Computex 2007: Storage, 4+ GHz Quad Cores and Systems

Toshiba Slim-Line HD-DVD Burners For Notebooks

The SD-L912A is a multi-format DVD burner that also supports HD-DVD. There is another version that is only an HD-DVD ROM.

One thing is for sure: the capacity of regular DVDs just isn't impressive anymore: one disc isn't enough if you spend a weekend with your digital SLR camera. Sure, there are double layer DVDs that offer a capacity of 8.5 GB, but this still isn't enough to back up large photo galleries or an audio archive. Handling multiple discs is a pain in the neck, so we need something better.

Whether Blu-ray or HD DVD will eventually prevail remains to be seen, but Toshiba doesn't want to wait to find out. The company offers a slim-line HD DVD burner as well as an HD DVD ROM. Thus, it's possible to equip most notebooks with the 25 GB high capacity recorders, and there are already some notebook vendors shipping products with these drives.

RAID Controllers

Accusys EXpeRAID ACS-61020: 8-Ch SATA RAID With Battery Backup And Cache

We found the Accusys booth by accident, but within it we discovered a sophisticated controller card: the ACS-61020 is an 8-channel Serial ATA 300 MB/s RAID card for PCI Express x4. Accusys uses an Intel Xscale I/O processor (IOP333) to offload parity/XOR calculation from the system CPU(s), and it supports RAID levels 0, 0+1, 5, 6 and JBOD mode. A DDR2 SO-DIMM slot is ready to accept a memory module for caching, and up to four independent disc arrays are supported.

The feature set of the ACS-61020 is too comprehensive for us to list all the details here, but the card supports all the interesting functions that you'd expect from a professional RAID controller. These include snapshot backup support, online capacity expansion, RAID level migration, an optional battery backup unit as well as in-band and out-of-band management. However, this is a full height expansion card, which makes it unsuitable for low-profile rackmount servers.