ConsumerIT - For Europe's High Volume PC Retailers, Distributors & Builders

Best Buy announces leadership changes and names Shari Ballard president of Best Buy International, overseeing the retailer's European venture as well as channels in Canada, China and Mexico.

Ballard was previously Americas president with Mike Vitelli, and began her Best Buy career in 1993 as assistant store manager before moving to human resources in 1997. She also gets the title of executive VP.

Best Buy is currently out of Europe, having left the UK on January 15th 2012 after closing all its 11 brick and mortar stores. It however still holds a stake in Carphone Warehouse. The retailer also closed own-brand stores in China (in favour of concentrating on the more profitable Five Star Brand) and Turkey in 2011.

Meanwhile Best Buy US also get a new president-- executive VP Mike Vitelli.

Go Best Buy Announces Leadership Changes

Go Bye, Bye Best Buy: Closing UK Stores

According to IHS iSuppli the market for cache SSDs will "explode" within the next few years, as growing ultrabook sales should boost demand from 881000 units in 2011 to 25.7 million in 2012.

A cache SSD looks like a regular SSD consisting entirely of NAND flash. It is independent storage but runs alongside a separate HDD to allow for faster boot-up times and improved performance. The technology first hit the market in 2011 and is a cheaper means for enhancing system performance-- a cache SSD paired with a 500GB HDD costs as much as a 120GB SSD ($160) according to the analyst.

iSuppli says 2013 cache SSD shipments will total 68.2M before growing to approximately 121M by 2015, with the majority of units ending up in ultrabooks-- out of the 25.7M units to ship in 2012, iSuppli estimates 22M will be present in ultrabooks.

The solution should prove popular for both price-conscious consumer and enterprise customers looking for a means to boosting performance without the need for top-line microprocessors or additional DRAM, iSuppli says. Cache SSD prices will also be low enough for mainstream adoption within the coming years, due to pressures from both ultrabooks and even more affordable "smartbooks" carrying mobile architectures and low-cost operating systems.

iSuppli concludes the cache drive segment is also the "primary reason" behind growing SSD shipments, which the analyst predicts will reach 46M in 2012 (up from 17M in 2011).

Go Cache SSD Shipments to Explode, Driven by Ultrabook Initiative (IHS iSUppli)

Dixons Retail claims "solid performance" for the 12 weeks ending 7th January 2012, despite total group sales declining by -5% Y-o-Y for the period.

UK & Ireland sales for the Currys and PC World owner (excluding new store openings) fall by -7% Y-o-Y. The retailer says the 2011 VAT increase "distorted" Christmas period sales totals, as like-for-like sales were up 2% in the 1-14th January 2012 period and up 23% during 4-14 January 2012.

The retailer says stores having KNOWHOW installation and support services also show "strong sales."

Sales in S. Europe (Italy, Greece, Turkey) fare worse by dropping by -10% Y-o-Y due to worsening economic environments, while N. Europe (Nordics and C. Europe) sees 3% growth. Dixons runs Elkjop in the Nordics, UniEuro in Italy and Kotsovolos in Greece.

Online sales are growing in importance for the retailer-- online now represents 19% of total group sales. Group CE John Browett comments "Consumer confidence in many of our markets remains fragile and we will maintain a cautious approach to the outlook for the year ahead..."

Go Dixons Trading Statement

Hitachi says the G-RAID external HDD can turn any PC into a content creation workstation through high speed connectivity and capacities of up to 8TB.

Connection interfaces include 3Gbit eSATA, FireWire 800 (FireWire 400 via cable) and USB 2.0. The drive carries Hitachi 4TB 7200RPM Deskstar 7K4000 HDs with a 6Gb/s SATA interface and a 64MB cache buffer.

The company claims the drive handles simultaneous playback of multiple layers of HDV, DVCPRO HD, XDCAM HD and ProRes 422 HQ footage.

It is ready out of the box for use with Mac OS X systems and also supports Windows systems through reformatting.

Go Hitachi G-RAID