storage

Iomega targets Apple fans with new hard drive offerings

Iomega announced today that the company is expanding its lineup of products geared towards the Mac community. The announcement, made at the Apple Expo 2007 in Paris, covers both existing and new products. Support for the HFS+ file system, new designs, and a wider array of connection options are designed to attract the attention of Apple fans.

Dual-drive RAID products: The UltraMax Pro Desktop Hard Drives feature two hot-swappable SATA-II drives for RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurability. The industrial design mirrors that of the Apple Mac Pro desktop line. The UltraMax Pro lines comes in two configurations. The first … Read more

iForem launches 'lifetime' storage service

iForem is a new service making its debut at the DemoFall conference. Currently aimed at enterprise users, the company is set to step into the consumer space early next year. The basic premise of iForem is that users pay for storage up front, similar to purchasing actual physical media to save their files. iForem then keeps the files safe, secure, and redundant as long as you've got the proper passwords--all without a subscription.

iForem creators Stephen Pieraldi and TJ de Luna started the company as a response to some of the free online storage solutions out there that offer … Read more

Storage start-up fits 250 hours of HD content on one disc

An Israeli start-up has created a way to store a whole lot of data on optical discs using fluorescence.

The TeraDisc looks like a regular CD, except it's chartreuse and see-through. Mempile says its disc will start off able to store 600GB to 700GB and in a year will be able to write 1TB worth of data. There are two physical layers of plastic, but 200 virtual layers on the one-sided disc. That means 250 hours of high-definition content or 300,000 digital photos. HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc can currently hold about 50GB of data on dual-layer discs. … Read more

Nirvanix picks up $12 million

It seems some investors are thinking about where all this user-generated content is headed.

Nirvanix, a new storage provider for online media applications, has received $12 million in funding from Mission Ventures, Valhalla Partners and Windward Ventures, the company announced Tuesday.

Nirvanix, which launched in early September, provides storage and retrieval tools for online media applications that host user-generated content. The company intends to specialize in large-scale media sites where millions of users may generate, store and retrieve content.

It's offering itself up as a viable alternative to Amazon's Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with the addition of … Read more

Report: Facebook may be headed for data storage

Remember when Facebook was just a way to "poke" that kid who sat in front of you in macroeconomics class? Yeah, that was a long time ago. Rev2 reported on Sunday that technobabble on the Facebook Developer Wiki may be hinting that the "social utility" wants to expand into data storage.

So far, this appears to only apply to developers who have created applications on the Facebook Platform and have until this point provided their own data storage for the apps. A Facebook data storage plan would allow them to rent or purchase storage (or perhaps, … Read more

Here comes the flow battery

DAVIS, Calif.--What is a flow battery? It's a battery with tanks of electrolytes that effectively lets the battery store more energy than normal batteries. The electrolyte flows or circulates through the system. The larger the tanks, the more electricity it can store.

"They are cheaply made out of plastic. They are low maintenance," said Rick Winter, an executive at Deeya Energy, which makes flow batteries. The company has been busy this summer setting up manufacturing facilities in India, CEO Saroj Sahu told News.com a few weeks ago.

Flow batteries won't appear in watches or … Read more

Seagate updates One Touch hard drives

Seagate announced today the fourth iteration of the OneTouch family of external hard drives. The OneTouch 4 lineup includes the standard OneTouch 4 hard drive, the OneTouch 4 Plus, and the OneTouch Mini portable drive. All feature a new industrial design meant to evoke the image of a vault--that is, data protection. All offer automatic backup: You can choose folders or files to backup, schedule the backup task to trigger at specific date/time, and keep up to 10 historical versions of each file/folder. The OneTouch Plus and OneTouch Mini drives take protection a step further with Maxtor SafetyDrill, … Read more

Hot deal: Western Digital Passport 160GB external hard drive for $88

We've seen this compact portable hard drive listed at up to twice the price. Today Dell Home offers it for 88 bucks, shipping included, when you pay with PayPal. Easy setup, light weight, compact size and great speed make this a convenient solution for non-Mac users.

To quote CNET Reviews:

The good: Compact; bus-powered; quick at reading and writing; includes sync and encryption software; comes with a zippered, hard carrying case.

The bad: Sync software works with only Windows XP and 2000; phone support may eventually become expensive.

The bottom line: Western Digital's Passport Portable External Hard Drive … Read more

Iomega brings its NAS storage to the home

Iomega announced today that it has finally moved into the home NAS market. Although Iomega has long produced NAS storage for small businesses, it hasn't brought its technology into the home. The new Home Network Hard Drive does exactly that. The network-attached storage drive comes in 320GB, 360GB and 500GB capacities, and costs just a little more than comparably sized USB hard drives. Each drive contains a single 7,200rpm SATA-II drive with an 8MB cache. For networking, they offer a 10/100 Ethernet port, though users may also connect the drives to a single PC over USB. The … Read more