WD completes Hitachi deal and is now world's largest HDD manufacturer

Western Digital (WD) have confirmed that they have completed all the procedures, and have finally acquired Hitachi. This acquisition has put WD at the top spot as the largest manufacturer of HDDs in the world, reports Verge. Although Hitachi wasn’t the first choice, as WD intended buying Seagate. The WD-Seagate deal maybe didn’t work out for good. The new merger is complete and inked in a deal worth $3.9 billion in cash and $25 million worth of shares, which were reportedly valued at 0.9 billion, early this week. The deal is also said to be funded by a $2.5 billion five year loan.


Reportedly, this move by Hitachi has brought it 10 percent stake in WD and the ability to appoint two members to the board of directors. Moreover, Hitachi has been struggling with the business for sometime now. For WD, it has enabled it to surpass Seagate, its competitor and take the first place in HDD manufacturing in the world. After this merger, WD stocks have risen by 16 per cent to surpass Seagate. Besides, the company has also been fighting out other players who’ve entered the digital market. 

The hard drive market hasn’t been at its best lately, with rising prices, due to the recent Thailand floods, which almost wiped out several factories. But manufacturers have been trying to put their best foot forward, despite all odds. We saw Hitachi released what it called the world’s slimmest hard drive, last month, which is a 2.5-inch notebook hard drive dubbed Travelstar Z7K500. However, there is no word on it making to the Indian store shelves. We also saw Hitachi Global Storage Technologies declare the Ultrastar enterprise-class solid state drive the industry’s first to use 25-nanometer (nm) single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash.

This new WD and Hitachi merger may just work for best interests of both companies.

Source:A Technical Site

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Norton 360 Version 6.0 Review

The war against viruses, trojans and malware has been one without an end. We’ve seen a crazy escalation in these unwanted elements in the recent past, but there have been a slew of antivirus products in the market, so you're convinced that if your PC has the right protection, then it’s safe from these problems. Norton recently released their new version, the V6 of their Norton 360 and 360 means all-round protection. 


The first roadblock that distinguishes a good antivirus from a great one is the interface. Imagine you having to pull your hair out just to find out where the infection is and how exactly to remove it. Yes, it should be as simple as a few clicks. With Norton 360 v6, Symantec have upped the ante on how simple a security suite should look like. Pop in the CD, enter the key and within minutes you’re into the matrix. 

The control panel

VLC 2.0 'Twoflower' Released

VideoLAN organisation has released the latest version of VLC media player, VLC 2.0. Apart from UI changes, the new version of the media player brings fixes for several hundred bugs, and has many other new features, including improved decoding support with a new rendering pipeline for different hardware, such as multi-core processors, mobile chipsets, and dedicated GPUs.

VLC 2.0, known as Twoflower, also brings support for a wide range of file formats, including experimental Blu-ray disc playback (full support expected soon). Other new features include a completely re-worked interfaces for the Mac and web platforms, Mac extensions support, improved Mac OS X 10.7 Lion integration, higher quality subtitles, new video filters, new resamplers for higher quality audio, new dynamic range compressor and karaoke filters, faster audio processing, as well as new video and audio outputs for Windows 7, Android, iOS and OS/2.

Professional users will be happy to know VLS 2.0 will feature support for ProRes 422 and 4444, AVC/Intra, Jpeg-2000 and DNxHD/VC-3 in 10bits, EBU subtitles (stl) and EIA-608, SDI and HD-SDI cards for Linux input, as well as faster Dirac/VC-2 encoders.

Developer features include updated LGPLv2.1+ for libVLC, libVLCcore and libcompat, new JSON requests on the web interface to control running VLC instances, and implementation of the MPRIS2 interface to control media players. VLC's web plugins have also been rewritten for better integration and stability in all browsers.

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AMD Trinity reference Ultrathins are a sight for sore eyes

If you thought Intel’s Ultrabooks were ubercool, then wait till you get a hold of AMD’s reference design for their Ultrathin notebooks. Engadget managed to get some good alone time with Compal’s reference design of AMD’s upcoming Trinity-based notebooks, that’s sure to give Ultrabooks a run for its money. For those who aren’t aware, Compal is the second largest ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) for notebooks in the world and basically, they come up with a bunch of reference designs for their clients and then pass it over to OEMs (like Dell, Acer, Toshiba, HP, etc) to manufacture. The one on the images was one of several designs to show manufacturers what AMD and Compal have planned for 2012.

This anorexic reference design is nothing short of stunning from every angle. It appears to be sporting a 14-inch screen, Chiclet keyboard and a generous trackpad. On the sides, we have a couple of USB 3.0 connectors, HDMI, mini-DisplayPort and a LAN jack. Notice the cool, lattice shaped exhaust vents. What’s really interesting is the new Trinity APU powering the notebook. This new APU is built on the same 32nm fabrication, but will feature four Piledriver cores, which is an enhanced and tweaked version of Bulldozer. The notebook will feature one of the low voltage Trinity APUs and a Radeon HD 7000M graphics chip. We still don’t have any model name or specifications of these chips right now, but we should know more in the coming months. The icing on the cake, however is the pricing. Unlike Intel’s elite Ultrabooks, which are mostly in the $1000 and above price range, AMD’s Ultrathins are targeted between $500 - $600, which make them more affordable and feature rich at the same time. Clearly, where these notebooks have cut cost is in the chassis, which from the reference design seems to be made out of plastic, instead of aluminium (which most Ultrabooks use). This is not necessarily a bad thing, though, as long as the plastics used are of good quality, I don’t see a problem with that.

Intel may have had a head start in this new segment that they created, but it seems AMD once again has the upper hand in the segment, where Intel just can’t seem to compete, and that’s value for money.

 Courtesy: Engadget

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