HBlog - Hardware Blog

At first glance, Navman’s new N60i portable GPS appears to be very similar to Navman iCN 750 that I reviewed in July. At that time, I concluded that although the iCN 750 was a nice, usable GPS, it was way too expensive for its feature set. Now, four months later, this latest model ups the ante by being both more capable and lower priced.The first thing that you’ll notice about the N60i is that whereas it’s approximately the same size as the iCN 750, (3.3 by 5.5 by 0.91 inches), the N60i is a quarter-inch thinner and has a larger, 4.3-inch screen. The bigger display also has a better, antiglare surface. The N60i weighs in at 8.5 ounces, 2.1 ounces lighter than the iCN 750. The reduced weight and thickness is most likely due to the device’s use of solid-state memory as compared with the 4GB hard drive used by the iCN 750. The N60i stores all of its map and POI data in 2GB of onboard flash memory. Built-in maps cover North America (the United States and Canada), Alaska, Hawaii, and interestingly, Puerto Rico, which is listed under States. And, as you would expect, battery life has improved, currently rated at up to 5 hours (depending on use).Both GPSs are based on the SiRFstar second-generation receiver module and are known for fast time to first fix (TTFF), as well as excellent receiver sensitivity. The N60i also did away with the fold up “patch” antenna found on the iCN 750—a welcome change.
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Fujitsu announces technology for future hard drive capacity expansion

Fujitsu of America announced another advancement in its research of magnetic recording. Using patterned media technology, Fujitsu was able to achieve a one-dimensional array nanohole pattern with a 25 nanometer pitch. This process could one day enable one terabit per square inch recording on HDDs. Fujitsu also revealed a new development involving perpendicular magnetic recording read/write operation on random patterned media. With this technology, the soft underlayer is used as the PMR media, another important milestone.

A density of one terabit per square inch is about five times greater than the current drive technology on the market. Applying a one terabit areal density figure to today’s drive sizes would give us 3.5” drives capable of storing 5TB or 2.5” notebook drives holding 1.5TB.
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Netgear’s Storage Central has been popular enough with the home and small business market for them to release an updated version. The SC101T now supports SATA drives instead of IDE, has disk mirroring, and finally supports Gigabit Ethernet. About gorram time, we say.
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