Really, one terabyte isn't enough? If so, you'll be pleased to know that your insatiable need for more digital storage has left Seagate no choice but to announce the world's first 1.5TB hard drive. The half-terabyte jump over previous highest capacity 1TB drives, Seagate is happy to point out, represents the largest jump in capacity in hard-drive history. The 3.5-inch Barracuda 7200.11 uses perpendicular magnetic recording, which squeezes more 1s and 0s per square inch than conventional drives, to pack 1.5TB of storage space over four platters. Seagate isn't sharing pricing details yet. The drive will begin shipping in August. » Read the rest of the entry..

The "rumor" is true: Intel's future Larrabee graphics chip does use processing cores based on the company's venerable Pentium chip. Larrabee, due in 2009-2010, is a high-end graphics chip with many processing cores targeting market segments that Nvidia and AMD-ATI now dominate.

Here's the starting point for the Larrabee-is-a-Pentium theme. The Web site Custom PC cited an article from German-language Heise, in which Custom PC says--via a link to a Babel Fish translation of the Heise article--Intel Senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger discusses Larrabee and Pentium.

Though Intel is refusing to confirm the report, the Heise article is true, according to a source who has accurate data about Larrabee.

The cores in Larrabee will have a "basic commonality" with the P54C Pentium, the source said. The P54C was introduced back in 1994. » Read the rest of the entry..

Plat'Home, a Linux company from Japan that specializes in combining eco-friendly, small, tough hardware with their own version of Linux, is announcing another in their series of MicroServers. Kanshi BlockS Pro, made to monitor servers and various network applications, is now available in North America. This is a great example of applying technology where it's needed. A large percentage of IT budgets are spent on infrastructure monitoring and management. Up-time can be anywhere from just important to mission-critical. The problem for many companies, however, is that the medicine is worse than the disease. Implementing expensive, complex monitoring solutions regularly strains budgets or is simply out of reach, even if necessary. » Read the rest of the entry..

Hitachi was first to hit the terabyte mark when it announced the 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive in January 2007. Fast forward a year and a half, and the company is back with not a larger version of the drive but a more efficient model in the Deskstar 7K1000.B. Like its predecessor, the 7K1000.B is a 3.5-inch, 7,200rpm hard drive that serves up 1TB of storage space and a 32MB buffer. It hits that magic terabyte mark, however, by using only three disks--down from the five-disk design of the older 1TB drive. It also borrows from Hitachi's 2.5-inch mobile drives and includes Bulk Data Encryption. » Read the rest of the entry..

Intel has upstaged Advanced Micro Devices at DreamWorks Animation. The movie studio has decided to drop AMD and go with processors from Intel, citing better performance and a more promising roadmap.

DreamWorks specifically mentioned Intel's upcoming Nehalem processor and Larrabee graphics chip as reasons for the switch.

Intel and DreamWorks announced Tuesday that they had formed a strategic alliance for 3D filmmaking technology. DreamWorks plans to produce all its feature films in stereoscopic 3D--which requires the viewer to wear special glasses for enhanced 3D--beginning next year. Intel will provide DreamWorks with "the latest high-performance processing technologies, including future chips with multiple processing cores," the companies said.

This is a setback for AMD. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker rolled out its quad-core Barcelona last year at George Lucas' Lucasfilm campus in San Francisco to make a point: Barcelona would be big player in the movie industry. But a series of delays related to a processor bug put a damper on the high expectations for Barcelona. » Read the rest of the entry..

Like new models from its Gateway subsidiary, Acer's new Aspire X1200 small-design PC looks like an all-64-bit affair. Three models come out this month, at $450, $460, and $699 (with a 22-inch LCD), and both the pricing and the distinct design separate them from Gateway's traditional midtower desktops.

The $700 Aspire X1200 comes with a 22-inch LCD.

(Credit: Acer) » Read the rest of the entry..

One year after the first release of the first Drobo that won our Editors' Choice award, and a few days after the release of the beta SDK, Drobo Robotics today announced its second revision of the product.

For those of you who don't know, Drobo is the world's first, and for now still the only, solution for external storage that automatically and intelligently takes care of your data with minimal input from you. All you have to do is install the hard drives, which is as easy as inserting a CD into the CD-ROM drive. The Drobo protects your data with Drobo Robotics' proprietary technology that guarantees the integrity of your data, as long as no more than one hard drive needs to be replaced at a time. It can also predict when you should replace a hard drive before the drive actually fails. » Read the rest of the entry..

In an effort to keep up (and possibly even surpass) other feature-rich NAS devices, such as the Synology DS107+ or the HP MV2120, Drobo Robotics today released to the Drobo Developer Community (DDC) the beta SDK for its ever popular Drobo products including Drobo, the external hard drive, and DroboShare, the network storage add-on. » Read the rest of the entry..