Fujitsu has announced the development of its new MHW2 BJ series of 2.5-inch SATA hard disk drives. With a record-breaking storage space of 160GB and transfer rate of 300MB/s, this is the drive that will offer a new level of high-performance laptop computing.

Fujitsu also claims ultra-quiet performance with a noise level of only 2.5 bels at idle. Combine that with its low-power consumption of 2.3 watts or less when reading or writing data.

Starting this May, we can expect to see these drives slipping into high-performance laptops.

Do you prefer the iPods?

Or the Maxtors?

Prof. Renugopalakrishnan and his team at Harvard Medical School in Boston have discovered a unique protein that could possibly be used to store up to 50,000-gigabytes (50-terabytes) of data onto medium the size of our DVDs.

Well, I’ve covered ferroelectricity technology that promises more than a thousand times greater storage space than this. But both technologies are just as out-of-reach right now.

The light-activated protein is found in the membrane of a salt marsh microbe Halobacterium salinarum and is also known as bacteriorhodopsin (bR). It captures and stores sunlight to convert it to chemical energy. When light shines on bR, it is converted to a series of intermediate molecules each with a unique shape and colour before returning to its ‘ground state’.

As the intermediates only lasts for hours or days, the professor had to modify the DNA that produces this protein to extend it up to several years. Not quite enough I would say. After all, do you really want to re-backup that 50-terabytes every couple of years?

But ferroelectricity or proteins, we don’t really care. Just give us our next-gen uber-large storage technology before our storerooms are decked full of DVD/Blu-ray/HD-DVD backups. Blame it on BitTorrent.

Don’t mind rebates? Then here’s a great deal for you. How does a Maxtor 200GB 7,200RPM Ultra ATA 133 hard drive at just $40 sounds? We’re talk about 63% off retail price here!

Simply purchase the hard drive from Office Depot at $110 and mail in this rebate form. They’ll rebate you $70 within 60 -90 days (I don’t get this, so is it 60 or 90?).

But act fast my friends, as this offer will only be valid if you make your purchase by…*gasp*…today!

Looks like PQI has managed to beat Samsung’s 32GB flash drive that is equipped on the company’s Q30 notebook. As mentioned in the post, solid state/flash drives for notebooks are truly a big step up from traditional hard drives. But like all things gadgetry, the problem lies in the price. Getting one of this baby will set you back an estimated $2,000.

The transfer rate is supposedly at 32MB/s, so we aren’t exactly sure how it would compare to Samsung’s 53MB/s read speed and 28MB/s write speed. That’s something we’ll leave till August to find out.

Researchers have finally found a way to create storage devices that are capable of storing millions of gigabytes of data. With the use of ferroelectric, the researchers from Drexel University and University of Pennsylvania are able to squeeze 12.8 million gigabytes of information into a cubic centimeter. Very amazing indeed.

Until recently, researchers were not able to find a method of stabilizing ferroelectricity on the nano-scale. It was this group of talented researchers that found out that water is in fact the answer to their problem. It has to do with the hydroxyl (OH) ions molecules found in water, which are capable of screening the charges.

Imagine the possibility of million-gigabyte hard drives. The amount of disk space might seem excessively generous, but I trust that when these drives become a reality, applications that truly leverage the obscene amount of space will start to sprout.

However, several researchers have suggested that significant challenges still lie ahead, such as methods of assembling the nanowires densely and efficiently reading and writing data to and from the nanowires.