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A FEDERAL JUDGE in Colorado has ordered a woman to decrypt the hard drive in her laptop so the files can be used as evidence against her.

The laptop was seized by FBI agents under a warrant in May 2010 whilst investigating financial fraud. However, the files were encrypted by PGP Desktop so the authorities demanded her decryption password under the All Writs Act.

Ramona Fricosu refused to hand over her password, claiming the demand violated the Fifth Amendment protection against compelled self-incrimination.

However, US District Court Judge Robert Blackman said, “I find and conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer.”

A similar legal doctrine has been around in the UK for a number of years but this is relatively new across the pond and is likely to appear more frequently in the future. µ

HARD DISK DRIVE MAKER Western Digital has said it expects the damage from recent flooding in Thailand to cost it at least 5m as it starts to bring the first of its factories in the region back online.

Western Digital has been hit hard by the devastating floods in Thailand, which have left a number of the firm’s manufacturing facilities under water. As the company revised is financial outlook, it said the Bang Pa-in plant has started churning out hard drives again this week.

While Western Digital will turn the lights back on in its Bang Pa-in plant, head slider production is not expected to restart before March 2012. In the meantime Western Digital will bring online a new head slider manufacturing plant in Malaysia.

John Coyne, president and CEO of Western Digital said, “Much work remains to be done but we couldn’t be more pleased with the effort and results thus far, including tremendous support from our supply partners and strategic customers.”

Western Digital said it expects to rake in at least .8bn for its second quarter fiscal year 2012 with gross margins near 23 per cent. The firm also said it expects to complete its purchase of Hitachi’s Global Storage Technologies division by March 2012.

While Western Digital has restarted production in Thailand, the firm also said it expects hard disk drive demand to outstrip supply well into 2012. However with production restarting, it is likely that hard drive prices will start to come back down. µ

HARD DISK DRIVE (HDD) prices have more than doubled in the six weeks between 1 October and 14 November after the floods in Thailand.

According to data from price comparison web site Idealo.co.uk, average selling prices increased by 151 per cent during the time period. In monetary terms, this was an increase from £43.29 to £109.78 and it equated to a price increase of 5.4 per cent per day.

Dating back to May 2011, prices for the most popular hard drives remained “extremely consistent”, Idealo said, with the average lowest price coming in at around £44.

However, beginning in late October and peaking in early November, the web site said there has been a dramatic increase in the prices offered by online stores on Idealo’s British, French, German and Italian comparison portals.

International Data Corporation (IDC) recently reported that as of early November, half of Thailand’s production capacity was directly impacted by the flooding. Thailand accounted for 40 to 45 per cent of worldwide HDD production in the first half of 2011. µ

STORAGE VENDOR Seagate has announced a simplified line of its Barracuda hard drives.

The updated Barrucuda range of hard drives will offer between 250GB and 3TB capacity. This is up to 1TB per platter, the highest density currently available, and Seagate has cranked up the spin speed to 7200rpm from 5400rpm.

Scott Horn, VP of marketing at Seagate said, “The new Barracuda family reflects the reality that end-users want a full range of hard drive capacities and as much performance as we can give them to help manage and store massive amounts of digital content.”

Seagate has also said it plans to discontinue its Barracuda Green Drive in February next year. This is because the upcoming drives have almost the same power consumption but higher performance.

Seagate will relaunch the Barracuda XT, its fastest desktop drive, as a solid state hybrid within the Barracuda line. SATA 6Gbits/s is the standard interface used and the hard drives will have up to 64MB of cache. µ

The rise of powerful home networking solutions have led to the shift in consumer focus from DAS (Direct Attached Storage) units to NAS (Network Attached Storage) units in the home space. Storage solution vendors such as Western Digital and Seagate were quick to identify the needs of the consumers. We have NAS solutions ranging from simple network attached hard disks to multi-bay SMB / SOHO NAS units from both of them.

Today, we will take a look at the recently introduced My Book Live from Western Digital. It is not advertised as a full blown 1-bay NAS solution, but more as a network attached hard disk. Western Digital stresses the personal cloud nature of the unit (after all, cloud is the hot keyword right now!) and provides smartphone apps to enhance this experience. Read on to find out how the My Book Live performs.

