Today LaCie announced significant advancements in two recognized and award-winning network storage solutions – the LaCie 2big Network and the LaCie 5big Network. The product upgrades include improved performance, enhanced features, comprehensive backup support, and extreme capacity expansion – ultimately providing customers with an easier setup experience and a variety of ways to archive, access, and share large amounts of content.

The award-winning LaCie 5big Network takes advantage of a Gigabit Ethernet connection and features five hot-swappable drives that support seven RAID modes. Now, with the latest capacity advancements, the 5big Network includes a 10TB model, making it the first in its class to offer double-digit capacity.

While Blu-ray still has a long ways to go before it overtakes the DVD, a new report issued by The NPD Group shows that the format is moving further into the mainstream. According to NPD's latest point-of-sale tracking data, first quarter sales of stand-alone Blu-ray players in the U.S. grew to more than 400,000 units, an increase of 72 percent over Q1 2008. Consumer awareness also reached 90 percent with 6 percent of those surveyed stating that they would be “extremely or very likely” to buy a Blu-ray player in the next six months.

According to the latest point-of-sale (POS) tracking data from The NPD Group, a leading market research company, Blu-ray Disc (BD) video technology is moving further into the mainstream. First quarter (Q1) sales of stand-alone Blu-ray players in the U.S. grew to more than 400,000 units, an increase of 72 percent over Q1 2008. Dollar sales increased 14 percent, to reach $107.2 million according to NPD’s retail tracking service.
                                                     
"The rising penetration of high-definition televisions and lower Blu-ray player prices are broadening the format’s market opportunity," said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at NPD. "Even as options expand for accessing movies digitally, Blu-ray is carrying forward the widespread appeal of DVD into the high-definition marketplace."

NPD’s “Blu-ray Report” March 2009 update revealed that overall consumer awareness of the BD format in the United States has reached 90 percent awareness in the past six months.  Purchase intent for Blu-ray set-top boxes also rose slightly in NPD’s most recent tracking surveys, with 6 percent of respondents saying they would be “extremely or very likely” to buy in the next six months, compared with 5 percent who responded similarly in the August report.  Despite these high awareness levels, more than half of adults (58 percent) continue to report that they were still “not very familiar” with BD. 

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Storage Appliance Corp., developers of Clickfree, the easiest-to-use PC backup solutions on the market, today announced two new products, the Clickfree Traveler and Clickfree DVD Transformer. Available May 7, 2009, both devices are PC and Mac compatible, and eliminate the confusing and time-consuming hassle associated with backing up irreplaceable digital data.

As light as a pen and the size of a credit card, the flash-based Traveler slips easily into a wallet, allowing business travelers, photographers, music lovers and others to carry up to 64GBs of data in their hip pocket or purse. The Clickfree DVD Transformer enables consumers to quickly and easily back up important data to optical discs, bypassing tricky CD and DVD burning software. Coupled with recordable CDs and/or DVDs, it’s an inexpensive yet foolproof way to back up important files.

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QNAP Systems, Inc. today launches the 2-bay Intel Atom-based TS-239 Pro Turbo NAS with iSCSI target service for SMB and SOHO users. Adopting the low power Intel 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB DDRII memory, and DOM (Disk on Module) architecture, the TS-239 Pro delivers outstanding system performance in data intensive business environment. The NetBench test result shows the TS-239 Pro delivers an extremely high throughput of over 350MBit/s when 20 clients are accessing the NAS simultaneously, which is 3 times faster than other NAS brands in the same class. With the support for two 2TB hard drives, hot-swappable disk trays with locks, two Giga LAN ports, three USB 2.0 ports, and two eSATA ports, the NAS has become the top-class 2-bay NAS model with the best specifications and of the highest scalability, redundancy, storage capacity, and stability in the current market.

The TS-239 Pro supports Windows, Mac, Linux, and UNIX OS. Advanced features such as built-in iSCSI target service (max 8 iSCSI devices) with Thin Provisioning, Online RAID Capacity Expansion, Online RAID Level Migration, AES 256-bit volume-based encryption, Wake on LAN, automatic policy-based IP blocking, instant SMS and email alert, BT and EMule download, schedule power on and power off, two IP cameras for network surveillance are also available.

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