A cautionary tale

Subject: Storage | May 22, 2007 - 04:00 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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TweakTown has managed to repeat a rather scary incident involving QuickTime, Vista and a RAID on an ICH8R chipset.  They haven't seen this behaviour occur on other platforms, but you may want to be careful just the same, especially if you are using RAID 0.

Intel, STMicroelectronics And Francisco Partners Establish A New Leader In Flash Memory

Subject: Storage | May 22, 2007 - 03:14 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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GENEVA and SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 22, 2007 STMicroelectronics, Intel and Francisco Partners today announced they have entered into a definitive agreement to create a new independent semiconductor company from the key assets of businesses which last year generated approximately $3.6 billion in combined annual revenue.

Western Digital Announces 250GB Scorpio 2.5" HDD

Subject: Storage | May 21, 2007 - 10:05 AM | Ryan Shrout
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Today Western Digital is taking the covers off a brande new 2.5" hard drive: the Scorpio 250GB.  The drive features a 5400 RPM spin rate, 8MB of cache and a 12ms seek time making it one of the fastest mobile hard drives on the market.  It also uses WD "WhisperDrive" technology to allow the disk to run quieter than competing products, a benefit to notebook users everywhere.

The Scorpio 250GB does use perpendicular recording technolgy and is now about to fit 125GB on each platter of the

SATA heads off on the road

Subject: Storage | May 17, 2007 - 02:31 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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Now that SATA has started saturating the market, both for hard drives and optical drives, a way to take them on the road is becoming important.  R&B Mods has a review of a device that lets you do exactly that, the Eksitdata EasyCombo USB 2.0 to IDE and SATA converter.  It will handle 2.5" and 3.5" IDE as well as SATA, making it a very versatile device and it won't take up too much space in your laptop bag.

Surgical data repair

Subject: Storage | May 14, 2007 - 05:16 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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Although not quite that drastic, disassembling a HDD to get the platters out and transferring them to a different casing is a bit of a chore.  To make it easier on you, or to let you know it can be done, AOA Forums have posted a how to on moving your platters.  If you really need the data, and can't pay the professional recovery fees, this article may save your mind.

NAS made easy

Subject: Storage | May 8, 2007 - 02:23 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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The Vantec NexStar LX is a simple NAS device, that thanks to it's USB2 connector can also be used the same as a basic external HDD.  Currently only IDE drives can be used, but SATA compatibility is being developed currently.  With a large heatsink and fan, there are no worries about the drive overheating if you just stick it under your desk right by your router, and you can control the fan's speed if it gets too loud. 

Wrangling up USB drives

Subject: Storage | May 3, 2007 - 06:15 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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HotHardware rounds up 4 of the newer flash drives available on the market.  Ranging from a modest 1GB up to a 16GB from OCZ, they test the transfer speeds to see what they are made of.  Transfer speeds are a big influence if you plan to use these sticks to enable Vista's ReadyBoost, so it can make a big difference now.  If you want size, sometimes you have to sacrifice speed, but as this article shows; that is not always the case.

Solid storage for laptops

Subject: Storage | April 30, 2007 - 05:33 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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TweakTown managed to get their hands on a pre-production solid state drive from Team.  At 16GB and a 2.5" profile, this is designed to be a rugged hard drive for a laptop.  With no moving parts, the noise and heat that most HDD create are completely absent.  Unfortunately, the large speed benefits that SSDs were hoped to have is also absent, but don't sneer at a cool, quiet and nearly indestructible (under normal usage) HDD.