storage

STEC issued a formal response Tuesday to a patent infringement lawsuit filed by rival storage maker Seagate Technology and its subsidiaries.

STEC, which responded to the lawsuit Seagate filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, says it will "aggressively" defend itself against Seagate's four patent infringement claims and contends it was one of the first companies to develop, manufacture, and ship high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs), predating the patents cited in Seagate's complaint.

Seagate is alleging STEC violated four of its patents relating to its SSDs, memory-backup systems, and self-testing … Read more

Today, Syncplicity launches its PC sync tool. Like the old-school FolderShare and the newer SugarSync (review), this product will keep the data on two machines (PCs only) in lockstep with each other. Syncplicity is in the hub-and-spoke camp (like SugarSync), not in the peer-to-peer world (FolderShare). This means that all the data that Syncplicity keeps track of for you is also stored on the company's servers.

There are advantages to this. Since the data is stored on an off-site server, the service becomes a passable backup and remote data access application. Also, the server-based architecture means your PCs don'… Read more

Cell phones and smartphones increasingly rely on microSD media for added storage. A 2GB card would let you carry a few ripped movies, about 500 MP3s, loads of photos, countless documents, and so on. SuperMediaStore.com has a PQI 2GB microSD card on sale for just $8.99. No rebates, free shipping, beat that.

The card comes with a fairly important extra: an SD adapter so you can use it with the vast majority of media-card readers (few of which have microSD slots). It even comes in a retail package, so it qualifies for PQI's lifetime warranty. Pretty sweet … Read more

HP has entered the online backup space with a new product called Upline. It's a decent cloud-based backup product at a good price point, but it has a few frustrating limitations.

The good news first: The software is simple to get started with (critical for a backup application) and the paid plans provide unlimited storage for your documents, photos, music, and video files (also critical--who wants to count bits when signing up for data insurance?). The system checks for new files by default every 15 minutes, and uploads your data to the HP-run servers in a quiet background process. … Read more

Updated at 2:30 p.m. PDT with comments from Iomega Chief Executive Jonathan Huberman.

And now for something completely different.

Software and storage company EMC announced Tuesday that it will purchase Iomega for $213 million, or $3.85 per share. EMC expects the deal to close sometime during the second quarter of this year.

EMC has traditionally played in enterprise-level storage and software arenas. Iomega is best-known for hard drives and storage for consumers and small-business customers. EMC hinted that this is just its first move into consumer hardware business.

"Iomega will play a key role in EMC'… Read more

Got storage? You can always use more, whether for backing up your hard drive, housing your multimedia library, migrating from old PC to new, or whatever. Here's your chance to score a big drive on the cheap: eCost has the Seagate-recertified 320GB FreeAgent on sale for $69.

This is an external USB drive, and a rather stylish-looking one at that: The espresso-brown finish is complimented by an amber light strip. The drive comes formatted for Windows but can be reformatted for use with Macs. There's no bundled backup software, however, and the warranty expires after 90 days.

My … Read more

I'm always on the lookout for new ways to host images for quick and dirty sharing. Worth checking out is Photie, which is an incredibly simple photo host. It's light on features, but offers unlimited storage and file sizes (great for people with 14 megapixel SLRs), along with generous sharing options both for downloading shots and hosting on external sites and social networks.

What might be its killer feature, however, is that it gives you a detailed listing of when and where your photos have been viewed. It's something you find on YouTube and Viddler for videos, … Read more

A solid-state drive maker is claiming its new 256GB drive is the world's thinnest.

While that may be true, it won't fit into the world's thinnest notebooks, which makes the claim less impressive. The SSD from Super Talent measures 12.5 millimeters thick. Sure that sounds teeny tiny, but that's more like pregnant-Nicole-Richie-thin compared to the 9.5-millimeter drives on the market, which are more like Nicole-Richie-after-Thanksgiving-dinner-thin: seems like a negligible difference in size, but has major implications. If you haven't noticed, some PC makers are battling over who can create the skinniest notebook. So … Read more

Dropbox is a promising new tool for online storage, file sync, and sharing. The cross-platform system plug-in gives you a shared drop box where you can dump files and access them from multiple computers just like you would on the home machine. It also keeps track of any changes to the files, which can be rolled back to previous versions that have been archived on the service's cloud storage.

I gave it a brief spin this afternoon on one computer and it works as advertised. I had no problem dumping a bunch of files, then accessing them through the Web interface. The photo album feature has been especially well implemented, as the system will automatically group together a folder of photos and categorize them into albums using the metadata. There are other nice touches too, such as visual notifiers to let you know when a file is syncing up with the server, as well as Growl system messages on the Mac version to let you know when a change is made to your drop box.

If you're away from your home machine you can still access all your files through the Web interface. There's also a file uploader that lets you add files up to 25MB if you want to save a file from a guest computer without having to install any software.

The service is in private beta with plans to open up later this year. We've got a little less than 100 invites to give away to Webware readers. Just sign up and enter "Webware" as the invite code. (Update: Invites are now gone. We're working on getting some more). Beta accounts offer up 5GB of storage with no limitations on how many computers you can have linked up. When the service opens up later this year, the free accounts will be limited at 1GB, so get 'em while they're hot. Another screen of the interface after the break.

Related: Tubes (now dead), Apple's .Mac 'Back to my Mac' service, SyncToy, Foldershare, BeInSync, SugarSync.

[found on Digg]

… Read more