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Millenniata M-Disk: The possibility of permanent data archival

You were born in a great family, had a fun childhood. Then you grew up, went to school, spent an exhilarating time at college, learned a whole bunch, and fell in love. Then you had a job that you loved, got married to a partner of your dreams, and continued to live a happy, exciting, stimulating, and healthy life.

Now, that's a great success story, but guess what? Then you died. And your story, the true details of it, might last a bit longer and would die, too. In a hundred years or so, nobody would have any real … Read more

How to send pictures directly from Android camera to Dropbox

Dropbox is one great way to share pictures, video clips, and other files across devices and between people. Its Android app has a sneaky feature that lets it take over your camera, camcorder, voice recorder, or text editor to create a file that is saved directly to the appropriate Dropbox folder. It's terrific for sharing media quickly with groups or just for making life easier when it's time to edit or send your files. Here's how to do it:

If you haven't already done so, pick up a free 2GB Dropbox account and install the Dropbox app … Read more

Box.net bumps free, paid storage capacities

Following Moore's Law, data storage continues to get speed and capacity boosts at quite a clip--all the while coming down in cost and physical size. One business benefiting from that trend is Web storage and collaboration service Box.net. The amount of data the company once got for their money back in 2005 is now five times larger and takes up considerably less space, the company says.

As a result, Box.net this morning is putting out big changes to its offerings that give users more overall storage. Beginning with the personal plan (which is free), users now get … Read more

Hitachi-LG hybrid drive does away with HDD

On Tuesday, Hitachi-LG Data Storage announced a hybrid optical drive that can obviate the need for a traditional hard disk drive in thin laptop designs.

Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) disclosed a second-generation Serial-ATA (SATA) 6.0-gigabit-per-second (Gbps)-based "hybrid drive" at Ceatec 2010, held this week in Makuhari Messe, Japan. The drive is meant to eliminate the need for a separate traditional (spinning) hard disk drive in laptops, allowing PC makers to bring out optical-drive-equipped systems with only one drive.

Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology also announced today that it is supplying 25-nanometer NAND flash chips for the drive. … Read more

What the T-Mobile outage means for consumers

At Storage Networking World in Phoenix this week, there was a buzz in the hallways and over breakfast tables about the T-Mobile Sidekick outage that was due, according to Microsoft, to "a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up." And why not? There are about 800 enterprise-level storage administrators here. The backup process is squarely in their space as is data recovery and data integrity. Some of their colleagues and some vendors represented on the show floor were at Sidekick ground zero pulling data from the wreckage.

SNW attendees knew that there … Read more

Hands on: Lexar total security thumbdrive

Thumbdrives offer arguably one of the most convenient ways to carry data around. However, because they are so small, they have been frequent culprits of data breaches. Enter the JumpDrive from Lexar.

The company announced Thursday its new JumpDrive Safe S3000 FIPS, which it claims is the world's first smart-card-based FITS 140-2 Level 3 validated flash drive.

Lengthy name aside, this is the most secure and easy-to-use thumbdrive I've ever gotten my hands on.

(FIPS 140-2, by the way, stands for Federal Information Processing Standard and is a U.S. government computer security standard used to accredit cryptographic modules. Level 3 of this standard is the second highest level of data security, which prevents the intruder from gaining access and requires a physical security mechanism to protect the data inside.)

Physically, the new JumpDrive looks very much like most standard thumbdrives on the market with a detachable lid that reveals the USB head. However, it is noticeably heavier due to its thick metal housing and a presumably sophisticated mix of high-security components inside. Its lid also has a thick layer of rubber insulation to keep the moisture out. According to Lexar, the drive exceeds military waterproof standards.

Lexar said the JumpDrive Safe S3000 FIPS is certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and features hardware encryption and is the first of its kind to have atemper-resistant smart card to manage all security critical computations. The drive uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit technology and utilizes an onboard hardware cryptographic controller to encrypt and decrypt data.

From the user's perspective, however, the drive is almost as easy to use as any thumbdrive. I tried it with a few computers and it worked very well. … Read more

New EMC Retrospect 8.1 backup software supports PowerMac

Owners of Time Machine-enabled Macs need not apply. But for the rest--especially small businesses that want a centralized backup solution, then EMC has something for you.

The company announced Tuesday the availability of its Retrospect 8.1 backup software for the Mac platform, which, unlike the previous version 8.0, now also supports the the legacy PowerPC Macs. This is good news for businesses that still have the older Mac computers.

According to EMC, on average, users of Retrospect 8.1 on Intel-based Macs can expect local backup performance to increase from 10 percent to 15 percent over version 8.… Read more

Hewlett-Packard to buy Ibrix

Hewlett-Packard announced Friday that it will acquire Ibrix, a maker of enterprise-scale file serving software.

Large companies running huge data-heavy applications often bump into bottlenecks with both storage and performance. HP says that Ibrix's software is designed to help such customers manage and store massive amounts of data, scaling to tens of petabytes. (A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.)

HP wants Ibrix to help strengthen its share of the burgeoning market for high-performance enterprise data storage, cloud storage, and file archiving. HP says this segment is growing 20 percent a year, faster than the markets for network-attached storage (NAS) … Read more

Moving molecules at IBM Almaden

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