Storage

I blogged on Wednesday about the photo archiving site Digital Railroad's abrupt shutdown, leaving thousands of professional photographer customers confused and worried. On Thursday, I got a statement saying that the site will extend the window time until Friday, October 31, 11:59 p.m. PST, for customers to migrate their photo archives.

The statement comes from both PhotoShelter and Diablo Management Group, the firm in charge of the shut down the defunct Digital Railroad, and reads:

As part of the process of terminating the business operations of Digital Railroad, Diablo Management Group has informed PhotoShelter of its intent … Read more

If you didn't lose all of your photos with the shutdown of Digital Railroad and you still want to share them, it just got easier. Memeo, a company that offers digital media management services, announced Wednesday that it now supports photo sharing on Macs and the iPhone.

The Mac version is called Memeo Share and the iPhone version is MemeoPhoto. These applications let you share high-resolution photos and video across multiple platforms, from any of the supported devices, including PCs, Macs, and the iPhone.

Of course, you can always use e-mail to share photos with friends and family. However, … Read more

Intel said Tuesday that solid-state drives can extend battery life up to 30 minutes compared to hard disk drives.

Add the speed advantage of solid state drives and that's two strikes against hard disks. Price parity--strike three--is still a ways off, however. That--and the fact that hard drives offer much larger capacities--will keep hard drives competitive next year.

For now, Intel is evangelizing the benefits of speed and power efficiency.

Most independent benchmarks show that solid state drives perform better than hard disk drives. In some cases, a lot better. That's a given now. One area, however, that … Read more

If you're done playing around with Google Earth for the iPhone, you might be interested in checking out something with some everyday utility. Last week Box.net dropped its iPhone application on the App Store. Just like the mobile Safari-friendly version of yore, this lets you access your cloud-stored files on the go, including documents, music, and movies.

The big difference is that this new version takes advantage of your phone's hardware, letting you upload snapped photos and keep an eye on any updates.

In the future, once Apple flips the switch on its live notification service this … Read more

As has been previously reported, AOL is shutting down its photo-hosting services AOL Pictures and Bluestring, and its online file storage service Xdrive. Everything stored there goes away on December 31, 2008. Photos on AOL Pictures are getting an optional new home at American Greetings' PhotoWorks service, although users have to actively sign on to the new service before June 30, 2009, to rescue their images.

The best bet, for everyone, is to sign on to your AOL services before the end of the year and download your photos or files. All three services will have bulk downloading available until … Read more

Solid-state drives aren't always faster than regular hard drives, but they sure can be tinier.

The smallest regular hard drives are the 1.8 inchers that Toshiba has been making for ultracompact laptops. On Wednesday, Super Talent Technology announced two SSDs that come in a significantly smaller form factor: .85 inch and 1 inch.

The new SSDs use Intel Z-P140 NAND Flash-based SSD technology and employ the older parallel ATA (PATA/IDE) interface, as opposed to the current and popular SATA interface used in regular-size SSDs. Both offer rather modest read and write speeds of 40 megabytes per second … Read more

Sony released a new internal Blu-ray recorder, the BWU-300S, a while ago. But if your computer doesn't have an empty bay to take it, you'll appreciate what Other World Computing announced Wednesday: an all new external Blu-ray recorder, called Mercury Pro, that features all four interfaces, including FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0, and eSATA.

The new OWC Mercury Pro drive supports 4x Blu-ray write speed (or 150MB per second). At this speed it can finish a single-layer Blu-ray disc (25GB) in 30 minutes or a double-layer disc (50GB) in an hour. While this is only half … Read more

In the wake of a big loss posted this week by SanDisk, layoffs appear to be in the offing.

On Monday, SanDisk said in prepared remarks that as part of its efforts to reduce operating expenses, "actions will be implemented in the current quarter" and will include "canceling or exiting a number of products and marketing activities, and will result in employee reduction in R&D, Sales & Marketing, G&A, and Operations."

And on Monday during SanDisk's third-quarter earnings conference call, CFO Judy Bruner spoke about more restructuring to come. In response … Read more

Will 2009 be the year that solid-state drives take off? Maybe not. The speedy drives are catching on, but wider acceptance will take time--and the bad economy isn't helping.

Costs are still high for these drives, which typically outdo--and in some cases blow away--hard disks in performance. "2010-2011...that's when we think the price points for the SSD market get attractive enough to really drive stronger growth," Sanjay Mehrotra, president and chief operating officer of SanDisk, said this week during SanDisk's third-quarter earnings conference call.

Indeed, there is still a wide price gap between hard-disk … Read more