Western Digital's hard drive operations in Thailand spent part of the company's second fiscal quarter ended December 30, 2011 waterlogged after severe flooding ravaged the area, but if it was time to sink or swim, WD chose the latter. Remarkably, the hard drive maker still managed to ship 28.5 million HDD units during its second fiscal quarter, pulling in $2 billion in revenue and profiting $145 million.

Samsung late last night put the word out that it's started producing embedded multi-chip package (eMCP) memory for use in entry-level and mid-range smartphones. The new eMCP solutions are offered to manufacturers in a wide range of densities and utilize LPDDR2 (low power double-data-rate 2) DRAM made with 30nm class process technology and NAND flash memory using 20nm class technology, Samsung said.

With native SuperSpeed USB 3.0 chipsets on the horizon and a whole host of USB 3.0-capable motherboards already on the market thanks to NEC, Marvell, and other third-party chip makers, there's no reason to saddle yourself with a USB 2.0 storage device, not unless it comes down to cost. Dollars and cents aside, Sony's new Micro Vault MACH USB 3.0 flash drive is a looker and a scorcher.

Perhaps 2012 will be the year that solid state drives (SSDs) finally dip to $1 per gigabyte, or even lower depending on how the market plays out. High prices compared to mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) have prevented SSDs from making a serious run at the mainstream market, but Ultrabooks as gain popularity, the demand for NAND flash memory is growing fast, and that could lead to lower costs.