Storage Digest: Computer Makers Sued Over Hard-Drive Capacity Claims, and More

Hardware

Computer Makers Sued Over Hard-Drive Capacity Claims

A group of computer owners this week filed a lawsuit against some of the worlds biggest makers of personal computers, claiming that their advertising deceptively overstates the true capacity of their hard drives. The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court against Apple Computer Inc., Dell Inc., Gateway Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Sharp Corp., Sony Corp and Toshiba Corp. According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system. The result is that a hard drive described as being 20GB would actually have only 18.6GB of readable capacity, the lawsuit said.

Read the full story on:Yahoo! News

LSI Debuts PCI RAID Storage Adapter

LSI Logic Corp. this week launched a next-generation RAID storage adaptor, called MegaRAID, that features an integrated serial I/O interconnect using Intels Dobson I/O processor. LSIs PCI-Express MegaRAID storage adapter supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50; background initialization for Quick RAID 5 setup; and auto-resume during array rebuild if the storage system shuts down.

Read the full story on: Techweb

Software

Hewlett-Packard Unwraps Expanded Data Management Plan

Hewlett-Packard Co. is expanding its data management initiative through partnerships in hopes of targeting companies in the financial services, health care and life sciences industries with products and services that help them comply with often rigorous data tracking requirements. In that vein, HP this week introduced its new OpenView Storage Area Manager 3.1 software, which provides users with a centralized view of storage capacity from Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. Exchange products, as well as capacity reports. HP, through what it calls its Information Lifecycle Management program, is focusing on helping companies with data retention, availability and recovery, as well as the ability to extract information from e-mail and Microsoft Office documents.

Read the full story on: Computerworld

Storage Business

AppIQ Acquires XStormTech

Executives at AppIQ Inc., a developer of enterprise software solutions aimed at turning the management of storage into an application-focused utility, said this week that the company will acquire XStormTech Inc., an SRM solution developer. Financial details of the deal between the two privately held companies were not released. XStormTechs SRM technology can cut the time needed to discover, scan and report on files, and can collect demographic information to alert the storage administrator when disks or logical volumes are running out of capacity, according to AppIQ executives.

Read the full story on: CRN