 2TB hard drive, the 3.5-inch Constellation ES. The hefty spinner also comes in 500GB and 1TB varieties and runs at 7,200RPM, which should make it a bit faster than Western Digital's behemoth, according to reviews for the latter. It'll be out calendar Q3, which we take to be fancy schmancy business talk for "this Summer." Meanwhile, the 2.5-inch ES-less Constellation line sports 3 Gbps SATA and SAS 2.0 interface. Look for this one in 160GB and 500GB sizes sometime this quarter, with Dell said to be one the first companies to offer the drives. Check out one more out-of-this-world promotional image after the break.
SOCOM Confrontation's Special Forces organizations revealed
Fans of Sony's popular militaristic 3PS series are probably already keen to the fact that the upcoming May issue of EGM will blow the doors off of the highly secretive next installment, SOCOM Confrontation. 1UP recently added to the meager pile of info for the game in the form of a correction for their ink-and-paper counterpart -- the list of Special Forces organizations featured in the game is apparently incorrect in EGM's upcoming feature.As it stands right now, clan-bound players can join up with and enjoy the unique equipment options made available from five different, actual military units: U.S.'s Navy SEALs, U.K.'s Special Air Service (SAS), Germany's Kommando Spezialkräfte (KSK), Spain's Unidad de Operaciones Especiales (UOE), and France's 1er Régiment Parachutiste d'Infanterie de Marine (1er RPIMa). We're sure this will make for some realistic, intense firefights -- still, we wish there were more eccentric units we could sign our digital soldiers up with, like the Michigan Militia, or McHale's Navy (the Tom Arnold remake regiment, of course).
Seagate can't stop announcing 1TB disks: Barracuda 7200.11 and ES.2
Perhaps due to the raging insecurities of playing catchup to Hitachi's 1TB disk, Seagate just announced a couple more 1TB drives in what has quickly become a confusing HDD line-up. Joining their previously announced 1TB Barracuda 7200.10 are the SATA-equipped Barracuda 7200.11 for consumers and business class Barracuda ES.2 with SAS interface. This time however, Seagate had the good manners to at least provide a date and price: Q3 and $399.99. Right, exactly the same price as Hitachi's 7K1000.Update: Seagate just gave us some clarification on the 7200.10 vs. 7200.11: "The 7200.10 that was announced was a 250GB single-platter design; the purpose of it was to leverage the new areal densities we achieved and put it into the current 7200.10 chassis with the core electronics. It is shipping today. The 7200.11 and ES.2 use the same areal densities but are a new generation design with updated electronics, etc." So there you have it.
Hitachi's Ultrastar triple-play: 15k RPM, SFF, and 1TB enterprise disks
If your enterprise disks aren't spinning at 15,000 rpm these days then you'd better step, son. Hitachi just announced their Ultrastar 15k300 (pictured left) which is, as you've probably already surmised, a 300GB disk chugging away at 15,000rpm. the 3.5-inch drive with 3.6-ms average seek time can be slung from Ultra320 SCSI, 3Gb/s SAS, or 4Gb/s FCAL interfaces in your mission-critical computing racks. Also announced is Hitachi's first small form factor (SFF) drive, the C10K147 (pictured center). This 2.5-inch, 147GB, 3Gb/s SAS disk is meant to assist data centers with cutting space and power consumption. The 15K300 is available now while the C10K147 will be delivered sometime later this quarter. Oh, in case you're wondering, that biggie drive on the right is the enterprise version (A7K1000) of their 1TB 7K1000 monster previously constrained to the desktop.[Via Impress]
Seagate unveils "world's fastest" 2.5-inch 15k RPM hard drive
Ah, companies and their bragging rights. Looks like today's self-proclaimed champion is none other than Seagate, as the firm has claimed that its newly-unveiled 2.5-inch Savvio hard drive spins quicker than any other drive on the block. The Savvio 15K expands upon the existing 2.5-inch "SAS enterprise hard drive series" with a pair of new 15,000 RPM models that could theoretically fit inside a laptop, but are clearly designed for blade servers and enterprise applications. As expected, these drives are built on perpendicular magnetic recording technology (PMR), and are only available in sizes of 36GB and 73GB, which is (understandably) smaller than the 146GB option in the 10K Savvio. Seagate claims that these diminutive speed demons consume 25-percent less power than the company's 3.5-inch Cheetah 15K.4 drives, offer 10-percent faster seek time, and provide 40-percent faster sustained data transfer rates. Seagate declined to mention hard details in regard to pricing, but did state that customers would face "a premium" for the newfangled speed, but hey, you gotta pay to play.
