SerialAta
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Intel Sandy Bridge chipset flaw identified as a rogue transistor affecting SATA ports
Intel raised quite a few eyebrows yesterday by disclosing that its Cougar Point chipsets suffer from an incurable design issue that would potentially degrade Serial ATA transfers over time. AnandTech has gone to the trouble of getting in touch with Intel to seek more information and the problem, as it turns out, is a single transistor that's prone to a higher current leakage than tolerable. This can not only diminish performance over the 3Gbps SATA ports, it can actually make them fail altogether. There is more comforting news, however, in that the pair of 6Gbps SATA ports on the chipset are untroubled by this ailment, so devices and users that never plug into the 3Gbps connections can just carry on as if nothing's ever happened. For everyone else, a repair and replacement service is taking place now, with Intel's budget for dealing with this problem said to be a generous $700 million.
Toshiba announces 750GB and 1TB laptop HDDs, gives them awkward model names like MK7559GSXP
Time for us to welcome the world's most capacious 9.5mm-tall hard drive, the 750GB MK7559GSXP. Yeah, it's quite a mouthful, but then it's not every day that you come across a storage disk that packs data quite so tightly, so maybe this is a name worth remembering. Not only is Toshiba's new two-platter 5,400RPM beastie the first ever to rise above 640GB without expanding to the chunkier 12.5mm height profile, it's also claimed to be 14 percent more energy efficient than the Japanese company's previous biggest model. If you don't mind moving up to the 12.5mm class, Toshiba's also bringing out a new MKxx59GSM series, which can stretch all the way up to 1TB, thanks to fitting three platters into the 2.5-inch diagonal space. Samples of both will be distributed to system manufacturers by the end of April, with mass production following soon thereafter.
Faster SATA standard coming in second quarter of this year, says SATA-IO
The folks behind the Serial ATA standard have been working on drafting a new, faster spec for a little while now, but it looks like things are finally starting to firm up, and SATA-IO marketing chair Conrad Maxwell now says that the new 6Gb/s standard is on track for release in the second quarter of this year. That, as you're no doubt aware, is twice as fast as the current spec and, according to Maxwell, it'll be backwards compatible with both the SATA-1.5Gb/s and SATA-3Gb/s specs. What's more, it's apparently also the group's intention to double the E-SATA spec to 6Gb/s as well, although no one seems to be making any promises on a date for that just yet. As a bit of a bonus, the group will apparently also be rolling out a new Power over ESATA spec (or ESATAp), which will allow 5 or 12 volts of power to be delivered via an ESATA connector.
