Give your cables a trim

Subject: Storage | October 22, 2007 - 04:12 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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MektuMods wasn't overly impressed by the length of their SATA cables, and in the effort to clean up their case design, they took an axe to them.  Figuring the pin out was the easy part, but if you want to shorten your SATA cables as well, get ready to break out the soldering iron and hot glue gun.

Western Digital's mysterious green machine

Subject: Storage | October 18, 2007 - 12:11 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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Western Digital's Caviar GreenPower is a large storage drive with a mission, offering high capacity (500GB, 750GB & 1TB) with a low energy requirement.  The mystery comes in when you try to determine the spindle speed and maximum sustained transfer rate which fall under WD's new IntelliPower, that will vary spindle speed based on storage capacity.  This backs up their claim to green power, as the drive is focused on efficiency, not speed re

Demand more from your NAS

Subject: Storage | October 15, 2007 - 01:37 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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The Wireless D-Link DSM-G600 NAS offers a bit more than your average NAS device.  It will accept any PATA drive as it has a separate power input so you don't have to worry about USB power limits, and offers 2 USB 2.0 ports and an RJ45 plug as well as 802.11B and G, giving you plenty of choices to transfer your data.  It also knows how to act as both an FTP server and a media server, so read the

Hurry up and wait

Subject: Storage | October 9, 2007 - 03:27 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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Over at Tech Spot is a review of a drive you will never buy.  The good news being that it is a Blu-Ray drive capable of writing and rewriting, but the problem is that it costs just short of $1000, and it's replacement that will be coming very soon costs about half of that.  You can check out the review to see what this current drive does, but both Tech Spot and I recommend waiting for the cheaper and faster model.

Tested to destruction ... and beyond

Subject: Storage | October 4, 2007 - 12:39 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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Not content with running over the Corsair Survivor with a car, or drowning it, or subjecting it to sniper fire, and various other devious and deviant tests of durability, HEXUS has crossed a line.

They ran over the Survivor with this.



Don't try that at home.

Hot swapping made easy

Subject: Storage | September 27, 2007 - 05:16 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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SATA 2 makes your devices hot swappable, but seeing as how it is more likely that your SATA 2 drive is an internal HDD or optical storage drive, it isn't really very easy to open the case up to swap the drives around, even if your case offers tool-less mounting.  Vantec has been quick to take advantage of this, with their EZ Swap EX.  It is essentially a 5.25" adapter that fits into an empty bay in your case and a 3.5" cover into which your drive goes.  Easy as pie to hot swap your SATA drives now, although Driver Heave

A second helping of caviar

Subject: Storage | September 25, 2007 - 05:28 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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The new revision of Western Digital's Caviar 750GB HDD, the RE2 sports tweaked firmware and RAID optimizations.  As it is an enterprise class HDD they also did more reliability testing, and extended the warranty, which the home user can also benefit from.  The big news is the drop from on Write seek time; from 10.9ms to 9.6ms.  From their testing The Tech Report found that while it is faster than the first revis

Super small, super speedy

Subject: Storage | September 18, 2007 - 06:05 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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The PQI Intelligent Flash Drive i810 is an example of small thinking at it's best.  512MB-2GB of storage in a 2 gram, 1.18 x 0.6 x 0.2 inch package, with a normal sized loop to feed a clip or string through and a retractable USB port.  ExtremeMhz was already impressed with the compactness of this tiny storage solution, and were blown away by the performance.

Revisiting Solid State Drives

Subject: Storage | September 13, 2007 - 01:58 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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Super Talent's new SSD drive offers 128GB of storage, a significant increase in size from the first SSDs to hit the market, as well as cost.  They estimate ~$4600, though I guess that is cheaper than 128GB of RAM.  When The Tech Report did their testing, they proved that the drives technology has come a long way from the first batch, and it's random access times are awe inspiring.  Unfortunately, the drive cannot perform that well for all of the tests.

RAID: not just for bugs

Subject: Storage | September 10, 2007 - 01:39 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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The first time you encounter them, RAIDs can seem a bit overwhelming, from having to buy two or more HDDs to figuring out the types 1 or 5 or 0+1, and then people start asking about stripe sizing.   AnandTech can give you some help figuring it all out, and get you started on building your own array, be it for safety, speed, or a bit of both.

Hybrid Hard Drives Could Feature 1GB DDR Memory

Subject: Storage | September 5, 2007 - 11:01 AM | Ryan Shrout
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Hybrid hard disks have been a hot topic over the last year or so, and a company called DTS plans to release a drive that could have up to 1GB of DDR memory on-board.  It is a 2.5" drive, so current capacities are limited to 160GB.

Shrinking the HDD, and the performance

Subject: Storage | September 4, 2007 - 05:25 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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X-bit Labs tested the Corsair Flash Voyager 8GB against the 8GB Seagate USB Pocket Hard Drive, to see which portable solution offers the best way to get your data while on the go.

Pushing the quiet button

Subject: Storage | August 30, 2007 - 02:22 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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The Tech Report reviewed Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 terabyte HDD earlier this month, and liked the performance, but not the noise when the drive was seeking.  It turns out that they had disabled Hitachi's Automatic Acoustic Management, which is supposed to limit the noise produced.  Head over to find out how well it works, and what performance costs you can expect to see from enabling it.

Intel to Respond to Request for Additional Information in Creation of New Flash Memory Company

Subject: Storage | August 30, 2007 - 11:16 AM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 30, 2007 - Intel Corporation today announced it has received a request for additional information from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in connection with the agency's regulatory review of the proposed transaction with STMicroelectronics and certain affiliates of Francisco Partners to form a private, independent semiconductor company that will design, develop and manufacture non-volatile memory products.

Storage on the go

Subject: Storage | August 28, 2007 - 02:59 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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The Cirago Smart Mobile Storage System sports a Compact Flash, XD and SD card readers, as well as USB, and contains a standard 2.5" drive, making it very handy.  OCC did notice 2 troubling problems with this otherwise perfect mobile storage device ... it only supports FAT 16/32, and the LCD is very hard to read.

Storage sandwich

Subject: Storage | August 23, 2007 - 03:36 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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The Future of Things has had a look at Mempile's TeraDisc technology, a big yellow DVD that may soon obsolete the 2 DVD formats currently fighting for supremacy.  They use their laser to create 200 virtual layers, five microns apart, each containing approximately 5 GB of data.  Their test also show about a 50 year lifespan for data on the disk, but it is a shame about the colour.

Big storage in a small box

Subject: Storage | August 20, 2007 - 02:28 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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Overclockers Club reviewed the Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB external HDD.  Offering a huge amount of storage, the entire unit is comparable in size to a pair of CD jewel cases, which means you won't be giving up a lot of desk space for electronic storage, leaving you room for piles of papers and USB beverage coolers, etc ...  An included adapter makes sure you can still use this device if you don't have eSata or other less common interfaces.

There is a premium on those last 250GB

Subject: Storage | August 14, 2007 - 12:14 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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The Tech Report is rather impressed by their receiving an actual SATA terabyte drive, Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000.  In terms of size, it is unique, unfortunately it's performance is not.  While it can out perform drives that have been on the market for a year or more, it has difficulty with the new generation of 750 GB drives that the competition offers.  There is also the fact that that extra 250GB costs you about $150, but if you need 1000GB of storage on a single SATA drive, <