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All posts tagged "storage"


Friday, April 20, 2012

Google Drive to Offer 5GB Storage

Posted by Hooch Tan in "Digital Home News" @ 02:00 PM

http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/04/16/google-drive-detailed-5-gb-for-f ree-launching-next-week-for-mac-windows-android-and-ios/

"Sometimes we get lucky, and today is one of those days. I got a draft release from a partner of Google’s upcoming Google Drive service and it gives away a wealth of information about how Google plans to take on the incumbent Dropbox. The short story? 5 GB of storage, and it launches next week, likely on Tuesday at http://drive.google.com"

Cloud storage seems to be pretty hot these days. With long time storage providers like Dropbox and Box, it looks like Google is finally jumping into the fray. Is what they provide good? Time will tell. I think it will partly be a matter of how well integrated their offerings are and how it plays with other applications. I do wonder just what Google will do with the data you store though, as I suspect, much like most of their offerings, they will use it to data mine everything about you, but for 5GB of free storage, off the bat, instead of after referrals, it is tempting.

This does raise the question about cloud storage in general and where it is heading. It looks to become much more generic, and could pose a threat against more specialized storage providers such as imgur. If Google also better integrates its other services with it, it could also compete against companies like Evernote as well. The next few years will prove to be interesting to see who wins out.


Monday, March 5, 2012

Backup Alternatives - Something For Everyone

Posted by Brad Wasson in "Digital Home Talk" @ 06:30 PM

http://lifehacker.com/5889422/whats...up-tons-of-data

"If you've considered backing up your entire DVD collection, or duplicating your hard-drives-full of RAW photos in case of electromagnetic terrorism, then you've looked at your backup options before. The thing is, there is no one single best way to backup tons of data. But there are several ways to protect yourself from data loss disaster. The experts at Q&A network Stack Exchange weigh in."

I am sure all of our readers are the most conscientious backup creators around. But, I bet you know someone who could use a little advice as to which of the myriad of options available on the marketplace would work best for them. Fortunately, the folks at Lifehacker have put together a nice little piece on this subject matter. Amongst their advice is to avoid relying on one backup (technology and dataset). Particularly interesting is that some of the cloud-based options are pretty flexible and relatively cheap these days. Hit the Read link just to touch up your knowledge on this important issue, and then prepare to advise others on how you do it. Oh, if any of you use a cloud-based solution, I would be keen to hear your comments on how well it works.


Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Do Not Lose Those Old Memories

Posted by Hooch Tan in "Digital Home News" @ 03:00 PM

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...article2281503/

"The films contained clips of my family in the late 1950s and early 1960s, not long before my mother became gravely ill. Over the intervening decades, I hadn’t had the heart to look at them. But, this time, I packed the films into a shoebox and took them to someone who specializes in converting old films into digital form. Within a week, I had all the clips on a DVD and was showing them to my wife and two young children."

The problem with technology is infrastructure. Most technology needs an infrastructure of one fashion or another, and without that infrastructure, the data we store using that technology can be lost. We have seen turnover in technology several times over the past few decades. From vinyls to cassette tapes to CDs to mp3s and beyond, music and audio recordings have changed several times. Videos have gone through similar transitions as have pictures and documents; everything we use to capture the precious thoughts and memories of our lives. There is nothing wrong with using technology to store these keepsakes, but time and effort must be spent to maintain your treasures, and I think that it is worth it.


Thursday, June 23, 2011

Seagate Delivers Unmatched Price-Performance Storage For World's First Tablet's Featuring Hard Drives

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Laptop Thoughts News" @ 09:45 AM

http://www.seagate.com

"Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) is delivering hard disk drive storage for the world's first handheld tablet computers with hard drives. The ARCHOS G9 8- and 10-inch tablets, announced today in Paris, feature the Seagate Momentus® Thin hard drive, a speedy notebook drive with a super-slim 7mm profile. The performance and capacity of the Momentus Thin drive are the perfect complement for the cutting-edge speed of the ARCHOS G9 family of tablets that features the industry's fastest dual-core 1.5 GHz processor and, on the strength of the Momentus Thin drive, gives users 250GB of capacity, eight times more than a standard 32GB tablet but at the same cost, making the ARCHOS G9 one of the tablet industry's best cost-performance values."

