WD, the world's leader in external storage solutions, today introduced its fastest My Book® external hard drive ever -- the new My Book 3.0 desktop external drives are among the first devices certified with the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface. With an interface that's up to 10 times faster than the previous-generation USB 2.0 interface, the high-performance My Book 3.0 drive significantly reduces the time it takes to open and save large files.

Offered standalone, or in a kit that includes a USB 3.0 PCIe (gen2) adapter card, the 1 TB My Book 3.0 drive is available now at select retailers and shopwd.com. The 2 TB model is expected later this week.

The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface on My Book 3.0 drives provides transfer rates of up to 5 gigabits-per-second, allowing users to open and save files up to 4.7 times faster than USB 2.0.  The new My Book 3.0 drive is compliant with the USB-IF SuperSpeed USB 3.0 standard to provide compatibility with other USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 products. SuperSpeed USB 3.0 is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1.

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CDRLabs kicks off the new year with a review of Lite-On's 24x DVD writer, the iHAS424-08. This Serial ATA equipped "Super AllWrite" drive is capable of 24x DVD±R, 12x DVD±R DL, 8x DVD+RW, 6x DVD-RW  and 12x DVD-RAM writing speeds and a maximum DVD read speed of 16x. Along with support for HP's LightScribe Direct Disc Labeling system, the iHAS424 also features many of the technologies we've come to expect from Lite-On, including more advanced ones like SmartWrite, SmartErase and OverSpeed. Add a comment

ioSafe today announced the availability of the new ioSafe Solo SSD - a solid state, highly ruggedized model of the award-winning ioSafe Solo desktop external hard drive. Combining ioSafe’s new proprietary ArmorPlate, a military grade steel outer casing with SSD technology, the new ioSafe Solo SSD adds unprecedented shock, drop and crush protection to the existing fire and water protection.

The ioSafe Solo SSD combined with ArmorPlate helps to protect data in a two story building collapse, 5000 lb. crush forces, 20’ drop into rubble and up to a 1000g shock. In addition the original HydroSafe™, FloSafe™ and DataCast™ work to keep the drive cool during normal operation and protect the data from fires up to 1550°F for 1/2 hour and complete water submersion of 30’ for 30 days in fresh or salt water. Like all ioSafe products, the ioSafe Solo SSD comes with ioSafe’s Data Recovery Service, a “no questions asked” policy to help customers recover from any data disaster including accidental deletion, virus or physical disaster.

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Compared to a standard DVD, Blu-ray's 50GB of storage capacity seems fairly large. Nevertheless, companies have continued to look for ways to squeeze more data onto a single disc. Along with the multi-layer discs developed by Pioneer, Hitachi and TDK, companies are now looking at partial response maximum likelihood (PRML) signal processing as a possible way to store up to 33.4GB of data per single layer. Thanks to Sony and Panasonic, PRML is one step closer to becoming a reality. The two companies recently announced that they've developed a new evaluation technique known as i-MLSE (Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation) that can be used to judge the optical quality when reading and writing to 33.4GB media.

Sony and Panasonic Corp. resolved this by developing the i-MLSE (Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation) evaluation index. Details of i-MLSE were announced at International Symposium on Optical Memory 2009 (ISOM '09), held in October 2009. The first of the two key characteristics is that i-MLSE has a strong correlation with the error rate (Fig. 1) even in read/write at 33.4 GB using PRML. The second, according to Sony, is that "i-MLSE exhibits the same relationship to signal quality as conventional jitter." In other words, it will be relatively simple to estimate the read error rate from the i-MLSE, just as can be done now with jitter.