CES 2013: Seagate Announces Central Shared Storage Backup and Streaming Box

Subject: General Tech | January 7, 2013 - 09:21 AM | Tim Verry
Tagged: remote access, NAS, media streaming, DLNA, central shared storage, backup, ces 2013, CES, Seagate

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Seagate announced a new home backup and media streaming box that it is calling the Seagate Central Shared Storage. Featuring a form factor well suited to your AV rack in the living room or next to the PC, the Central Shared Storage box will act as a NAS and DLNA server with additional software that enables automatic backup of multiple PCs throughout the home and Facebook photos. The Seagate software will run on computers running either Windows or OSX and will organize audio, video, images, and documents for viewing and streaming on a variety of devices.

In addition, the Central Shared Storage box will also back up your photos stored on Facebook. You can stream or access multimedia on mobile devices (using the Seagate Media App), PCs, or Samsung Smart TVs and Blu-ray players. ON the mobile side, Samsung supports IOS, Amazon (Kindle HD), and Android devices. You can also access your stored content from afar with the remote access feature. social network accounts. Samsung Smart TVs and Blu-ray players will further offer up a customized interface for the viewing your music, movies, and photos on the big screen TV.

It will be interesting to see what the performance is like over the network, and whether the software required for auto-backup is worth using. Unfortunately, there is no word on Linux support, but it may still be possible to get Linux computers backed up to the NAS using something like Wine.

The Seagate Central Shared Storage will be available in March 2013 and will come in three capacities. The MSRPs are as follows:

• 2TB is $189.99
• 3TB is $219.99
• 4TB is $259.99

You can find the full press release here.

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!

CES 2013 Podcast Day 1 - Everything Lenovo, NVIDIA Tegra 4 and Shield

Subject: General Tech | January 7, 2013 - 04:33 AM | Ryan Shrout
Tagged: video, Thinkpad, tegra 4, shield, podcast, nvidia, Lenovo, ideacentre, ces 2013, CES

CES 2013 Podcast Day 1 - 01/06/2013

It's time for podcast fun at CES!  Join us as we talk about the first day of the show including a lot of announcements from Lenovo, the NVIDIA Tegra 4 and Shield products and more!

You can subscribe to us through iTunes and you can still access it directly through the RSS page HERE.

The URL for the podcast is: http://pcper.com/podcast - Share with your friends!

• iTunes - Subscribe to the podcast directly through the iTunes Store
• RSS - Subscribe through your regular RSS reader
• MP3 - Direct download link to the MP3 file

Hosts: Ryan Shrout, Josh Walrath, Allyn Malventano and Ken Addison

Program length: 45:50

Be sure to subscribe to the PC Perspective YouTube channel!!

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!

CES 2013: NVIDIA Officially Releases Tegra 4 SoC

Subject: General Tech | January 7, 2013 - 03:01 AM | Tim Verry
Tagged: tegra 4, SoC, nvidia, cortex a15, ces 2013, CES, arm

Details about NVIDIA’s latest system on a chip (SoC) for mobile devices leaked last month. On Sunday, NVIDIA officially released its Tegra 4 chip, and talked up more details on the new silicon.

Interestingly, the leaked information from the slide held true over the weekend when NVIDIA officially unveiled it during a press conference. The new chip is manufactured on a 28nm, low power, high-k metal gate process.  It features four ARM Cortex-A15 CPU cores running at up to 1.9GHz, one (additional) low power Cortex-A15 companion core, a NVIDIA GeForce GPU with 72 cores (not unified shader design unfortunately). In addition, the Tegra 4 SoC includes the company’s i500 programmable soft modem, and a number of fixed function hardware used for audio and image processing.

According to Anandtech, the majority of GPU cores in the Tegra 4 are 20-bit pixel shaders though exact specifications on the GPU are still unknown. Further, the i500 modem currectly supports LTE UE Category 3 on the WCDMA band with an LTE 4 modem expected in the future.

Image Credit: ArsTechnica attended the NVIDIA press conference.

Tegra 4 will support dual channel LP-DDR3 memory, USB 3.0, and a technology that NVIDIA is calling its Computational Photography Architecture that allegedly will allow real-time HDR imagery with still and video shoots.

According to NVIDIA, Tegra 4 will be noticeably faster than its predecessors and the competing SoCs from Apple and Qualcomm et al. When compared to the Nexus 10 (Samsung Exynos 5 SoC) and the stock Android web browser, the Tegra 4 device (Chrome browser) opened pages in 27 seconds versus the Nexus 10’s 50 second benchmark time. Users will have to wait for retail devices with Tegra 4 hardware for independent benchmarks, however. Thanks to the higher top-end clockspeed and beefier GPU, you can expect Tegra 4 to be faster than Tegra 3, but until reviewers get their hands on Tegra 4-powered devices it is difficult to say just how much faster it is.

Speaking of hardware, the Tegra 4 chip will most likely be used in tablets (and not smartphones). Here’s hoping we see some prototype Tegra 4 devices or product announcements later this week at CES.

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!

CES 2013: NVIDIA Grid to Fight Gaikai and OnLive?

