storage

Apple joins hybrid-storage market with Fusion Drive

Apple announced at its October 23 event its first hybrid drive, called Fusion Drive, initially available as an option in its new iMac and Mac Mini.

Apple's Fusion Drive combines 120GB of solid-state storage and a regular platter-based hard drive of either 1TB or 3TB. Apple says the operating system and software will be installed on the flash memory part while all other data, such as media and documents, stays on the hard-drive part. However, users can move apps and files between the two sides of the drive to improve performance.

Apple claims that the Fusion Drive will offer … Read more

Ease into Windows 8 with My Passport Enterprise portable drive

Wondering if you should upgrade to Windows 8? WD has teamed up with Microsoft to offer a quick solution for business users.

The company announced today that its My Passport Enterprise portable drive is now Windows To Go-certified and will be available on the same day as Windows 8, which is Friday.

In a nutshell, the drive comes with Windows 8 Enterprise environment pre-configured on it and makes it possible to provision a fully featured Windows 8 work space on a bootable USB drive. In other words, you can take this drive, plug it into any computer running Windows 7Read more

Get an OCZ 120GB SSD for $59.99 shipped

It's official: solid-state drives are awesome-sauce.

They're fast, shock-proof, battery-friendly, cooler-running than traditional hard drives, and, finally, affordable.

Case in point: Today only, and while supplies last, TigerDirect has the OCZ VTX3-25SAT3-120G Vertex 3 120GB SSD for $59.99 shipped. That's after redeeming a $20 mail-in rebate (PDF).

That's one of the lowest prices I've seen on a 120GB SSD, especially one with this pedigree. The Vertex 3 is a 2.5-inch SATA III drive that would make a mighty fine replacement for the pokey old HDD in your pokey old laptop. Of course, because … Read more

MegaUpload rises from the dead as Mega

MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom has proven to be unstoppable. After the U.S. government's major takedown of the cloud-storage service, which came with charges of racketeering, copyright infringement, money laundering, and more, DotCom has escaped extradition to the U.S. for now and was given a formal apology by New Zealand's prime minister.

Emboldened, DotCom has announced that he is building a new file-sharing site called Mega. According to Wired, this new site will work slightly different than MegaUpload but will still let users upload, store, and share data files. DotCom also intends to make it raid-proof.

"… Read more

Iomega ships 2 new business StorCenter NAS servers

Iomega today announced the availability of the StorCenter px2-300d and the StorCenter ix4-300d NAS servers for business environments, ranging from small offices to enterprises.

The former is a dual-bay NAS that offers up to 6TB of storage space and the latter is a four-bay with a top capacity of 12TB. Both servers are available in a diskless configuration, leaving users the option of picking the type of hard drive and the capacity on their own. Both also offer Iomega's Personal Cloud feature, which was first introduced with the Home Media Network Drive more than a year ago.

Iomega says … Read more

iOS, Android apps are porking up, research firm says

The size of the average mobile application is on the rise, according to the results of a new study.

As part of its Mobile Application Markets research report, ABI Research today said that the size of the average iOS application last month was 16 percent greater than in March, with even larger growth in some specific app categories.

The big standout, the firm says, were games. In September, the average game was 60MB, up 42 percent from the average in March.

Why exactly are these apps expanding in size? ABI points to two possible reasons: Apple extending the over-the-air app download Read more

WD ships 8TB My Book Thunderbolt drive

WD announced today that its My Book Thunderbolt Duo now offers up to 8TB of storage space, up from the drive's initial cap of 6TB of when first released in March.

The My Book Thunderbolt Duo, which we've already reviewed, is WD's first Thunderbolt storage device. So far it's been the most affordable Thunderbolt storage device on the market in terms of cost per gigabyte. The new 8TB-capacity drive follows that tradition with a price of just $850, and it now comes with a Thunderbolt cable included.… Read more

Get a free 15GB cloud-storage account from 4Sync

Cloud-storage vendors are falling all over themselves to attract new customers.

Dropbox, by far the most popular, offers newcomers freebie accounts with 2GB of space. SugarSync raises the bar to 5GB, while Microsoft ponies up 7GB for its SkyDrive service.

If you're looking for even more cloud storage and want to keep your wallet closed, check out 4Sync. The company, just out of beta, currently offers 15GB of cloud storage free of charge.

True to its name, 4Sync promises to keep all your files in sync across all your devices: laptop, desktop, tablet, and smartphone. But unlike, say, Dropbox … Read more

Intel shows off personal cloud for consumers, small business

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel is getting into the personal cloud storage game with the introduction of its own Atom processor-based storage solutions aimed towards both consumers and small businesses.

Essentially, these are network-attached storage appliances powered by either the Intel Atom D2550 or D2500 processors for securing, backing up and sharing content through the cloud. The cloud technology comes in through an exposed HTML IP address (with a secure log-in), and the end user can access that IP address either through a regular desktop browser or it can look like a drive.

Intel said it has been focused on developing reference architectures … Read more

Get a 3TB USB 3.0 hard drive for $127.49

Need a mammoth backup drive to connect to your router, Pogoplug, or PC? No, really, I mean mammoth, as in the highest capacity you can buy.

While supplies last, Newegg has the Toshiba Canvio Desk 3TB USB hard drive for $127.49 shipped. That's after applying coupon code EMCJNNF79 at checkout.

Update: This code is now producing a "not valid" message, and the info on Newegg's product page indicating it was valid until Oct. 6 is gone. I've reached out to Newegg to get some explanation for this and will update the post if and … Read more