A hard drive that's only 7mm thin? Now that's impressive. 250 GB of storage on a tablet really changes the game when it comes to storage; if you're a movie, photo or music enthusiast, being able to carry all your media content on your tablet would be fantastic. Myself, I'd need 60 GB for all my photos (with some videos thrown in the mix), and another 99 GB to carry all my music. It will be 2016 until I'm able to get anywhere near that with Flash storage. On the flip side, even with as good as hard drives have become with shock tolerance, I'd feel like I'd have to treat the tablet in a more gentle fashion knowing that it had a spinning hard drive in it. It's a trade off to be sure. These two Archos tablets sound pretty interesting though - an 8 inch tablet with a dual-core 1.5 Ghz CPU for $279? Hmm. The remainder of the press release is after the break. Read more...


Friday, April 1, 2011

Network Hard Drives With Extra Cloud Goodness

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 09:00 PM

http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/04/0...files-anywhere/

"It has long been a dream of mine to connect a hard drive at home to the Internet. This dream, of late, has been deferred by the rise of cloud services like SugarSync and Dropbox but two hard drive manufacturers, Buffalo and Iomega, have come out with compelling devices that seem to finally allow home and home office users to get the benefits of cloud hosting with the safety of complete control over your data."

Having network-attached storage for your data is a good thing. Having that data be easily accessible to the outside world, as long as it's done securely, it's a great thing. It's extremely handy to be able to grab files from anywhere in the world, as long as said files aren't too big and your upstream Internet connection at home isn't too slow. I don't use the remote file transfer feature on my Windows Home Server too often, but when I need it, it's a life saver!


Thursday, February 17, 2011

Considerations Before Buying a Network Attached Storage Device

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 11:00 AM

http://the-gadgeteer.com/2011/02/16...storage-system/

"Having used a number of these digital media storage systems over the past several years I have had to go through the buying process; working through my own requirements, researching and evaluating the options in the market, and finally selecting the right system for my usage. In an attempt to make your purchase decision easier I wanted to share some thoughts on how to select the right product for your environment."

If you're thinking about buying a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device, it's not something you want to purchase blindly - you'll want to make sure it has all the features you'll need. The author of this article points out 13 different factors that you should consider before making a purchase. Some of them can be easily dismissed - who cares what it looks like if it's going to be in a back room? - but others, such as the device's capability to back up your systems, should be given careful consideration.


Thursday, February 10, 2011

Windows Home Server 2011: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back?

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 05:00 PM

http://www.mediasmartserver.net/201...iendly-storage/

"This leaves Windows Home Server 2011 sorely lacking when it comes to fitting the needs of the average home consumer, the target market that was envisioned for the original Windows Home Server. While WHS 2011 is a polished improvement of Windows Home Server, storage management has become more complicated, storage growth is more complicated, and storage protection will either depend on what is likely to be complicated RAID from the OEMs or else Server Backup with its limitations."

Image via Engadget

Whoa boy. This has sure turned into an ugly situation! If I'm understanding what I'm reading correctly, when you add a hard drive to Windows Home Server 2011, it shows up as a distinct drive rather than a pool of storage - this is what the loss of the Drive Extender technology means. Further, libraries are locked to a single drive without any duplication of folders like we had before. Any duplication of the data will come via whatever hardware-based RAID solution an OEM wants to integrate into their product. This also means that the only way to back up the server itself is to an external hard drive.

I don't know about you, but I'm seeing a whole lot of ugliness here. I'll be keeping my current WHS running as long as I can, thank you very much.


Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Hey Developers, Get Your Hands Off My Documents Folder!

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 07:00 AM

See that screenshot above? That's an incredible 10.1 GB worth of file bloat that I had no idea was there. The culprit? Cyberlink PowerDirector 9, a video editing application that I've been using quite a bit over the last month. I've developed a real love/hate relationship with this software; when it works, man, does it ever work well! It leverage's my Core i7 CPU and NVIDIA 460 GTX GPU in ways I've never seen any other app do...it's SHREDS HD video, both exporting and editing it. What's not so good is the stability and corrupt output problems I've been seeing. More on that later though; back on topic... Read more...


