Today, more rumors have surfaced regarding Samsung moving to a metal unibody design for its upcoming flagship, the Galaxy S5. The phone is set to debut during the second quarter of 2014 and if reports are true, it will ditch the flimsy plastic exterior in favor for a more elegant and sturdy metal chassis.

While arguably one of the best smartphones ever made, Samsung has received a lot of criticism regarding the plastic body construction of its Galaxy S4. HTC, on the other hand, has received nothing but praise for its aluminum unibodied HTC One, even though it features a slower processor and an older revision of Android.

Additionally, Samsung has undoubtedly taken note to the following Apple has with its metal unibody iPhone 5 and 5S. According to a new report from the Taipei Times, a Taiwan-based parts supplier will be receiving orders very soon for a metal casing that is set to house the new Galaxy S5. These supply chain rumors are often true, and with similar rumors been released earlier in the year, we agree that Samsung will most likely release a unibody Galaxy S5 next year.

Today, Phobya unveiled its new top-of-the-line Black Owl PC case that was designed with the extreme water cooling enthusiast in mind. The Black Owl is actually the end-result of a design contest held earlier this year on the popular modding website Bit-Tech.

The case is constructed completely out of aluminum and features support for up to three radiators. Weighing in at less than 7kg, the Phobia is spacious enough to feature today's latest hardware, including eATX motherboards and extra long graphic cards.

The Phobya Black Owl features a concave front panel that features enough room to mount three 5.25-inch and three 3.5-inch drives. Additionally, space is available for up to four 2.5-inch drives. The case is definitely built to be modder friendly as it does not feature pre-installed power and reset buttons, allowing the customer to choose something like Phobya's vandalism-proof push buttons.

OCC has just released a revised version of its popular Deneva 2 series of enterprise-grade SSDs. The new Deneva 2 SSDs are based on MLC 19nm NAND flash and feature a SATA III 6Gb/s interface.

OCZ says that the drives also feature a "completely new power architecture that was designed from the ground up to optimize server backplane functionality, provide enhanced management of in-rush current and power fluctuation." The company says that the resulting product delivers an SSD that delivers superior performance, endurance, and reliability.

"Our Deneva 2 has been a popular SSD series among IT professionals not only as an HDD replacement but to dramatically accelerate I/O access of such popular enterprise applications as OnLine Transaction Processing, database warehousing, read intensive data caching and server boot-ups," said Daryl Lang, SVP of Product Management for OCZ Technology. "By implementing new features and the latest NAND flash process geometry we are able to deliver an optimal balance of I/O performance and cost-efficiency to our customers."

It wasn't too long ago that Hugo Barra joined Chinese manufacturer, Xiaomi, but if you forgot who Barra is, well, he was only the former Vice President of Global for Google.

The first smartphone to launch while Barra is with the company is the new MI3, which is quite the smartphone indeed. We have multiple versions of the phone, which are all limited to China unfortunately. The first is a WCDMA model, with the second being a CDMA2000 model. These two models will feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, with four cores clocked in at 2.3GHz each.

If you purchase the TD-SCDMA version for China Mobile, then you'll enjoy an NVIDIA Tegra 4 SoC. All variations of the MI3 feature 2GB of RAM, but when Xiaomi claim "the fastest smartphone ever" it is referring to the MSM8974AB model which features the Snapdragon CPU, which boosts the clock speeds for the memory interface and Adreno 330 GPU.

Facebook has been banned in China for what seems like forever, but now Beijing has lifted the ban on the Internet access within the Shanghai free-trade Zone to foreign websites that were previously considered politically sensitive by the Chinese government.

These websites included Facebook, Twitter and The New York Times, but now according to government sources who told the South China Morning Post, the authority in charge of the Hong Kong-like free-trade zone in Shanghai is a first in mainland China. This would also see bids coming in from foreign telecommunications companies for license to provide Internet services within the new zone.

One of the government sources told the South China Morning Post: "In order to welcome foreign companies to invest and to let foreigners live and work happily in the free-trade zone, we must think about how we can make them feel like at home. If they can't get onto Facebook or read The New York Times, they may naturally wonder how special the free-trade zone is compared with the rest of China."