Product Seagate Goflex Satellite
Website Seagate
Specifications500GB, USB 3.0, 802.11 b/g/n, WPA security, supports Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later, 267g, five hours continuous streaming, 25 hours standby time, 120x90x22mm, 267g
Price £180

SMARTPHONES AND TABLETS are able to replicate most of the multimedia functionality associated with laptop and desktop computers, but one of their key limitations at present is on-board storage.

Step forward storage maker Seagate, which aims to allow users to share content using portable devices, negating the need to splash out on that 64GB Ipad or 32GB Android tablet.

The Goflex Satellite is an external 500GB hard disk drive that allows users to stream content to three devices simultaneously over WiFi. With dimensions of 120x90x22mm and a weight of 267g, the device is portable enough to carry around all day.

One of the things we like about the Goflex Satellite is its ease of use. Users can simply load movies, photos, music onto the hard drive, hit the switch to activate the WiFi and share content. The drive works on both PCs and Macs, with the latter requiring a quick manual driver install. The device comes with a USB 3.0 connection, facilitating high-speed data transfers for those who have the latest laptop or desktop.

Best of all, the Goflex works on pretty much any device that has a WiFi connection and web browser. The hard drive can also be used with a dedicated Apple IOS or Android app. However, once connected to the Goflex, it is not possible to use WiFi bridging, so if users need to connect to another hotspot to use the internet they will have to disconnect.

During our tests, we primarily used the web browser to view content and manage settings. When sharing content with friends or colleagues, the browser is the quickest and easiest way to view content. It doesn’t require users to download anything – handy if there is no nearby internet connectivity.

Once you are connected to the Goflex WiFi, simply type in any URL and the page redirects to the Goflex web interface.

We were able to stream content directly to an Ipad 2, a Blackberry Playbook, an Acer Iconia Tab, a Motorola Xoom, an HTC Flyer, a Google Nexus S and an HTC Desire S. Even when streaming video content to three devices simultaneously for prolonged periods of time, playback was smooth and the connection did not drop or stutter.

Dust off your old-school shooter skills: a demo for the indie cyberpunk FPS Hard Reset is now on Steam.

Hard Reset comes from Flying Wild Hog, a Polish developer made up of talent from People Can Fly (Painkiller), CD Projekt Red (The Witcher) and City Interactive (Sniper: Ghost Warrior). You play an Army veteran tasked with defending humanity from a growing robotic threat.

In an effort to best serve their audience, Flying Wild Hog chose to make the title PC-exclusive and it shows. Their proprietary engine is capable of some truly stunning visuals, and the combat – full of circle-strafing and back-pedaling – harkens back to older id Software shooters. It also includes more modern weapon customization to keep things fresh.

Hard Reset releases at next Tuesday, but if the brief demo wins you over, you can save a little cash by pre-ordering for . 

Source: Steam

THE LATEST OVERPRICED CREATION from Apple’s Mac Mini line has gone under the scalple showing just how much over the odds fanbois are willing to pay for a shiny logo and some angular industrial design.

Apple’s Mac Mini is supposed to represent a low-cost Macintosh computer and years ago it was not a bad bit of kit for the price. However the latest version, which came out earlier this week, costs upwards of £529 and Apple thinks a £849 version can be used as a server. But after the chaps at Ifixit took the latest Mac Mini apart we were left to wonder whether you could even stuff £529 worth of tenners into an empty Mac Mini.

Being fair to Apple, its design department has been very clever in slimming down the Mac Mini further. No smoke and mirrors here, oh no, just remove the built in DVD writer and watch the fanbois fawn over ‘cleaner lines’, creating an opportunity for Apple to flog the same USB drive it offers Macbook Air customers for £66.

After taking the lid off Apple’s ‘mid 2011′ Mac Mini, the Ifixit boys found out that there is enough space for a second hard drive, though Apple doesn’t provide the connections required to hook one up to the motherboard. However Apple kindly offers fanbois the option to make use of this space by opting to have a 750GB SATA drive and a 256GB SSD for only £600, doubling the cost of a Mac Mini. At that sort of price the space inside the Mac Mini is priced higher per square inch than most of London’s Zone 1.

