Seagate's first 2010 fiscal quarter (ended October 2, 2009) brought cheering news and a better outlook as its numbers continue to recover and it beings sampling its solid state drive (SSD) with OEMs.

Price is still a huge barrier for solid state disks (SSD) in the enterprise, but for some datacenters the math already makes sense.

Seagate Technology now expects revenues for the September quarter to be at or slightly above the high end of its original guidance.

SSD is breaking into the mainstream due to the proliferation of models and the lower prices that have come in the last year from increased competition and improved production processes.

The formal transfer of Fujitsu's hard disk drive business to Toshiba has been postponed to Oct. 1 pending approval from Chinese antitrust authorities, a person familiar with the proceedings told Dow Jones Newswires.

Seagate Technology said it will close its Singapore hard-disk-drive manufacturing plant by the end of 2010 and lay off 2,000 workers as a result.

Hard drive maker Seagate Technology raised its forecasts for margins and overall industry sales in the current quarter, citing a larger-than-expected increase in corporate demand for computers, and its shares rose 4%.

The 1.8-inch hard disk market appears to be dying. Already, the market is down to two manufacturers, Toshiba and Samsung, and when the latter announced its new 250GB, US$200 1.8-inch HDD last week, the announcement had a rather stunning omission: IDE and SATA.

Western Digital has announced that it has completed a US$65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Aliso Viejo, California, a supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market.

Samsung expects solid-state drives to reach price parity with hard-disk drives within the next few years amid steep annual price declines in flash memory chips.

Researchers have developed a breakthrough storage technology capable of squeezing the contents of 250 DVDs onto a disk the size of a quarter.

Fujitsu and Toshiba has announced that they have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on the transfer of Fujitsu's hard disk drive (HDD) business to Toshiba. The companies plan to conclude a transfer contract at an early date, and aim to complete the transaction in the first quarter of fiscal 2009.

Shares in Japan's Hitachi slid 17% to their lowest in 29 years after it shocked investors with a record $7.8 billion annual loss warning and offered a cost-cutting plan that failed to instill confidence in a quick recovery.

SanDisk said that it had signed a definitive agreement with Toshiba to restructure the Flash manufacturing joint ventures operating at the 300mm Fab 3 and Fab 4. The result of the agreement will be basic SanDisk's transition to fabless flash-based products manufacturing.

Hitachi said the job cuts would be made globally across its car equipment and electronics divisions. The Japanese electronics and engineering group had previously predicted it would make a net profit of 15bn yen in the year to 31 March 2009.

Shares of Seagate Technology tumbled to a 52-week low Thursday after the hard-drive maker posted disappointing second-quarter results and gave a third-quarter outlook below Wall Street's expectations.

Japanese electronics giant Toshiba has confirmed it is in talks to buy Fujitsu's hard disk drive (HDD) arm. The Nikkei business daily said any deal between Fujitsu and Toshiba would be worth 30bn-40bn yen ($340m-$450m; £233m-£308m).

Seagate Technology on Monday shook up its executive ranks as the No. 1 maker of computer hard-disk drives replaced Chief Executive William Watkins with the company's chairman, Stephen Luczo. The move comes less than a week after Seagate said it would cut about 10% of its US-based workforce.

The palm-sized device in a larger 500GB capacity is on sale from various online retailers now for around £120.

...The debate boils down to how much speed you need," Crump said. DRAM storage is faster, but that's at a cost that's much higher than Flash-based storage. For example, 2TB of Flash-based storage costs about US$180,000, compared to about US$1 million for the same amount of DRAM-based storage. "DRAM is faster, but if flash does it for you, why spend the extra money?" he asked. In that case, it depends on the needs of the business, he said...