Try testing the warranty on this one!

Subject: Storage | June 26, 2006 - 03:06 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

The Inquirer found a bullet-proof USB drive!  I can only imagine the fun the product testers had while determining if a keychain sized USB drive could be made to be bullet-proof.  Go out and buy one to test for yourself.

Burnin the Blu-ray way

Subject: Storage | June 22, 2006 - 12:14 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

ExtremeTech managed to find a real, live Blu-ray DVD burner, the Pioneer BDR-101A.  Drop by and find out just how long it takes to burn 25GBs onto a DVD, and if you feel like paying the ~$1,000 to get one for yourself.

Get to know your SATA interface

Subject: Storage | June 19, 2006 - 05:57 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

Drop by PC Mechanic to get an overview of the Serial ATA interface.  Everything from how it differs from it's predecessor, PATA, and why case modders are so in love with it.

It's cheaper without the installed sunroof

Subject: Storage | June 15, 2006 - 02:01 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

The Raptor WD1500 ADFD drive still is not cheap, at ~$250 for a 150Gig drive.  As The Tech Report discovered though, with the new firmware on these newer models, they can actually out-perform the earlier windowed models.

Backup to external hard drives the easy way

Subject: Storage | June 9, 2006 - 03:09 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

Bjorn3D reviews the Eksitdata Easy ATA and Easy SATA USB adaptors.  Plug in a SATA drive on the fly for backup, or reboot to attach a PATA drive, with no external enclosure.  Cheap and easy to use, though will notice a speed decrease when transferring over USB to SATA.

Not all SD cards are the same

Subject: Storage | May 22, 2006 - 04:53 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

BCC Hardware compares Crucial's 2GB SD flash card with ones from Soultek and Transcend.  Shouldn't your digital camera deserve the best memory you can get it?

Network Attached Storage for the little guy

Subject: Storage | May 17, 2006 - 06:32 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

Think Computers introduces a handy little box from IOGear, the BOSS 120GB home/office network srever appliance.  For around $300, you can get one, and set up your own file server in about 10 minutes.

Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster.

Subject: Storage | May 5, 2006 - 01:35 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

The new Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750 GB is an impressive beast, and Big Bruin has it on the test bench.  At about $500, it costs less than a dollar a gigabyte, and it is significantly faster than it's predecessor.

"Seagate really does have the Steve Austin of hard drives on their hands with the Barracuda 7200.10, as it really is better, stronger, faster. One thing the 6 Million Dollar Man didn't have going for him was being "bigger", which is obviously something the 7200.10 does have.

Thinking big

Subject: Storage | April 19, 2006 - 07:17 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

Maybe 400 or 500GB hard drives sound big now, but it wasn't too long ago that a 4GB harddrive was huge.  Drop by Tech Spot to see the newest storage drives from Seagate and Western Digital.

Think Speedy Gonzales with storage space

Subject: Storage | April 13, 2006 - 03:20 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

It's tiny, about the size and thickness of a quarter, fast from it's USB2.0 and dual channel transfers, and holds 512MB, 1GB or 2GB.  Check out OCZ's Mini-Kart series at Laptop Lifestyle.

Taking EZ DUB for a test spin

Subject: Storage | April 6, 2006 - 04:06 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

Techware Labs tries out the newest drive from Lite-On, the EZ-DUB.  Essentially it is postioned to be the easiest way to copy a CD or DVD, simply put a disk in the external drive, press a button ... wait ... remove disk and replace with blank disk ... wait again, and you are done.

8GB of storage for your favorite shutterbug

Subject: Storage | April 3, 2006 - 02:45 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

Futurelooks reviews an 8 gigabyte compact flash compatible photo storage micro hard drive from Seagate Technologies.  This card would seem to be the current record holder for biggest commercially available flash card, and there is no way you could fill it in just one sitting.  If you know someone with 4 or 5 small flash cards for their camera, then you may know what to get them the next time they deserve a present.

"Sitting in a beautiful brand new plastic blister package was an 8 gigabyte compact flash

c

Seagate provides you with some space

Subject: Storage | March 30, 2006 - 02:39 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

The Seagate NL35 comes in 3 sizes, 250, 400 and 500GBs.  XYZ Computing grabbed the 400GB SATA version and took it for a spin.  As the drive was designed for enterprise applications, it makes perfect sense as a storage drive, the MTBF is 1 million hours and an error recovery control.

If you are more interested in speed than size, then check out Ryan's review of the WD Raptor X 150GB SATA drive.

Balancing a stack of data on a spinning platter

Subject: Storage | March 28, 2006 - 12:09 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

BTX Form Factor explores the upcoming hard drive technology, perpendicular storage.  By keeping the magnetic particles used for storage standing vertically instead of lying them on the surface, much greater storage density can be reached.  This requires a new manufacturing process that they briefly touch on as well.

"Hard Disk Drives store all our most valuable data, our contacts, email, family photos and the

like, but increasingly space is getting cramped in drives...

Heavy duty disk storage on the go

Subject: Storage | March 24, 2006 - 02:40 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

TECHGAGE looks at the biggest and fastest 2.5 HDD from Seagate, the Momentus 5400.3 160GB.  Living out of a laptop is becoming more common, and this drive looks to address almost any storage need, without forcing you to carry around external drives in your bag. 

If you demand to be mobile and still have the hard drive space you need, then you should look at

the Seagate Momentus 5400.3.

Plextor tries out NAS for size

Subject: Storage | March 16, 2006 - 01:08 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

The Plextor 250GB Network Attached Storage device is based around a 250GB Hitachi RoHS drive which features a 7,200 rpm spindle speed and an 8MB cache, more than enough for the 100BaseT interface (ie. Cat5e).  Read the full review at Ben's Custom Cases to learn about all the tricks the included software can do, from easy backups to running an FTP server.

"Curiosity has been known to kill a cat, and one day it may just get me.

Intel's Robson aims to speed up harddrives

Subject: Storage | March 13, 2006 - 02:51 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

Extremetech is sharing some info they have gathered about Intel's upcoming chipset add-on, Robson.  It will be a flash based "intelligent" prefetcher, and will attempt to store some of the required data between the HDD and the CPU, in an attempt to reduce latency.

"Intel proposes that the flash memory cache should be located on the motherboard. It's unclear

whether it should be permanently installed or could be another type of memory socket.

Going on a RAID

Subject: Storage | March 8, 2006 - 02:21 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged:

If you have never set up a RAID, for whatever reason, Bjorn3D has posted the first article (of 3) for you.  No longer do you have to spend $1000's on HDDs, or find a RAID controller card to set one up.  Once you have mastered the basics, you may be amazed how easy it is.

"The use of RAID, a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, up until a few years ago was pretty much

limited to servers and high end workstations; this was primarily due to the cost of the controller

and the accompanying hard drives.