storage

A New Jersey company said on Tuesday it will invest $20 million over three years to develop an underground compressed-air storage system for wind turbines and other power sources, a sign of growing confidence in the technology.

Energy Storage and Power is a joint ventured formed by energy developer PSEG Global and Michael Nakhamkin, who designed the only compressed air-storage facility in the U.S.

With Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES), air is pumped into underground formations, such as depleted natural gas wells or salt caverns, using a natural gas-powered machine. The pressured air is released later to drive a … Read more

Despite the early kinks attending MobileMe, what's not to like about the concept? I'll include Live Mesh in the category, though Microsoft still remains in beta with the product. Synchronizing e-mail, calendars, and contacts--it's a fine idea. Unfortunately, nobody has figured it out to anyone's full satisfaction yet.

Maybe that will soon change as more companies with the means and the motivation offer cloud-based storage to consumers. One recurring rumor has Google planning an upcoming consumer service with "infinite storage" called GDrive. Take rumors for what they are worth, but given Google's (growing) … Read more

I recently got a NAS device from Thecus--the N3200--and was very excited getting it out of the box. Among other things, the device looked as if it would be the first network storage device that incorporates a PCI expansion slot.

Unfortunately it isn't. There's indeed a place that reads "expansion slot" on the back of the device that looks like where you would fit a PCI card on a computer, but that's just a placeholder. As it turns out, the N3200 is the first NAS designed with a chassis to house more features … Read more

Intel finally announced its own SATA solid-state drive for notebook and desktop clients, and our secured lab has become a feeding frenzy of folks geeking out on the X25-M, just one of the SSD drives Intel introduced Tuesday at its Developer Forum in San Francisco.

The mainstream SSDs will come in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch models and both will use standard multilevel cell NAND flash memory that will hopefully translate to a lower cost-per-bit for the consumer.

As of the time of this announcement, Intel hasn't released pricing. We're crossing our fingers that the company will eventually … Read more

Some deals don't need much in the way of explanation, like the PQI i221 4GB USB flash drive. SuperMediaStore has it on sale, today only, for $9.99 with free ground shipping. 'Nuff said?

Well, maybe a few deets are in order. The drive "can use strap," whatever that means, and includes a three-mode LED status indicator. It's compatible with all operating systems and comes with a lifetime warranty.

I think the PQI looks cooler than most flash drives, though three reviewers on the SuperMediaStore site seriously disliked it, citing slow performance and an easily lost … Read more

With AOL-owned Xdrive on the auction block, competing cloud storage providers are scrapping together all sorts of plans to woo these potential paying customers to their services. Two in particular, Dropio and Box.net, have set up simple escape hatches wherein Xdrive users can simply plug in their account credentials and have their data piped over.

There's a catch, though: both services have free storage caps well beneath Xdrive's generous 5GB. In the case of Dropio, that cap is 100MB. To supplement this, the service is offering Xdrive users a special premium drop, which bumps up the cap … Read more

Boston-area battery upstart A123 Systems on Friday said that it plans to go public and raise $175 million.

The company, which is not profitable, on Friday filed papers in which it said it intends to raise as much as $175 million, based on the registration filing fee. The money will be used to expand it manufacturing and research facilities as well as pay back about $2.5 million in debt.

A123 Systems was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seven years ago to commercialize lithium-ion batteries for a range of applications.

The batteries, which the company says last … Read more

Thecus on Tuesday introduced two new NAS devices aimed at enterprise and SOHO environments: thei4500R and i5500. Both are iSCSI-based NAS devices that promise to deliver high value for customers looking to store and secure valuable data.

In case you're unfamiliar with the technology, SCSI is a high-end storage interface standard, similar to SATA--used in most desktop and laptop computers to connect a computer's internal hard drive(s) to its motherboard--but much faster. iSCSI is an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities by carrying SCSI commands over IP networks. iSCSI is … Read more

A month after saying it had figured out how to squeeze 400GB of data onto a single optical disc, Pioneer says it can do better than that.

On Tuesday the company said that it is "feasible" to produce a Blu-ray-compatible disc with 20 layers. At 25GB per layer, that amounts to a 500GB disc. The previous claim of 400GB meant just 16 layers were on a single disc.

Blu-ray Discs are currently available in single layer (25GB) and dual-layer (50GB) discs.

The company said that it was able to squeeze more layers in by stacking alternating layers of … Read more