Earlier today, HighPoint announced that it has began shipping the RocketU 1144C, which it says is the world's fastest USB 3.0 controller. The USB 3.0 controller card is powered by HighPoint's per-port performance architecture and a fast PCI-E 2.0 x4 host interface that is combined with UAS technology, which is responsible for this controllers abnormally fast speeds.

The RocketU 1144C delivers unprecedented levels of performance when paired with UAS capable storage devices, such as the RocketStor 5422 USB 3.0 Storage Dock. UAS (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) enables USB 3.0 devices to store and process multiple commands in parallel; significantly reducing wait time and streamlining data transfers. The speed and efficiency advantages provided by UAS technology are ideal for multi-tasking and performance-hungry applications.

HighPoint's third generation 4-Port USB 3.0 HBA provides all of the same features as previous 4-port HBA's.

Today, Mellanox announced the immediate release of its MetroX TX6100 solution that enables InfiniBand and Ethernet RDMA connectivity between data centers. Mellanox says that "MetroX allows for rapid disaster recovery and improve utilization of remote storage and compute infrastructures across long distances and multiple geographic sites."

"A common problem facing data-driven researchers is the time cost of moving their data between systems, from machines in one facility to the next, which can slow their computations and delay their results," said Mike Shuey, HPC systems manager at Purdue University. "Mellanox's MetroX solution lets us unify systems across campus, and maintain the high-speed access our researchers need for intricate simulations -- regardless of the physical location of their work."

Purdue University recently deployed MetroX TX6100 over six kilometers to connect their computational clusters to storage facilities thus providing access to its remote-based supercomputers and allowing Purdue University to organize limited access to data center space more efficiently resulting in higher facilities utilization.

Throughout the day, Gmail users have been experiencing spotty performance issues as well as downtime when trying to access their email. Sluggish load times and delayed receipt of emails are the major nuisances, while some users, including myself, were unable to access the service altogether several times throughout the day.

Google has confirmed that as many as 50 percent of users may have been affected by the performance issues and service disruptions, which appeared to start around 2:05PM Eastern Time. Google says that they are working diligently to return things to normal and as of this posting, all of my issues seem to have been resolved.

Update: Google appears to still be dealing with issues pertaining to the GMail service. Per their update page, Google says that "Gmail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change. Gmail message delivery delays and attachment download issues have been corrected for most affected users. A majority of the delivery backlog has also been cleared. We hope to clear the backlog completely in the very near future."

LSI Corporation announced they are working closely with VMware to deliver breakthrough desktop density for VMware Horizon View deployments. VDI can be a challenging environment for the storage infrastructure with its 'bursty' random write workloads. For HDD-based solutions, be they SAN, NAS or direct attached storage, these workloads closely mirror the absolute worst-case scenario for an HDD. Throwing more spindles at the problem isn't the best of solutions, as this leads to drastically over provisioned storage resources to tackle a problem that can be addressed with a simple slip-in solution that provides lower power consumption and exponentially better latency performance.

Many administrators mistakenly think that throughput and IOPS can address every performance challenge, but the secret to maximum performance actually falls to the latency of the storage solution.

Enter the LSI WarpDrive, which brings a healthy helping of flash and places it as close to the processor as possible, delivering massive performance improvements with a minimum of configuration. Above we can observe the VSImax rating of 280 obtained before the system maxed out the CPU.In collaborative testing with VMware Horizon View using a single LSI Nytro WarpDrive application acceleration card, the WarpDrive comfortably delivers concurrent support for 200 active virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workloads on a two-node cluster with no storage latency.

Last week we broke the news that Valve was prepping for three big announcements this week surrounding its Steam gaming platform, and today the company released its first announcement by unveiling a new operating system. The new SteamOS is a free, open-source operating system that is designed around steam and built on Linux.

Valve says the new OS is capable of running on "any living room machine" which presumably means custom-built HTPCs, Laptops, and almost certainly the mystical Steam Box many industry insiders expect to be launched during one of the company's next announcements on Wednesday or Friday. Unfortunately Valve did not clue us in on an actual release date, but did say that the new OS would be available for download "soon."

"As we've been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we've come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself," Valve stated. "SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines."