A few bits of this week’s interesting storage news and an update on ServeTheHome including a FTC request in the Seagate-Samsung deal, new Xeon motherboards from Gigabyte, a new USB NAS solution from Addonics, and Patrick running SoCal Tough Mudder this weekend!

FTC Asks Seagate for Additional Information on Samsung Acquisition

As a lot of people expected, the FTC made a second request according to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Act (HSR) in conjunction with the Samsung acquisition. For those that are less experienced in M&A work, this does a few things. First, it means that FTC is not quickly approving the deal, so the agency is looking into the hard drive sector. Second, it means Seagate will spend a few million dollars answering the second request as it generally takes a team of company personnel, consultants and attorneys to respond to these things in a reasonable amount of time. Third, it gives the FTC an extension on reviewing the deal since it gives the agency thirty days from when the company substantially complies with the second request to respond.

Gigabyte’s Computex Sandy Bridge Xeon Motherboard Lineup

This week Gigabyte sent me some preview information around a multitude of C202, C204, and C206 based products for the recently announced Sandy Bridge E3-1200 series Xeons as part of the mATX GA-6UASL family. I do not cover Gigabyte as much as ASUS, Supermicro and Tyan, but their boards may be worth a look. The boards are a bit harder to find in the US, but I am going to see if I can find somewhere to order a GA-6UASL3 (with dual Intel 82574L controllers which work great with VMware ESXi) in the next few weeks. Here is a shot of the board:

Gigabyte GA-6UASL3

I am a big fan of the mATX form factor for Intel Xeon X3400 and E3-1200 series CPUs, so this is certainly worth a shot as I have personally used Gigabyte motherboards in many of my personal HTPC/ low power test server systems over the years.

Addonics Releases a new NAS 3.0 USB to Ethernet Adapter

Addonics released a new NAS 3.0 USB to Ethernet adapter this week. The unit allows one to connect multiple hard drives through USB connections to a Gigabit Ethernet port. From the product page:

The NAS 3.0 is Addonics’ 3rd generation NAS adapter with up to 30% faster performance and several powerful enhancements. The new features in the NAS 3.0 adapter include support of NTFS and exFAT file system, WebDAV server, two drive volumes and a few others. The NAS 3.0 adapter enables creating a Network Attached Storage with capacity as large as 128PB and with features that rival many expensive NAS storage solutions.

Frankly, using a $65 device limited by USB 2.0 bandwidth for the drives is probably not ideal for a 128PB cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, when these devices start supporting USB 3.0 they will become fairly interesting when connected to external USB 3.0 enclosures.

Patrick is Competing in Tough Mudder SoCal on 28 May 2011

As many readers know I tend to pick one event per summer to focus on. Last year I did triathlons and this summer, feeling that the window of opportunity may be closing due to “old” age, I decided to do at least two Tough Mudder events. Basically, one runs 10+ miles up a mountain and does a series of events involving running through mud, scaling walls, crawling through mud, and even getting electrocuted along the way. A reason for the slower-than-usual publishing schedule this week is that I have been preparing for the Southern California Tough Mudder event this weekend. With any luck I will complete the event and get back to publishing content on Tuesday, 31 May 2011. If one does not see any new content by then, let us hope I am OK !

Related posts:

1. European Union to Scrutinize the WD-Hitachi and Seagate-Samsung Deals
2. Seagate – Samsung Deal the Storage Industry Impact
3. Samsung Selling Hard Drive Unit? Seagate a buyer?
4. OCZ Accused of Fraud, Seagate-Samsung, EMC Earnings, WD Earnings
5. Intel 22nm 3D Transistors, Seagate 1TB Platters
6. Seagate one-ups Western Digital, Slashing Warranties