Hard-drive giants to merge

The way has been formally cleared, by US and European authorities, for the go ahead of the proposed merger of hard-drive manufacturers Maxtor and Quantum HDD. The new company will be known as the Maxtor Corporation and it is estimated that the merger will result in annual cost savings of $120-200m. Its focus will include disk drives for desktop machines, high-performance SCSI drives, hard drives for consumer electronics and network-attached storage. ...more

HP racks up 100,000 Linux server sales in UK

HP has sold its 100,000th Linux-based server in the UK. The company has also shipped over 1,500,000 Linux servers worldwide, it has announced. The company pointed to figures from IDC that showed 32. ...more

Concept futures

More sickly sweet than Spielberg, NTT DoCoMo's vision of the future, chocabloc with prototype products comes courtesy of a 13-minute film on its Web site. Having launched its 3G FOMA service, the company must be hoping to 'educate people' to put down the voice call and pick up the data service - it starts with FOMA videophones and leads on to holographic images and happy families.. ...more

Update: Pressplay backs pressing CDs

Online music subscription service Pressplay has said it will allow the burning of downloaded files on to CDs. Pressplay, backed by Sony and Universal and also offering EMI's music catalogue among other labels', would be at a distinct advantage with this move over its rival MusicNet, backed by RealNetworks and the remaining major labels. Once burned, the CDs could be played in any audio equipment such as Hi-Fis and portable CD players. ...more

LaCie announces faster back-ups

LaCie has announced a new AIT tape drive capable of backing-up or archiving 200Gb of compressed data onto one tape. The AIT3 drives have twice the capacity of existing AIT2 drives and double the transfer rate, reaching a maximum of 24Mb per second. The drives are back-compatible with AIT1 and AIT2 media, so no existing back-ups will be redundant. ...more