Thursday, November 18, 2010

Hitachi LifeStudio Plus 500 GB Reviewed

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 10:46 AM

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/re...us_500gb_review

"Ever heard the phrase, "Do one thing, and do it well?" Hitachi surely has. The company took that advice, considered it, threw it out the window, and released an external backup drive bundled with a media suite that does many things-some of them potentially interesting, but none of them particularly well. The Hitachi LifeStudio Plus is an external backup drive with an interesting dock, a cool companion USB key, and a clunky, awkward integrated software suite."

Hitachi's concept seems like a solid one, but they dropped the ball with the software - and, let's face it, this isn't the first time we've seen this. Hardware companies tend to be good at hardware, and when it comes to software, they go looking for partners that have what they think they need...but it rarely ends up being a best-of-breed solution. Sorry Hitachi, maybe next time.


Thursday, October 28, 2010

OCZ Unleashes RevoDrive X2 PCIe SSD: 740MB/sec

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 02:30 PM

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/28/...d-740mb-sec-up/

"OCZ Technology Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:OCZ), a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) and memory modules for computing devices and systems, announces the launch of The RevoDrive X2 PCI-Express SSD, a follow-up to the successful launch of the first RevoDrive, with increased performance and capacity to serve high-performance computing consumers. The RevoDrive X2 upgrades the original architecture to deliver unprecedented speed up to 740MB/s and up to 120,000 IOPS, nearly triple the throughput of other high-end SATA-based solutions with a substantial reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO) to the consumer. The product is available now through OCZ's global channel."

This beautiful piece of hardware is available in sizes from 100 GB up to 960 GB, and it offers a significant boost over the first version. I can't find any pricing, but the v1 product is currently priced at $291 after rebate for 120 GB, so if the new version is the same, or cheaper, this is pretty tempting...


Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Seagate Sets New Areal Density Record for Portable Hard Drives

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 05:32 PM

http://consumer.media.seagate.com/2...density-record/

"What's more significant about 1TB in this new form factor is that in order to make a drive at this capacity, Seagate reached a NEW areal density record-500GB-per platter! Areal density, which is also alternatively referred to as bit density, is the measurement of how much data can fit on an electronic storage device and is expressed in the number of bits that can be found in every square inch of space on the device. Translated into layman's terms , this essentially means that the greater the areal density, the more data can be stored in a smaller amount of physical space. Larger areal density also means faster transfer of data on a computer because the device drive doesn't have to look as far for the data."

It's quite staggering how much storage they can cram into a portable hard drive these days - yesterday afternoon a Seagate 1.5 TB FreeAgent GoFlex drive appeared on my doorstep, and I was amazed that 1500 GB worth of storage could be so small. I think this announcement is even more impressive though - Seagate has been able to shrink the chassis size down considerably (above is a before and after image), and even better boost speed. I've been told that the new 1 TB drive, using H2Bench as a measurement tool, cranks out 100 MB/s (not sure if that's read or write) compared to 83 MB/s from the previous 750 GB drive. Smaller? Faster? And USB 3.0 right out of the box? Sold!


Tuesday, October 12, 2010

The Frugal Storage Geek

Posted by Hooch Tan in "Digital Home News" @ 07:00 AM

http://lifehacker.com/5660551/

"If a grand is out of budget, and you have a spare tower, you can build a network file server fairly easily. Windows Home Server may be the easiest, but has limitations that you will need to investigate. If you're a little more adept, anything from a default linux install to one of the customized distros will serve you well and will run well enough on years old hardware."

So not everyone has money for a Drobo or Synology device to pack their favourite memories. When your budget is tight, finding ways to store a lot of data gets more challenging. The mass mind from LifeHacker puts forth a lot of good ideas though many of them involve a few hours or more of setup. Most of the solutions include networking which makes the most sense if the data you want needs frequent accessing, though if you are looking for archiving data, just going with bare hard drives is probably the cheapest way to go.


Tuesday, September 21, 2010

1.5 Terabytes That You Can Slip Into Your Pocket? Seagate Says "Yes, Here You Go!"

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 05:00 AM

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/pr...able-hard-drive

"SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. - September 21, 2010 - Designed to address the explosive worldwide demand for digital storage, Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) today launched the world's first 1.5 terabyte (TB) 2.5-inch portable external drive. Available immediately, the new 1.5TB FreeAgent® GoFlexTM ultra-portable drive delivers an all-in-one, technically advanced solution to help jump-start, build, store and enjoy libraries of digital content in one's preferred medium-whether on a Mac or PC, or a television, at home or on the go. With 1.5TB of capacity people can now store and carry up to 60 HD movies, 750 video games, thousands of photos or tens of thousands hours of digital music."

