storage

One year after the first release of the first Drobo that won our Editors' Choice award, and a few days after the release of the beta SDK, Drobo Robotics today announced its second revision of the product.

For those of you who don't know, Drobo is the world's first, and for now still the only, solution for external storage that automatically and intelligently takes care of your data with minimal input from you. All you have to do is install the hard drives, which is as easy as inserting a CD into the CD-ROM drive. The Drobo protects … Read more

Got a big archiving project you've been itching to do? Pioneer's latest development could help you keep all your data in one nice, little circular package.

The Japanese electronics maker has been working on an optical disc, which, like Blu-ray, can store 25GB of data in a single layer. But Pioneer says it's one-upped the high-definition format to the sixteenth degree. The company announced today that it has a single disc that contains 16 layers of storage, at 25GB each. That adds up to 400GB of data capable of being stored on a single disc.

Blu-ray comes … Read more

No moving parts, shock resistant, and incredibly short seek time are some of many benefits you get from a solid-state hard drive. However, for now, the price for a SSD is so incredibly high that calling "insanely priced" might not be an over statement. It's hard to justify (or to afford for that matter) spending about $1,000 for only 64GB when you can pay about 10 percent of that cost for a regular 200GB laptop hard drive.

So how about making our own SSD?

Sans Digital just released the CR2T CompactFlash card enclosure that might make … Read more

No, I am not talking about something that's for or from an airplane. It's simply a network attached storage device from VOX. The full name--don't hold your breath, you've already read the creative part--is BlackBox Dual Bay Gigabit RAID Shared Network Storage. As if the naming it BlackBox were not sensational enough, VOX decided to paint the device silver.

Other than the confusing, yet very telling name, the device is actually straightforward. It's a dual bay NAS device that supports RAID 0 and RAID 1. It's always nice to have the option of using … Read more

Someday, the electricity grid will operate with the equivalent of a giant hard drive. But in the short term, grid storage will look more like a PC's cache or RAM, able to serve up small bursts of power to keep things from crashing.

A panel of experts, organized by the New England Clean Energy Council, earlier this week said that the utility storage field has enormous potential. But rapid deployment of storage devices is held back by concerns over technology risk and financial complexity.

Technology optimists say that wide-scale energy storage will change the face of the transmission grid … Read more

Seagate announced today its newest device to join the network attack storage (NAS) community: the Maxtor Central Axis.

Slated to be available in North America next month, the Central Axis promises to be a central space that hosts regular data files as well as digital content for home users. The Device supports the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) standard, meaning it will work very well with DLNA-compliant devices such as the popular games consoles Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3.

The Central Axis will also come with an easy backup solution that backs up data from any computers within … Read more

A123 Systems has signed on electricity utilities to use its lithium-ion batteries for short-term energy storage, according to a company executive.

The company, spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a closely watched venture that is best known for activity in the auto and power tools markets.

It is working with General Motors for plug-in hybrids and Think for all-electric town cars. A123 Systems also owns Hymotion, a company that converts hybrid cars to plug-in hybrids.

But lithium-ion batteries, already used in millions of consumer electronics devices, can be plugged into the electricity grid as well, according to … Read more

OK, I admit it. I want options, even though, most of the time I don't have much use for them. Take pocket-size external hard drives, for example. I want them to be compact, light, pretty, bus-powered, and especially I want them to support USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800. (I would take eSATA, too, though, that wouldn't make sense until it's bus-powered capable). However, the truth is, I've used mostly just the USB 2.0 connection for personal purposes. So today, I decided to find out if FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 are worth … Read more

Memory card maker SanDisk is launching what it claims is the industry's first premium mobile phone storage cards at the CommunicAsia trade show. Labeled under the company's Mobile Ultra lineup, the new memory cards will offer improved transfer speeds when used in compatible devices. According to a representative at the SanDisk booth, the Mobile Ultra media transfers data at up to 20Mbps, more than four times the 5Mbps attainable with the current SanDisk Mobile flash cards.

The new Mobile Ultra memory cards will be available for the microSD/SDHC and Memory Stick Micro (M2) formats at 2GB, 4GB, … Read more