storage

If you own a digital SLR camera or some other device that uses CompactFlash media, now's your chance to stock up on storage: Adorama has a 4GB Kingston CF card for $0 after a $40 mail-in rebate. Shipping runs $5.

Yeah, there's a rebate, but at least we're talking quality media here: Kingston is a top brand, and the company backs the cards with a lifetime warranty. Plus, the rebate itself is through Kingston, not Adorama, so it's probably a safe bet. If you're interested, don't wait: The rebate deal expires Friday (February 8), … Read more

IBM's researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area have been at the forefront of data storage for decades.

An IBM team invented the first hard drive (the IBM 350, which was part of a machine called RAMAC) 52 years ago in San Jose, Calif. The relational database came out of IBM's labs in the area, too.

Now, scientists at IBM Almaden are trying to come up with breakthroughs that will help computers sift through the "exabytes" of data that have become an inevitability for many corporations and government agencies. (An exabyte is a quintillion bytes, or … Read more

The Department of Energy announced on Wednesday that it has pulled out of a carbon-capture technology project in favor of a restructured funding mechanism.

The DOE last year signed an agreement with the FutureGen Alliance, a coalition of coal and oil companies, to spend about $950 million on a demonstration coal-fired power plant that injects carbon dioxide emissions underground. Last December, a site for the FutureGen project in Matoon, Ill., was announced by the Alliance.

On Wednesday, the DOE said that it has scrapped that agreement and issued a new request for information, which will solicit proposals for demonstration plants … Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy plans to pull its support of a $1.8 billion project to build a power plant that captures pollution underground, according to published reports.

The FutureGen project is meant to test cutting-edge carbon capture and storage technology, which is supposed to dramatically reduce emissions from fossil fuel-burning power plants.

Carbon capture and storage is considered an important technology to reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions, but the technology is unproven at a large scale. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year called for government funding of carbon capture projects in the United … Read more

Data is a problem--a good problem. As in, we have so much information we don't have enough room for it on one device.

Web storage company Fabrik acknowledges this and says it will give people a way to instantly access their data from one application without regard to where the information is being kept.

Fabrik's product is called Joggle and is based on the AIR platform from Adobe, which launched last year.

Any music, video, and photos stored can be viewed all in the same window no matter what Web site or storage device it is on. With … Read more

If you've never heard of Dropio, it's worth checking out. The service provides temporary storage for your files--an online dropbox, so to speak--complete with a unique Web address you can share or keep to yourself.

Of course, lots of services offer this capability, but Dropio just added an entirely original feature: MP3 audio recording. Now, when you create a "drop," you get a phone number and special extension. Just dial in from your cell phone (or any phone), enter the extension, and start talking. When you're done, Dropio turns the recording into an MP3 you … Read more

If your power strips are as overloaded as mine with cords and bulky transformers, you'll be glad to hear that eSATA--a standard that gives external hard drives the data transfer speeds of internal drives--is untethering itself from its power cord.

eSATA is an external version of the Serial ATA technology used to hook up internal PCs, but today external eSATA drives need their own power supply. But on Monday, the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) announced it's working on a version that will let external drives draw power over the cable that connects the drive to a computer. … Read more

You young'uns won't remember this, but there was a time when a 4GB flash drive cost hundreds of dollars. Literally hundreds! Now you can scoop one up for a mere $17.49, and you won't even have to pay for shipping.

As you can see from the photo, the PQI 4GB Cool Drive comes in pink--nothing a can of spray paint can't fix (unless, of course, you like pink). PQI supplies a bunch of preloaded mobile software, including unnamed browser, "doc," and e-mail applications. (Obviously you can ditch this stuff if it turns out … Read more

We got an e-mail earlier today from a Webware reader and Omnidrive user who told us the online storage service has been out since early this morning. We sleuthed around a little and tried to get in touch with Omnidrive CEO Nik Cubrilovic, whose personal blog is also down, although we've heard nothing back yet. As of publishing this, the service is still down.

Last month Read/WriteWeb broke a story about the online storage service heading to the mythical Internet deadpool after picking up on a flurry of unresolved technical difficulties that had been listed in the official … Read more