There's not a lot you can do to make hard drives exciting beyond offering them with more storage, or faster speeds - but Seagate is giving it their best shot with the FreeAgent GoFlex drive, which offers both. First we have the 1.5 terabytes of storage - that's an amazing amount of storage for a drive that you can fit in your pocket! They've added speed as well with the USB 3.0 connection; I don't have a single computer with USB 3.0 yet - and realistically, USB 3.0 won't be common until Intel and AMD support it at the core chipset level - but it's important for accessory makers like Seagate to bring products like this to the market to drive adoption. The nice thing about USB 3.0 is that it's backwards compatible with USB 2.0, so you're not losing anything by purchasing products with it - and when you to get a computer with USB 3.0, products like this one will become even faster. Nice!

Like all Seagate GoFlex drives, it comes with an OS X NTFS driver, so it will work on both your Mac and PC without re-formatting. And you can swap the cable for Firewire 800 (it's an additional accessory) if you're so inclined to get a boost in speed over USB 2.0 on your Mac.

A little bit of extra icing on the cake: you'll get a free digital copy of the most recent Star Trek movie, and the option to purchase unlock codes for 20 other Paramount movies. I wonder if it's an HD copy of the movie? I suspect not. Still, not a bad little bonus!

Full press release after the break. Read more...


Tuesday, September 7, 2010

The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultraportable Family of Products

Posted by Chris Baxter in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 07:00 AM

Product Category: Portable storage device
Manufacturer: Seagate
Where to Buy: Amazon.com (affiliate)
Price: $90 to $170 USD depending on storage size of hard drive, $99 for the Net Media device, $130 for the GoFlex TV HD, and $20 to $40 for the different cable options
System Requirements: Windows® 7, Windows Vista®, Windows® XP (32-bit & 64-bit) operating system or Mac® OS X operating system 10.4.9 or higher and a USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 800, or eSATA port.
Specifications: The GoFlex Ultraportable drive: Height - 111mm (4.39 in), width - 83mm (3.19 in), length - 14mm (.57 in), and weight - 150g (.33 lb).

Pros:

  • Wide variety of attachments and accessories that actually extend the capabilites of the drive;
  • The GoFlex Net Media Sharing Device is an easy and fun way to share your files on the network;
  • Using the optional cable attachments can greatly increase the performance of the drive.

Cons:

  • User Interface for the GoFlex TV HD Media Player needs work;
  • Taking advantage of all the accessories the product has to offer can get expensive.

Summary: Seagate has a family of portable storage devices and accessories that are aimed at keeping up with technology, making networking your storage devices easy, and delivering the media content on that storage to the place it is most useful, your TV. I got the chance to test and review these products to see if they can deliver what they promise. Was I disappointed or did they succeed at what they were designed for? Read on to find out. Read more...


Friday, July 2, 2010

Seagate Unleashes Massive 3 Terabyte GoFlex Desk External Drive

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 09:30 PM

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/pr...top-hard-drive/

"The GoFlex Desk external drive gives you plenty of storage capacity and it's easy to upgrade to any interface you choose. Simply pair the desktop hard drive with a GoFlex USB 3.0 or FireWire 800/USB 2.0 adapter to increase your performance by up to 10 times. Works interchangeably between a PC or a Mac computer."

Sweet mother of megabytes! That's a crazy amount of storage right there - 3000 GB to be exact. Well, OK, not exactly because of the whole 1024 bytes thing, but close enough. The GoFlex Desk uses the GoFlex cable system, which means you can swap out the USB 2.0 cable for a USB 3.0 cable once you get a PC that has USB 3.0, or you can switch to an eSATA cable or Firewire 800 cable as well. Not bad! Another interesting thing is the Mac OS X compatibility - Seagate offers an NTFS driver on the drive, and once you install it on your Mac, it can read and write to the drive without trouble. I've tested this technology, and it works great. So, is there a 3 TB drive in your future?


