It has been quite sometime since TRIM got support from Windows7 and Intel’s RST or Rapid Storage Technology; however it is notable that up till now it didn’t include Solid State Drives in the RAID configurations.

Now there’s a piece of good news for all those who have loads of SSDs and desire to use all those GBs as quite soon some remarkable changes are going to be made as it is reported that the RST 11.5 driver which will soon be rolled out which will be empowered with  the TRIM feature for RAID 0 setups.

Right now TRIM functions on an SSD only by operating in the AHCI mode. Last year users were happy in believing that the TRIM support would be added in RAID volumes by the Intel’s RST 9.6; unfortunately, it didn’t materialize that way and Intel made it clear that it was only meant for the SSDs to be working as single drives in the AHCI mode on the side of a separate entity aligned to the Intel storage controller but this wasn’t the case if the SSD was included in the RAID volume.

TRIM is indeed a beneficial feature as without a proper feature to handle all the useless stuffs collected overhead one can’t think of better write performance of an SSD and again there is a noticeable degradation in the performance over the time. However, TRIM support sorts out this issue.

The arrival of RST 11.5 offering support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 systems is expected to be by the second quarter of 2012.

Other World Computing has recently broken the news about the release of the 6G Mercury Aura Pro Express, a 2011 MacBook Air replacement SSD which completely utilizes the 6Gbps SATA interface. It is available in 120GB and 240GB capacities. These new drives are a combination of a SandForce 2200 series controller and Tier 1/Grade A NAND memory which helps them to easily achieve a reading speed of 507MB/s and writing speed of 454MB/s making these almost twofold faster than the stock drive in MBAs.

Apple’s current MacBook Airs come with SATA 3Gbps SSDs and it doesn’t at all promote SATA 6Gbps even when the hardware has a support for it. As the non-standard SSD form factor is used by the ultra thin and light notebook, this disapproves the usage of the typical 2.5 inch drives available on the market as a replacement.

OWC claims that the new Aura Pro Express 6G SSD is going to be the first and only available 6Gbps SSD available on the market which is especially designed in such a way that it works well with the 11.1 inch as well as 13.3 inch models of Apple’s new MacBook Air.

Company also claims that the data protection that it provides is about 100 times more than what is provided by the ordinary SSD available in the market as it combines the highest level of Error Correction Code and SandForce RAISE technology together with an over-provisioning of about 7%.

The 120GB model is available at $345 and the 240GB model is priced at $600. There is also a plan of bringing out a model of 480GB capacity meant for 2011 MacBook Air, its launch date has not yet been announced.

Hitachi GST has just declared their first 3.5 inch hard drive which is going to offer a storage capacity of 1 TB per platter. Though it was Seagate to set this milestone a few months back and get their drives out in the market just the last month, Hitachi has now come up with it. By overcoming the barrier of 1 TB areal density, it will be possible for Hitachi to bring out high capacity hard drives even when the platter and heads are fewer, this will help lowering down the costs, failure rates, and consumption of power.

Brendan Collins, the Vice President of Product Marketing, Hitachi GST, suggested that companies are busy running the areal density race as higher capacity is quite appealing but at the same time it is quite important to reach the highest possible capacity which is 1 TB for now as it proves beneficial in providing the widest range of applications and possibilities covering the largest market volume of the industry.

This brand new technology will soon be available in single platter models under the Hitachi Deskstar and Cinemastar series. However, the models will also be available with 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, and 750GB capacities at the same time. One thing needs a mention here that the Travestar range of the company, especially targeted for the ultra-thin and light weight notebook market, has not been taken into consideration for the capacity update with the new improved 1 TB capacity.

The 5K1000.B and 7K1000.D versions of Hitachi Deskstar devices offers 5400rpm and 7200 spindle speeds respectively, these also offer 32MB buffer and Serial ATA-600 interface. Both these models come along with a special technology named as HiVERT by Hitachi GST. This technology reduces the power consumption when the drive is idle. What differentiates between these two models is that the 5K1000.B offer additional power savings where as the 7K1000.D isn’t able to do that because of its lower spindle speed.

The Cinemastar range is also available in 5200rpm and 7200rpm versions. It also features several A/V streaming optimizations additionally that can be used in the consumer electronics devices such as DVRs, portable media players, and so on.

IBM is working to build the largest ever data repository offering a combined storage capacity of 120 petabytes. IBM has chosen its Almaden, California research center for developing the facility.

Media has found that IBM is building this marvelously grand storage system for an anonymous client who requires such supercomputer that has the capability of simulating the real world phenomena something similar to the ones used to model the weather and climate.

The 120 petabytes storage that this data repository is going to offer will indeed be the most massive till now. To make it simplified, 1024 gigabytes is equal to 1 terabytes, and 1024 terabytes make 1 petabyte. So on calculating, 120 petabytes will be equal to 124 million gigabytes.

Now, this huge storage will easily be able to house 24 billion 5 megabyte MP3 files. Besides, it will be able to store about 60 backup copies of the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine, in which each of the copy will be containing 150 billion web pages. On estimating the total storage capacity, it will be able to store approximately 1 trillion files.

IBM is reported to be using 200,000 conventional hard drives for creating the data container, which is going to be around 10 times greater than any of the previous efforts made by the company. Now since it is going to have a large number of disks bundled up together, avoiding the failure of the drives look quite impossible, say on somewhat semi regularly.

To overcome such inevitable issues, IBM is working toward creating a special storing arrangement by storing several copies of the data on different disks and at the same time making use of new methods for keeping the supercomputer running comfortably at speed almost full in case an expiration of the multiple drives take place.

It is believed that the system is going to work in such a way that there won’t be any data loss for around a million years, says Bruce Hillsberg, the project leader cum director of the storage research.