Almost 2 years after first rumours on PowerPC 970 MP IBM today announced it at the Power Everywhere Forum in Tokyo .

With two CPU cores, just as the recent AMD Athlon and Intel processors have, it is practically a dual cpu sytem on one chip. CPU frequency is from 1,4 Ghz to 2,5 Ghz. Each core has 1 MB L2 Cache, and contrary to AMD and Intel dual cores, one of them can even be deactivated during operation... I suggest this is only interesting for power-saving modes in notebooks, but notable anyway.

The notebook design is supported by low-power variants of the PowerPC 970 FX, running at 1,4 Ghz with only 13 Watts, 16 at 1,6 Ghz.

Altough with recent news of Apple using Intel CPUs, it's still unsure if this advantage will find a way into the power/ibooks design.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has awarded Iomega a patent relating to nano-technology-based optical storage that could allow the development of DVD media with storage capacities up to 40-100 times more than today's DVDs.

800GB DVD Technology Patented

After having my 3 months young Samung SATA disk crash, and spending (WASTING!) considerable time recovering from old backups, old disks etc.etc. I came to the conclusion that my workstation needs a pro-like storage sub system.

Of course I have TWO RAID1 controllers on my ASUS P4e800 board - but both of them simply suck. Windows setup simply blue screens when accessing such a device via the one controller (Promise SATA controller with SATA RAID option)... the second controller (INTEL ICH5 RAID!) does not even have a "clone" function to make a good RAID1 array from a single "good" system disk... cheap add-ons for people that never intend to use it... altough it's an INTEL brand hardware, I would never recommend anyone relying on that built in crap... if you already hassle around that much for setup - can you imagine a recovery scenario?

I need to setup a RAID5 array which should enable me to have safe functionality as long as only 1 disk fails at the cost of only 1/3 ... and a third of 200 GB x 3 is still a 200 GB disk :-)

My hardware dealer suggested the controller FastTrak S150 SX4 a pretty low-cost, but full features RAID5 SATA controller...

Important features per homepage

• Four-port Serial ATA RAID controller with 1.5Gbps per channel
• 32-Bit/66MHz PCI 2.2 interface
• Support for RAID level 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD
• Online array expansion and RAID level migration to add capacity on the fly
• Supports hot swap of failed drives
• Automatic/manual rebuild of hot spare drive
• Variable stripe block size support enables optimization for diverse application requirements
• Promise RAID Processor with XOR engine for RAID parity calculations
• Supports up to 256MB of SDRAM memory in a 168-pin DIMM slot supports up to 256MB of ECC
• Seamless upgrade to Promise's external storage solutions (have to look at those as well...
• FRAM for RAID5 transaction log to avoid data corruption in the event of application hang ... FRAM is Ferroelectric RAM - said to be 20,000 times faster than flash memory and costs 25% less than battery-backed SRAM... means this should keep everything consistent