Storage

Twelve months ago, IBM Research began work on a project to develop an algorithm to help reduce the cost and requirements of virtual desktop storage.

To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it's good to be the R&D king.

On Tuesday, IBM, claiming to be the first vendor to crack the code on virtual desktop storage, is set to debut a technology at the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas that executives say reduces storage costs by up to 80 percent. Here's the relevant portion from the announcement about the Virtual Storage Optimizer:

The new phase of "cloud computing&… Read more

A solution called simply "Get my tagged pics" does the heavy lifting for at least some of your shots, or rather shots of you. Any pictures that are tagged with your name gets grouped together into sets of 10, which you can pull down to your hard drive as a zip file.

The system is not entirely perfect. For instance, … Read more

It wasn't too long ago that a 4GB flash drive for under 20 bucks was worth crowing about, but now you can get an A-DATA 8GB PD9 MyFlash drive for $16.99 shipped. It's a new, retail unit with no rebates in sight.

As you might expect, this is a pretty no-frills drive. It has...get ready...an LED indicator! And it's driverless! Hey, for $16.99, don't expect the thing to be spitting out Pez.

Needless to say, with 8GB of storage, you can carry plenty of data back and forth between your home and … Read more

Toshiba announced on Tuesday two new 1.8-inch hard drives, including the single-platter 120GB (MKxx31GAL series) and the world's first dual-platter 240GB (MK2431GAH) internal hard drives. The single-platter version also includes an 80GB offering.

Generally speaking, 1.8-inch hard drives are small form factor portable hard drives, where the regular size is 2.5-inch--and used mostly in portable media players, camcorders and compact ultramobile PCs.

These two new hard drives use the Parallel ATA interface and feature the industry's highest area density at 344 gigabits per square inch. They incorporate the fourth-generation perpendicular magnetic recording technology, which Toshiba … Read more

There were plenty of announcements missing from the Nintendo 2008 E3 press conference this summer, but perhaps most surprising was the fact that the company did not address the ever-growing storage problem plaguing the Wii.

Since WiiWare hit the console earlier this year, the factory-installed 512MB of internal storage just isn't cutting it. Nintendo is essentially shooting itself in the foot: here we have all these new games to download and play, but only the capacity to store a limited number of them.

Sun Microsystems has spent years getting bludgeoned by commodity hardware and software. Now it's planning to apply those painful lessons to its competitors in the storage industry, as highlighted by The New York Times reporter Ashlee Vance:

In the early part of this decade, Sun learned all too well just how disruptive ("good enough" technology at a significant discount) can be. Customers moved away from products built on Sun's own custom microprocessors and software to cheaper servers that relied on Intel processors and the open-source Linux operating system. While larger customers still wanted Sun's high-end … Read more

I reviewed the WD My Passport external hard drive recently and thought it was really cool with the storage gauge that lights up when plugged in to show how much storage space has been used. Lenovo has gone one step further with an external hard drive concept that can reveal the same information without even being plugged in.

The concept external hard drive features a finger-touch access button, much like a biometric reader, and an external display. Once you touch the button, the display will show the remaining storage space in the form of simple digits.

It's unclear how … Read more

The Download Station is a function of QNAP's Linux-embedded Turbo NAS which supports BitTorrent, FTP, and HTTP downloads. This lets users download directly onto the NAS drive without having to leave a computer running, thereby saving energy. Generally, you can access a NAS's Web interface to manage the downloads; however, it's more convenient to do this via a desktop application. … Read more

Need his-and-hers memory cards? Woot.com has a two-pack of 2GB microSD cards, with SD adapters, for $6.49 plus shipping. As with all Woot deals, this one expires at midnight tonight, and is available while supplies last.

Sorry for the late (and short) post today, but I just got back to town. Even Cheapskates take vacations once in a while! Anyway, these are Kingston cards with lifetime warranties. They're good for cell phones, MP3 players, and other devices that accommodate microSD and/or SD media. Shipping is five bucks, shaking a bit of dew off the deal lily, … Read more