Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC - News), a world leader in hard drive storage for computing and consumer electronics applications, today announced that it has completed a $65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Inc., Aliso Viejo, Calif., a leading supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market.

Since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems has sold millions of SiliconDrive® products to meet the high performance, high reliability and multi-year product lifecycle demands of the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets. These markets accounted for approximately one third of worldwide solid-state drive revenues in 2008. SiliconSystems' product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors. SiliconSystems has developed extensive intellectual property to address the stringent embedded systems market requirements to ensure data integrity, eliminate unscheduled downtime, protect application data and software and provide for data security and protection through its patented and patent-pending PowerArmor®, SiSMART®, SolidStor® and SiSecure(TM) technologies.

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WD® (NYSE: WDC), the world's leader in external storage solutions, today expanded its My Book® family of external hard drives to include a 2 TB capacity, the largest available capacity in a single-drive system. With its wide variety of models, WD offers a solution for every type of user, whether they're a creative power user on a Mac® or a home user on a PC. The new 2 TB My Book family includes: My Book Studio Edition™, My Book Mac Edition, My Book Home Edition™ and My Book Essential Edition™ models. 

Market research shows that consumer creation and acquisition of digital media is growing rapidly, driving demand for increasing storage capacities. According to market research firm IDC, the number of digital cameras and camera phones in the world surpassed 1 billion (Mar. 2008). Separately, market research firm GfK reports that HD (high definition) video camcorders are experiencing record growth and now account for 42 percent of total camcorder sales (Aug. 2008). HD video requires massive amounts of drive space: at least 8 GB per hour of video. Since 2006, when Apple® began offering movie downloads, the Apple store has already sold more than 250 million TV episodes and sold or rented more than 33 million movies (Apple, Mar. 2009). 

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Sony Optiarc has beaten Lite-On to the punch, releasing the world's first 24x DVD writer, the AD-7240S. Available now through various online retailers, including Newegg and Buy.com, the Serial ATA equipped AD-7240S offers 24x DVD±R, 12x DVD±R DL and 12x DVD-RAM writing speeds as well as features like Optiarc's Auto Strategy and Adaptive Self Tuning technologies.

Thanks to the fine folks at Optiarc America, we were able to get our hands on the AD-7240S and run some tests. So far things look very promising. When writing to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 24x, it took the drive about four minutes to burn an entire 4.7GB DVD, beating most 22x DVD writers by 20-30 seconds. It's writing quality was also surprisingly good, considering the speeds.

A full review of the AD-7240S is currently in the works. In the mean time, please post any comments or questions you may have in our forum.

TotalMedia Theatre 3 is packed with new features; including enhanced video display results, robust Blu-ray interactive features support, DTS Surround Sensation Ultra PC capability, MKV, FLV and HE-AAC audio support, and direct playback from camcorders to mention a few, providing users with the ultimate movie-viewing experience.

Utilizing ASUS Xonar HDAV series audio card, TotalMedia Theatre 3 enables lossless digital audio pass-through such as DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby TrueHD, and Dolby Digital Plus, to AV receivers for high-fidelity sounds up to 192 kHz sampling frequency and 24-bit audio resolution, offering an exceptional audio experience to users when watching Blu-ray movies.

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