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Hitachi makes new eco-friendly hard drive

Hitachi on Wednesday joined the crowd of green-storage vendors with its fourth generation of the CinemaStar hard-drive family.

The new drive features Hitachi's EcoTrac Classification. This means it's halogen-free and has very low power consumption. The new CinemaStar features a read/write power specification of 1.4W--a reduction of 22 percent compared to previous models.

Other that that, this is a 2.5-inch (laptop) SATA hard drive that has the spinning speed of 5,400 rpm, which is popular though slower than the 7,200 rpm of some higher-end drives.

According to Hitachi, its new CinemaStar hard drive … Read more

Intel at chip conference: More wireless, less GHz

At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Intel will present 15 papers, with a renewed emphasis on integrating more functions into one chip--and less focus on gigahertz. Intel is especially focusing on squeezing more sophisticated wireless silicon into small devices.

"The trend of using smaller transistors to build larger microprocessor cores with higher operating frequency is coming to an end," Mark Bohr, an Intel senior fellow, said Wednesday.

The chipmaker will highlight research on what it is proclaiming as the "new system-on-a-chip (SoC) era," which it describes as requiring "a fundamental shift in the way semiconductor … Read more

Scion will add 4th vehicle

DETROIT -- Scion plans to expand its model line from three vehicles to four.

Also, Scion Vice President Jack Hollis said: "Within the next two years, we will have a replacement tC" coupe.

The tC coupe will be nearly 7 years old when the redesign arrives, but such a long life cycle will not be the norm for Scion in the next decade.

"It will be different for each model," Hollis said at the Detroit auto show in January. "There are some that are going to be short. There are going to be three- to … Read more

Sony Ericsson C510 clears FCC

Three weeks after it made its world debut at CES, the Sony Ericsson C510 Cyber-shot has passed through the gates of the Federal Communications Commission. It was a rather quiet week otherwise, except for a whole lot of Huawei models.

Because the FCC has to certify every phone sold in the United States, not to mention test its SAR rating, the agency's online database offers a lot of sneak peeks to those who dig. And to save you the trouble, Crave has combed through the database for you. Here are a selection of filings from the past week on … Read more

Buyer beware: Solid-state drive prices vary--a lot

Updated at 9:40 a.m. PST with additional information about SLC-based solid-state drives.

Some solid-state drives are more equal than others--or, to put it another way, command higher prices than rival drives, despite being seemingly quite similar.

SanDisk and Toshiba offer a good lesson. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, SanDisk said it would start shipping 240GB SSDs in "mid 2009," priced at only $499. (Next to a comparable hard-disk drive, that may be a lot of money, but for a solid-state drive, it's dirt cheap.)

At the Toshiba booth, however, the story was very different. A Toshiba representative said his company's comparable 256GB SSDs are priced at $800. And this discrepancy is coming from two companies that get their flash chips from the same source: a joint-manufacturing operation in Japan.

Below are the prices Toshiba representatives were stating on the show floor versus prices that SanDisk announced.

Toshiba/SanDisk solid-state drive pricing:

Toshiba 512GB: $1,600, SanDisk N/A Toshiba 256GB: $800, SanDisk 240GB: $499 Toshiba 128GB: $400, SanDisk 120GB: $249 Toshiba 64GB: $175, SanDisk 60GB: $149

Throw Intel into the mix, and it gets more confusing. "Introductory" pricing for Intel 160GB versions of its X25-M and X18-M Serial ATA (SATA) solid-state drive is $945 for less than 1,000 units. … Read more

Samsung still adding 'Touch of Color' to monitors

Samsung has been doing the whole "Touch of Color" (ToC) thing for a few years now. Samsung injects a bit subtle color in monitor bezels, enhancing (depending on your tastes) the aesthetics of the monitor and brands it "Touch of Color."

I don't mind ToC, but I still prefer jet black. My own tastes not withstanding, Samsung is still pushing ToC and it had three monitors at CES 2009 to show it off: the P2070, P2270, and P2370.

Each of the three displays has a transparent bezel with gray shading that gives the edges a … Read more