Sony Corporation ("Sony") and Panasonic Corporation ("Panasonic") today announced that they have formulated "Archival Disc", a new standard for professional-use, next-generation optical discs, with the objective of expanding the market for long-term digital data storage.

Optical discs have excellent properties to protect themselves against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored. They also allow inter-generational compatibility between different formats, ensuring that data can continue to be read even as formats evolve. This makes them robust media for long-term storage of content. Recognizing that optical discs will need to accommodate much larger volumes of storage going forward, particularly given the anticipated future growth in the archive market, Sony and Panasonic have been engaged in the joint development of a standard for professional-use next-generation optical discs.

These efforts resulted in the formulation of "Archival Disc", a new professional-use next-generation optical disc standard, for which the technology roadmap, logo, and specifications are outlined below.

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Plextor, leading developer and manufacturer of high-performance digital media and storage equipment, will reveal its new M6 Solid State Drive Solution at the upcoming 2014 edition of CeBIT in Hannover, Germany. The M6 multi-form factor lineup features Plextor's next-generation and new 2.5" M6S, the new M6M mSATA SSD and the new ultra-fast M6e M.2 PCIe SSD.

Building up to the official introduction of the highly anticipated M6 series Plextor will be continuously demonstrating the full lineup from March 10 - 14 in its showcases in the Business Center (Hall 15, Stand A18, Room 18) and at Planet Reseller (Hall 15, Stand D21, Number 66).

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The Storage Products Business Unit of Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a committed technology leader, announces new additions to the enterprise capacity hard disk drives (HDD) – the AL13SXB and the self-encrypting AL13SXQ. With a 2.5-inch form factor, the AL13SXB and AL13SXQ have 15mm z-height and spin at speeds up to 15,000 rotations per minute (RPM), making the AL13SX series suitable for mission critical enterprise storage applications.

The AL13SX series comes in 300GB, 450GB and 600GB capacities, and delivers high performance in 600GB capacity while supporting industry standard 512n sector lengths in a space efficient 2.5-inch form factor. The 4K native sector and 512e emulation models of the drives include Toshiba’s persistent write cache technology for improved data integrity and performance. Overall, the AL13SX series supports high storage density, saving rack space and reducing mission critical storage footprint and operational burden for enterprise customers.

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OCZ Storage Solutions – a Toshiba Group Company and leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced the introduction of the enterprise-class Z-Drive 4500 PCI Express (PCIe) SSD Series.  The new Z-Drive 4500 Series delivers even higher performance in comparison to OCZ’s Z-Drive R4 Series, leverages 19 nanometer (nm) MLC NAND flash, and features a more robust architectural design covering 800GB, 1.6TB and 3.2TB usable capacities.

Each model within the Z-Drive 4500 Series is integrated with OCZ’s new Windows Accelerator (WXL) Software -- a flash management and caching solution for Microsoft Windows Server applications also announced by the Company today.  WXL Software enables IT managers to deliver low-latency flash deployable as a local flash volume, a flash cache for HDD volumes or as a combination of both.

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WD, a Western Digital company and a world leader in connected storage solutions, today expanded its prosumer personal cloud solutions with My Cloud EX2, a high-performance two-bay network attached storage (NAS) system. The My Cloud EX2 and My Cloud EX4 products are designed from the ground up for creative professionals and prosumers that need to reliably save, share, back up, stream and manage large amounts of digital data.

“WD is committed to providing a comprehensive portfolio of personal cloud solutions as the need for digital data storage continues to dramatically increase,” said Jim Welsh, executive vice president, WD Branded Products and worldwide sales. “With the My Cloud EX series of products, customers will be thrilled with the advanced features, high-performance and reliability that only WD can provide.”

Complete Data Control and Protection
Several data management and security features allow customers to select their preferred methods for managing and protecting their movies, photos, music and digital files. Drive management options include RAID 0, RAID 1; JBOD and spanning modes, while data protection options include RAID 1, USB, cloud or LAN/WAN backup. The My Cloud EX2 comes preconfigured in RAID 1 mode to protect data right from the start and is easily configurable into other data protection modes. Customers can use their My Cloud EX2 to centralize and back up all of their computers and notebooks with WD SmartWare™ Pro software for PC users, and with the Apple® Time Machine® backup software for Mac users.

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EDGE Memory, a leading U.S.-based supplier of memory and storage upgrades, announced today the release of the much anticipated diskGO Sonic USB 3.0 flash drive as part of their new portable SSD line. Powered by a top-tier SandForce SSD controller, this USB drive is one of the fastest USB storage devices available today.

"The diskGO Sonic SSD is an impressive product. It's ideal for traveling professionals, photographers, graphic designers, or anyone that needs to transfer or store large amounts of data quickly", says Brandi Rocha, Marketing Manager at EDGE. "It's really incredible to think that you can carry up to 240GB of data in your pocket. Plus, the speed difference of this drive over other USB 3.0 drives on the market today is truly significant."

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Today, CDRLabs brings you a review of OCZ's Vector 150 solid state drive. Building off the success of the original Vector SSD Series, the Vector 150 is based on OCZ's Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller. Developed entirely in-house, this cutting-edge controller is powered by both an ARM Cortex processor and OCZ's own Aragon co-processor and features an advanced, multi-level ECC engine, efficient garbage collection and adaptive flash management algorithms. The Vector 150 also adds support for AES-256 encryption and is equipped with 19nm MLC NAND flash for even greater endurance and performance. Along with 50GB of host writes per day for five years, the drive is capable of 550MB/s read and 530MB/s write speeds and a maximum of 95,000 4KB random write IOPS.