Subject: Editorial, General Tech, Graphics Cards, Systems, Mobile, Shows and Expos | January 7, 2013 - 01:07 AM | Scott Michaud
Tagged: CES, ces 2013, nvidia

The second act of the NVIDIA keynote speech re-announced their Grid cloud-based gaming product first mentioned back in May during GTC. You have probably heard of its competitors, Gaikai and OnLive. The mission of these services is to have all of the gaming computation done in a server somewhere and allow the gamer to log in and just play.

The NVIDIA Grid is their product top-to-bottom. Even the interface was created by NVIDIA and, as they laud, rendered server-side using the Grid. It was demonstrated to stream to an LG smart TV directly or Android tablets. A rack will contain 20 servers with 240 GPUs with a total of 200 Teraflops of computational power. Each server will initially be able to support 24 players, which is interesting, given the last year of NVIDIA announcements.

Last year, during the GK110 announcement, Kepler was announced to support hundreds of clients to access a single server for professional applications. It seems only natural that Grid would benefit from that advancement: but it apparently does not. With a limit of 24 players per box, equating to a maximum of two players per GPU, it seems odd that a limit would be in place. The benefit of stacking multiple players per GPU is that you can achieve better-than-linear scaling in the long-tail of games.

Then again, all they need to do is solve the scaling problem before they have a problem with scaling their service.

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!

CES 2013: Seagate Wireless Plus - All the Mobiles!

Subject: General Tech, Storage, Mobile, Shows and Expos | January 6, 2013 - 10:11 PM | Scott Michaud
Tagged: Seagate, ces 2013, CES

Certain mobile device manufacturers do not include a standard powered USB type A port for your removable storage? There’s an app for a peripheral for that!

The Seagate Wireless Plus basically amounts to a 1TB external drive duct taped to a battery with a wireless dongle overly attached to it. The manufacturer claims that there is enough charge to power your storage for 10 hours to remain powered for as long as your mobile device. Seagate programmed compatibility with iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire HD as well as extra functionality for Airplay, SLNA, and a Samsung app for Smart TVs and BluRay players. In other words, at the very least this drive was designed for compatibility with a lot of devices.

The device is currently available online at Amazon and BestBuy. It is expected to cost $199.99 MSRP. Press blast after the break.

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!

Storage Visions - The Panasonic DataArchiver - 108TB of Blu-Ray Archival Storage in a 6U Chassis

Subject: Storage, Shows and Expos | January 6, 2013 - 09:59 PM | Allyn Malventano
Tagged: Panasonic, ces 2013, CES, bluray

At Storage Visions I came across a clever device from Panasonic. The DataArchiver:

This is a 6U rack-mount chasses, capable of being filled with 108TB of Blu-Ray discs. Several stacks of 12-disc cartridges load into two drawers. A handler rides between the two drawers, fetching cartridges as needed, and loading the discs into the 12 installed Blu-Ray drives:

This system provides excellent long-term archival storage of Blu-Ray discs (when handled properly - as it does), and for the extra cautious, the system can even mount and access the discs as RAID-5 or 6 volumes, allowing for single or double protection from faulty discs / disc sectors. The DataArchiver also implements AES256 across all discs in the array. Certainly an interesting piece of archival technology.

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!

Storage Visions - FusionIO shows off ioDrive II and ioFX

Subject: Storage, Shows and Expos | January 6, 2013 - 09:31 PM | Allyn Malventano
Tagged: storage visions, fusionio, ces 2013, CES

At Storage Visions, we checked out new products from FusionIO, namely the ioDrive II and ioFX:

There was a demo running with a pair of ioFX units paired together:

The pair were driving a demo which was streaming 12 uncompressed HD streams, playing back simultaneously, and drawing a continuous 3GB/sec from the storage:

More important was the conversation I had which hinted at bootability coming to these drives soon (albeit only with UEFI due to the demands the FusionIO device driver places on the host system). Also of interest was that ioSphere, the front end manager for FusionIO products, now has a HTTP / web-based interface, meaning administrators can now manage and push firmware updates to dozens or hundreds of ioDrive's simultaneously.

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!

CES 2013: Lilliputian Nectar Mobile Power System brings Fuel Cells to Consumers

Subject: General Tech | January 6, 2013 - 09:18 PM | Ryan Shrout
Tagged: nectar power, lilliputian, CES 2012, CES

Fuel cells have been out of reach for consumers but the promise of extensive battery life in a small form factor is too amazing to not look forward to.  While at the CES Unveiled show we ran into Mouli Ramani from Lilliputian systems and he told us about the first consumer ready fuel cell power system, the Nectar Mobile Power System.

In its current form the Nectar Mobile Power is a 55,000 mWh USB charger that would be able to fully charge an iPhone every night for two weeks and the slogan "two weeks of power" was thrown around quite a bit.  The cartridges are filled with butane but Mouli says that any hydro-carbon could be used.  Butane has an advantage that it can be taken on airplanes in small amounts.  :)

The key technological change for this iteration of fuel cellss is a silicon-based fuel cell catalyst, being manufactured by Intel up in Massachusetts, allowing the device to more portable, and more importantly, inexpensive. 

We interviewed Mouli about the product and plans for the future, like getting this tech in laptops and phones!  We plan on talking with him later in the week as we have quite a few more questions to dive into with him, stay tuned!

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!