Lake Forest (CA) – Western Digital (WD) today said that it has begun shipping its 2.5” Scorpio SATA hard drives with a capacity of 320 GB.

The new drives are built in a 9.5 mm form factor aim to attract customers in the notebook and portable storage devices segment. WD claims that the devices include “proprietary features that make the drive extraordinarily quiet while running at cool operating temperatures.”

While the drives are equipped with a 3 Gb/s SATA interface, they operate at a platter rotations peed of 5400 rpm and will be targeting the higher end of the mainstream market as a result. Features integrated in the drive include the company’s “WhisperDrive”, “ShockGuard” and “IntelliSeek” technology.
(Full article ‘Western Digital ships 320 GB notebook hard drives’)

Santa Clara (CA) – Following servers with Intel’s Xeon processors, Sun today introduced workstations based on Intel’s Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors. Yes, that’s an Intel logo on this Sun workstation Sun now has a third workstation family, adding to the existing models based on single- and dual socket AMD Opteron-based systems (Ultra 20, Ultra 40 M2) as well as single- and dual-socket UltraSparc IIIi (Ultra 25, Ultra 45) models. The new Ultra 24 is based on Intel’s Core processors and, in the case of a Core 2 Quad configuration, is Sun’s first (single-socket) quad-core workstation. The Ultra 24 has the identical outside look of its two sister models, making the Intel Core 2 logo the only differentiator to the 20, 40, 25 and 45.
(Full article ‘Intel CPUs expand SunВ’s workstation portfolio’)

Seoul (Korea) – Samsung has developed a 40” LCD TV panel that is just 10 mm (0.4”) thick.  The manufacturer said that the new panel delivers 1080p resolution and could enable LCD TVs that are about as thick as a 10-20” desktop LCD monitor. The bezel of the device is only 15 mm (0.6”), down from a typical 30 mm (1.2”) in this class. The power consumption of the display is rated at a maximum of 90 watts, which is only about a third of today’s 40” LCD TVs. There was no information when this panel will be available in mass-production TVs.Samsung said it will display several other new technologies shown in public for the first time, including its recently announced 16:9 and white LED notebook LCDs as well as a 22” desktop LCD with a Displayport interface.
(Full article ‘Samsung showcases super-thin LCD TV panel’)