flex storage

Seagate's GoFlex drive goes superslim

LAS VEGAS--Seagate made a huge splash in the pond of external hard drives during 2010 with the GoFlex family, which includes the GoFlex Desk and the GoFlex Ultra-portable. These new drives don't just look good and offer high capacities; they are also superflexible, allowing for use of virtually any type of connectivity via interchangeable adapters.

The company today announced a new member of this GoFlex family of portable hard drives: the GoFlex Slim, which is arguably the slimmest portable drive that's based on the 2.5-inch internal hard drive. The new drive is just 9 millimeters thin, about … Read more

Seagate revives Zip drive concept with GoFlex storage system

LAS VEGAS--You might not remember it, but the Zip drive was arguably the most popular external storage solution during the second half of the '90s. With the initial storage capacity of 100MB (which later increased to up to 750MB), it was a perfect replacement for the floppy drive.

The Zip drive is similar to a floppy drive, with the slot just slightly larger to accommodate the thicker Zip disks.

With the rapid increase of internal hard drives' capacity, though, the Zip drive couldn't keep up, and its popularity started to wane at the turn of the century. By 2005 … Read more

MaxiScale and the emergence of software-defined storage

For the last two decades, RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) controllers have ruled the storage world. RAID has been required for data protection in disk arrays. RAID schemes (RAID 0,1,6 10, etc.) reside on RAID controllers baked into disk arrays with many billions sold to date. But perhaps more important from the standpoint of making money, the RAID controller has also delivered differentiated value for storage vendors. Data copy and migration, snap shot, deduplication, and the list of controller-based functions goes on--all have been loaded on to the RAID controller.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the … Read more