Amazon goes down

Amazon's S3 cloud storage service suffered eight hours of downtime and elevated error rates in the US and Europe last weekend, says Network World.

The outage lasted several hours longer than a similar problem that hit the service in February, disrupting Web sites that rely on the online simple storage service.

The social networking site Twitter was disrupted during both outages.

The Seagate Barracuda ES Series has been selected as the hard drive of choice for the Omneon MediaDeck media servers and MediaGrid active storage systems that will enable NBC's coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, says Market Watch.

The media servers and storage systems will allow NBC to produce an unprecedented 3 600 hours of coverage during the Beijing Olympic Games - a threefold increase over the coverage during the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics will be held from 8 to 24 August.

Samsung and Sun Microsystems say they've found a veritable fountain of youth for data centre solid-state drives, says The Register.

They claim to have jointly developed a single-layer cell (SLC) NAND flash device that provides a "fivefold increase" in data write/erase cycles over standard SLC flash.

Numbers aren't provided - but given current server-grade flash products are normally rated around 10 000 cycles, that puts the technology at a healthy 50 000 read/write lifespan.