You couple this that the Boss reported earlier with the mindset below and you know where the bus is headed. Over a cliff. –

A US financial analyst expects Seagate to announce the closure of one or two US plants by the end of May, predicting 800 to 1000 redundancies.

The target at Seagate is to drive its quarterly operating expenses below $300m, according to Stifel Nikolaus analyst Aaron Rakers. This will be achieved, he thinks, by shutting down one or two US plants, which will achieve a faster operating expense reduction than closing overseas facilities. There could be up a thousand employees laid off as a result.

Rakers also considers that Seagate has caught up with Western Digital and other competitors on small form factor areal density, with 320GB/platter capacity levels being reached. An announcement of 2.5-inch products with 320 and 640GB capacities could occur in the third quarter of this year, with shipments in the fourth quarter or very early 2010.

It was fun watching the American Tech scene. Most of it will head overseas in short order to avoid American taxation. For the Giants like HP and IBM maybe never. But for middle tier players its the South China Sea rim or die. All I can say is — “Thanks for the memories”.

Linky.

Beginning with Release Candidate 1 of Windows 7, the operating system will no longer display AutoRun when most removable media is connected. Up to now, the feature has automatically opened a window each time a drive is connected that presents a list of tasks the user can instruct Windows to carry out. Malware purveyors have long manipulated the feature to display options that say things like “open folder to view files” but install malware when clicked instead.

“With these changes, if you insert a USB flash drive that has photos and has been infected by malware, you can be confident that the tasks displayed are all from software already on your computer,” Arik Cohen, a program manager on the Microsoft’s core user experience team writes here. The changes eventually will be added to Vista and XP.

Excellent move Microsoft. Yes its a minor thing but one that is long over due. The ease of manipulation that that panel offered was a gripe by many a tech.

Nor is this minor peve limited to Microsoft. Ubuntu and other Linux distros will do this too. The saving grace is that Linux is more immune to such attacks.

Linky.

The folks that gave us the mini-ITX platform, VIA, have brought forth an small form factor data storage unit.

With eight 3.5″ hard drive bays in a 2U form factor rackmount chassis, the VIA NSR7800 offers system integrators the perfect balance of power-efficiency, performance and capacity. Powered by an energy-efficient 1.5GHz VIA C7 processor, the VIA NSR7800 is an ideal base for a variety of rackmount server applications including email, file and web server products.

Key Features include:

* 2U rackmount design
* Supports 8 S-ATA II hard drives
* 8 easy-access, lockable drive bays
* Bootable Compact Flash Type I socket
* Dual Gigabit LAN

The VIA NSR7800 has eight S-ATA II drive bays are easily accessible through lockable front levers that allow hard drives to be securely installed in moments. Dual Gigabit LAN ensures fast data transfer speeds.

The VIA NSR7800 supports a type-1 compact flash slot for embedded OS installations and uses PCI-Express-based Gigabit networking to handle file transfers quickly and efficiently. A mini-PCI port is also available for additional security related add-in cards such as hardware VPN or anti-virus modules. The device can address 8 drives so the potential is 15Tb of storage. –

LEDs include individual S-ATA port activity, overall hard drive activity, network activity and power. There are also custom LED control and push button backup and recovery options.

The VIA NSR7800 supports Microsoft Windows Server 2003/2007, Windows Home Server and Linux. System monitoring and management includes Wake-on-LAN, Wake-on-Alarm and Watch Dog Timer. A complete driver and SDK is available to customers.

pricing is not known at this time. There is also a tower like configuration with the same specs. Not exactly a Tightwad type of purchase except maybe if you are a over-monied videophile. The cheapest RTM video storage today is around $4k. If I added up what is probably in this VIA unit it would come out to about $2k. So it quite possible that this unit will deliver a cheaper cost per Gb for the videophile than most current storage offers.

Linky.

Intel has decided to be a player in the SSD game. Somewhat unusual considering they are not as big a player in the RAM market as several korean and japanese mfrs are. –

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Intel Corporation has begun shipping its highest- performing solid-state drive (SSD), the Intel® X-25E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive, aimed at server, workstation and storage systems. Unlike mechanical drives, the SSDs contain no moving parts and instead feature 50nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory technology. Systems equipped with these drives will not suffer from the performance bottlenecks associated with conventional drives. By reducing the total infrastructure, cooling and energy costs, SSDs can lower total cost of ownership for enterprise applications by more than five times.

“Hard disk drive performance has not kept pace with Moore’s Law” said Kirk Skaugen, general manager, Intel Server Platforms group. “Intel’s high-performance SSDs unleash the full performance of the latest Intel Xeon processor-based systems while increasing reliability and lowering the total cost of ownership for a broad range of server and storage workloads”

It will be interesting to see how the SSD market works out against their mechanical brotheren. The SSD makers would seem to have a natural advantage in the storage performance curve due to the manufacturing techniques used vs traditional disk. But just when you think that SSD has eclipsed them the likes of Western Digital, IBM and Seagate seem to pull another storage rabbit out of the hat.

Linky.