Monday, May 10, 2010

The Backblaze Pod: 67 Terabytes of Storage for Under $8K

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 02:00 PM

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/0...-cloud-storage/

I'm a Mozy customer myself [Affiliate, use coupon code MAY to save 10% off] - I have 443 GB worth of data backed up with them, and I'm paying $3.98 a month to do it - but I have to admire the geek chops the guys at Backblaze had to create the solution they needed to run their backup service. They looked at the pre-made solutions out there, but all of them were extremely expensive...so they decided to build their own. 45 hard drives, offering 67 terabytes of storage...that's just awesome!


Friday, April 9, 2010

Spring Cleaning is for Computers Too!

Posted by Hooch Tan in "Digital Home News" @ 01:00 PM

http://lifehacker.com/5511904/how-t...your-hard-drive

"Whether you're looking to free up gigabytes worth of hard drive space or you just want to clear out the extra cruft because you're serious about a clean hard drive, we'll highlight how to find and remove the biggest space hogging files on your drive, remove unnecessary files hiding deep in your filesystem, and offer a few tips for keeping things clean."

I am a digital pack rat. I have emails going back over 18 years, and should I ever feel ambitious enough to move some data off of some very dusty 5.25" disks, I have messages going back over 20 years. Over time, and various different backup methods, I find myself almost always running out of space, and so once ore twice a year, I need to purge what is no longer needed. This can be something simple as duplicate files (there are programs that can do this for you) or deleting things that I really, really, no longer need like a halfway edit of an essay I wrote in High School. The radial pattern offered by Disk Space Fan is neat, but the good 'ol WinDirStat seems to let me identify not just large files, but groups of files that are being serious hogs. One tip that they do not mention that I think is important, is with stuff that you access maybe once a blue moon, you might want to consider compressing it using the "Ultra" setting. With more modern compression algorithms, you can save a considerable amount of space that way. Anyone have any tips for getting the absolute most out of your storage space?


Friday, March 12, 2010

Going Green With a New Windows Home Server

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 08:00 AM

Since first hearing about the Windows Home Server operating system a few years ago, I've been intrigued with Microsoft's efforts in this space. I was fortunate to be included in the first beta, for which I used my old software/hardware testing computer, cobbled together from an assortment of parts. I called this my "Frankenbox"; the machine was a standard mid-sized tower with a 400 watt power supply, a 3 Ghz Celeron CPU, and 2 GB of RAM. When I deployed it as my Windows Home Server, I added a few new parts to it: an Intel gigabit Ethernet card, a SATA card for installing extra hard drives, and of course a bunch of hard drives. It's easiest to show the hard drive arrangement with a screen shot. Read more...


Thursday, February 11, 2010

Breakthrough in SSD Memory Chip Stacking

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home News" @ 05:01 PM

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/02/1...sized-1tb-ssds/

"SSDs haven't found their way into the mass market yet, but a team of Japanese researchers is already trying to make them more worthwhile. The team claims it has developed a technology that helps to shrink the size of SSDs by no less than 90%, makes them cheaper and boosts energy efficiency by 70%."

I'm always a little wary of announcements that claim massive breakthroughs - and SSDs that are 90% smaller and 70% more power efficient certainly qualify for the "massive breakthrough" moniker - but this seems like it's based on an adjustment to the way the current chips are laid out, rather than a re-work of the chips themselves. Anything that can drive down the costs of SSDs is welcome in my book, and hopefully this technology will be part of accomplishing that.

Tags: hardware, storage, ssd

Sunday, January 3, 2010

You Want Expansion? Rosewill Gives You Expansion!

Posted by Andy Dixon in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 02:00 AM

http://www.nedmug.com/Blogs/tabid/2...29/Default.aspx

"When I first built my Windows Home Server, I built it using an old Intel Server cabinet because I wanted a lot of drive bays, 6 to be exact. I filled it with 6 500GB hard drives, for a total of 3TB of drive space. I figured that would last me a while for file storage and backups of the computers in the house. I was right. . . for a while."

I was browsing the web today looking for ways to expand my Windows Home Server, as I am getting close to running out of disk space, and I found a post on We Got Served linking to a blog discussing this rather nice little bit of kit. This is the Rosewill RSV-S8 external device enclosure, and it allows you to expand your system by a hefty 8 SATA-II drives. It also comes with a 2 port eSATA PCIe card to allowing you to connect it to your existing PC. Unfortunately, the price is the only thing that puts me off, $349 on newegg.com, but if you are looking for that much disk storage then I guess money is no issue!


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