On the whole Apple has done a very good job of packaging the pint size money hole, and it should be commended that it can fit a 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 chip into such a small space.

What users can easily do, as is evident from Ifixit’s teardown, is upgrade RAM and the hard drive easily, which is probably more than what most fanbois would ever dare to do. That said, after spending so much to buy a Mac Mini, most fanbois won’t have the cash left over to upgrade anyway. µ

STORAGE VENDOR Western Digital (WD) has announced it is shipping its Scorpio Blue 1TB capacity hard drive for notebooks.

The 2.5in hard drive is super slim at just 9.5mm thick. The drive offers total storage capacity of 1TB by using two disk platters of 500GB each.

Matt Rutledge, VP and GM of Client Storage at WD said, “With the release of the 1 TB WD Scorpio Blue notebook drive in a 9.5 mm package, WD is able to offer the greatest storage capacity available for use in portable computing environments,”

The drive uses a 3Gbits/s SATA interface, spins at 5400RPM and has an 8MB cache. WD claims it is one of the quietest drives on the market and is both reliable and shock tolerant, making it perfect for notebooks and other portable devices.

Power consumption is low at 1.4W when the drive is reading or writing, which drops down to 0.18W when it is idle or in sleep mode. As well as being thin the drive is pretty light at just 110g.

WD said that the Scorpio Blue drive has “data-protection features that actively watch over valuable data”. It also has Advanced Format technology that WD claims optimises it for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard.

The WD Scorpio Blue hard drive is shipping now through various distributors and resellers with a guide price of 9. µ

STORAGE VENDOR Adaptec has released what it claims is the first hardware 6Gb/s SATA/SAS controller allowing users to mix hard drives and SSDs in an array.

Adaptec, known for its SCSI cards from years gone by, released its Series 6E controllers that is aimed at workstations and low-cost servers. The four-port 6405E and eight-port 6805E offer what Juergen Frick, senior product marketing manager at Adaptec claims is “the industry’s first hardware SATA3 controller”.The debate over hardware and software RAID controllers has been ongoing for many years, but while pseudo hardware RAID controllers found on high-end consumer motherboards do a perfectly good job, as Frick admits, heavy disk utilisation being able to offload hardware I/O to a controller saves significant CPU cycles, according to Frick. Another feature where Frick claims Adaptec’s latest entry-level boards increase performance is the 128MB cache that is on the controller, with Frick claiming, “caching still outperforms SSDs”.

As Adaptec’s four-port 6405E and eight-port 6805E are intended for workstations there are RAID 0, 1 and 10 modes, with both boards having the aforementioned 128MB DDR2-800 cache. The four-port card has only a PCI-Express 1x interface with bandwidth capped at 400MB/s. Asked why this was the case when SATA3 SSDs are already pushing upwards of 500MB/s, Frick said that ultimate performance was dependant on workload and that Adaptec’s customers asked for a PCI-Express 1x card to provide connectivity and the chance to access high I/Os per second data rates. Frick admitted that the eight-port 6805E, which has a PCI-Express 4x interface and a throughput of 1600MB/s, is the card you want if you want high streaming performance.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of Adaptec’s 6-series boards is the ability to mix hard drives and SSDs, with Frick saying, “Customers still have doubts over fully relying on SSDs”. Frick was referring to the ongoing concerns about SSD controller firmware. Adaptec’s Hybrid RAID software allows users to set an SSD as the boot drive, mirror the SSD on a hard drive and use the rest of the hard drive as a different partition.

As to this mix and match RAID capability, Adaptec has said that it now tests “desktop-grade” hard drives to see how they operate in 24×7 environments. Frick explained that these drives are the standard drives that are not offered with a ‘RAID edition’ sticker. Frick went on to say that Adaptec has tested over 350 drives to ensure compatibility with the controller.

Although motherboard chipset vendors have done a lot to improve the performance of their pseudo-RAID devices, there’s little doubt that for commercial environments controller boards from firms like Adaptec, Areca and LSI are still extremely popular, and for good reason. Not only do they offer higher performance and better customer support, but driver support is considerably better, with Adaptec having open source drivers for both FreeBSD and Linux.

Adaptec said that customers will be able to order the 6405E and 6805E from today with prices ranging from £120 to £175.