storage

The Wall Street Journal has announced its 2008 Technology Innovation Awards. Among the heavyweights on the list - Salesforce, Applied Materials, GlaxoSmithKline, etc. - is open-source storage vendor, Cleversafe, a company that I've long followed and admired.

It's great to see Cleversafe getting its due credit, especially from a list of judges that includes the CTO of Agilent, EVP of Software at SAP, and more distinguished names.

Here's what caught the judges' eyes:

[Cleversafe's] Dispersed Storage software breaks files up into slices and then sends the slices over the Internet to multiple storage locations on a … Read more

I said it would happen, and here it is: a 1TB external hard drive for less than $100. Specifically, Buy.com has the 1-terabyte Cavalry CAXE3701T0 dual-interface drive for $89.99 shipped (after a $50 mail-in rebate). Yowza.

Because it's preformatted with NTFS, it's plug-and-play ready for Windows users. (Mac and Linux folks could easily reformat it, I'm sure.) The drive includes both USB and eSATA interfaces, and even comes with a SATA bridge cable so you can connect it to an internal SATA port (handy for those systems that lack an external one). Why bother? Oh, … Read more

I like external storage a little more than most people, so when I saw that SimpleTech by Fabrik announced its first 3TB two-drive RAID 0/1 device with four interfaces (eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0) I nearly burst right here in my office. The company also announced a 1.5TB single-drive Pro model, in case you're the type who likes two enclosures at the same time. (I'm more a single-enclosure kinda guy.)

The Pro and Pro Duo drives, along with being flexible and easy to use, give you access to Fabrik's Ultimate Backup … Read more

Need more storage for your digital camera? If you buy a memory card off the shelf at, say, Best Buy or Office Max, you'll pay way too much. Witness: Newegg has a Kingston 4GB SDHC card for just $7.99 shipped (lowest price I've seen yet, btw). And no rebates! Best Buy sells the exact same card for $37.99, plus sales tax.

Kingston is a well-known brand, and the card comes with a lifetime warranty. Just make sure your camera, PDA, MP3 player or whatever supports SDHC media (some older devices don't).

So... good weekend? My … Read more

Two weeks after releasing the largest capacity 1.8-inch hard drive, Toshiba announced on Thursday its MKxx29GSG series of this small form factor storage device that's finally catching up with the regular 2.5-inch laptop hard drives in terms of speed and storage space.

For a long time, 1.8-inch hard drives' performance was limited to 4,200rpm and the old-school ATA interface, making them significantly slower than the currently popular 2.5-inch hard drives that spin at 5,400rpm (or even faster at 7,200rpm) and use the SATA standard. That discrimination has ended now with Toshiba's … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Wednesday unveiled its first ever hardware product--a storage server with embedded software designed to work with the company's databases and be used in a grid. The Exadata programmable storage server aims to put database intelligence next to each drive.

The hardware roll-out, which was cooked up in a partnership with Hewlett-Packard, is aimed at the emerging problem of moving data from hard drives to database servers. The storage server took three years of development with HP and has been tested for about a year with key customers such as Google.

Ellison, speaking at … Read more

By now you've probably heard of Eye-Fi, the Wi-Fi-enabled SD memory card that wirelessly beams photos from your camera to your PC. When it first came out last year, I thought it was overpriced at $99--but now you can scoop up an Eye-Fi Home card for just $59 shipped.

(Note: The above link takes you to CNET's product page for the Eye-Fi Home. On the right-hand side, you'll see that several vendors are offering the card for $59. To get free shipping, choose either BuyDig or Beach Camera.)

I've been testing an Eye-Fi for the last … Read more

I'm eagerly anticipating the day when I can show you a 1-terabyte hard drive for under $100. (Be patient, it'll happen.)

In the meantime, eCost has the 500GB Vox V1 external USB/eSata drive for just $55. There's a rebate, yes, and shipping will run you about 10 bucks. But, lordy, that's a lotta storage for notta lotta cash.

Drives like this are ideal for making full-system backups, storing massive video libraries, and just expanding your available storage in general. CNET loved the V1's ease of setup and speedy performance, but wasn't wild about the bundled backup software. … Read more

Earlier this year, we took a close look at Iomega's eGo line of portable hard drives. We tested both the brown leather eGo and the camo eGo, with superb results: we liked both Iomega's Drop Guard design that protects the drives from drops up to a meter above the floor, and the quick transfer speeds.

Now, Iomega is taking the drives' aesthetic value one step further by introducing the 320GB eGo Helium. The drive is just .63 inches, and its sleek exterior casing is anodized silver to match perfectly with Apple's MacBook Air. Inside the chassis, you'… Read more