drive

LaCie expands its art collection

Being art lovers ourselves, we appreciate LaCie's attention to aesthetics in some of its latest products. After all, it's not easy to make a hard drive look like something that belongs ni a museum.

That's exactly what it did last week with the debut of its "Golden Disk," by French designer Ora-Ito. In our humble opinion, however, its second attempt isn't quite so successful: The "Little Disk" from designer Sam Hecht does sport a glossy finish but, aside from its removable cap, it looks pretty much like a dark-chocolate box.

The portable … Read more

A new approach to securing USB flash drives

USB Flash drives are great. Securing them, however, is not so great. They are easily lost and the more you use one, the more likely it will contain files you consider sensitive. Corsair recently came out with a product that takes an entirely new approach to securing flash drives.

Seeing as this is a Defensive Computing blog, it goes without saying that my personal flash drives are secure. I use a free, open-source program called TrueCrypt. There are however, three problems with this approach:

The hassle of installing TrueCrypt and learning how to use it. There is a portable version … Read more

Intel to build flash drives into servers

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel will begin building flash-memory drives into servers in 2008, starting with 32GB models that the company promises will boost system performance.

Flash drives can perform 10 to 50 times as many input-output transactions per second as conventional magnetic hard drives, said Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, in a speech at Intel Developer Forum here. In addition, they consume 4.5 times less power and write data at twice the speed.

Of course, the flash-drive capacities are much smaller. "The cost per bit is clearly going to be higher," Gelsinger said in … Read more

A 416GB flash drive--but probably not for you

Enough with the eensy weensy flash memory drives such as Dell's 64GB model. It's time for a solid-state disk whose capacity is closer to a conventional hard drive with spindles and platters.

Bitmicro Networks this week announced a 2.5-inch flash drive with a capacity of 416GB that will be available in March 2008.

Alas, though, the drive is geared for military, industrial and commercial users, not for arming high-end PC owners with bragging rights. Bitmicro's drive is designed to withstand shocks, vibration, and hot and cold temperatures.

Not being a conventional retail product, it's no … Read more

New sensor could lead to bigger, faster hard drives

Solid-state drives are beginning to pop in more and more and more systems, but that doesn't mean the traditional hard drive with its quaint spinning platters doesn't have a few tricks up its sleeve. Researchers at the National Physical Laboratory in England think they've come up with a new read-head sensor design that can read more densely packed data on a disk thanks to something called the magneto-electric effect. (Today's drives rely on the magneto-resistance effect, if you're scoring at home.) While the sensor on your hard drive would have trouble reading anything more than … Read more

The hard drive as a work of art

LaCie is a tech company that understands design and marketing. Even though it's in the business of computer peripherals and components--products that don't exactly scream glamour on their own--it's never shy to apply its creative notions to items as diverse as speakers and USB hubs. But the company may have truly outdone itself with its latest effort, finding beauty in the most unlikely of subjects: an external hard drive.

The "Golden Disk" could easily be sitting in a modern art display somewhere, a "sleek, liquid-inspired device" in a reflective case created by French … Read more

Alienware beams in massive solid-state RAID laptop drives

We love solid-state hard drives--in theory. No moving parts, no noise, less heat, more energy efficient, and less prone to failure--what's not to like? Of course, when we're all used to low-cost 200GB-plus hard drives in our laptops, actually making the move to SSD drives can be a bit of a reality check.

While a single 32GB SSD drive in your laptop may set you back a few hundred dollars, Alienware is leading the pack by offering the most outrageous laptop SSD package we've seen. On its award-winning 17-inch m9750 laptop, which we recently reviewed very favorably, … Read more

Toshiba hits 160GB with tiny drive

Toshiba on Wednesday pushed the capacity of its 1.8-inch hard drives up one more notch to 160GB but said it also made the products more power-efficient.

The 8mm-thick, dual-platter model also employs a new interface called CE-ATA for consumer electronics devices. Toshiba also introduced a 5mm-thick single-platter 80GB drive; both drives spin at 3,600rpm and have an average seek time of 15 microseconds.

Toshiba won't comment on who's buying this drive, but it doesn't take big brains to figure out one company Toshiba is courting: also on Wednesday, Apple introduced new iPod media players with 160GB drives. … 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