storage

Unlimited online storage for free, almost: Wuala

Wuala is a new company with a compelling story for Web users: If you want to share files--music, videos, anything--with your friends and family, it will let you do it for free, with no file-size or bandwidth limits.

The catch: You get 1GB of storage for free. Beyond that, you get access to free storage in proportion to the amount of storage from your own hard drive that you share with the Wuala community.

Wuala uses a "mesh" of hard drives from all its users. Everything you share gets sliced into 500 or so pieces and the distributed in tiny bits, and redundancy, to thousands of other users. When you, or someone you're sharing the file with, wants to load or play a file, it's pulled in from users, BitTorrent-like.

It's not easy to build a reliable storage network based on end-user PCs, which tend to be online only sporadically, and with poor upstream bandwidth. Wuala rewards its users that stay online: The amount of storage users have access to is equal to the amount of storage from their own drives that they've set aside for the Wuala network, multiplied by the average percentage of time that their machine is online. In other words, if you're sharing 20GB of your hard disk, and your PC is on 50 percent of the time, you'll be able to use 10GB of space on the Wuala network. PCs that are network-connected less than 20 percent of the time cannot share their space at all.

All files you put up on the network are replicated extensively, so you'll always be able to get the data that you've uploaded. CEO Dominik Grolimund assured me. We had a nice talk about the mechanics of his network's security, redundancy, and reliability that I won't replay here, other than to say that if Wuala doesn't work as reliably as traditional centralized storage, it's going to be a very short-lived start-up.

More software upgrades on the way for HD TiVos

It looks as if TiVo is finally beginning to roll out some long-promised software upgrades to its high-def DVRs, the TiVo HD and TiVo Series3. Hot on the heels of last week's 9.1 software upgrade (which enabled support for Rhapsody's subscription music service), some users are already getting an upgrade to version 9.2. In addition to improving the Amazon Unbox viewing experience, the latest upgrade is said to add support for connecting external eSATA hard drives, thus expanding the number of recordable hours of TV--a feature promised when those DVRs were first released. TiVo's remaining … Read more

Google ups storage for Gmail, Google Apps users

Gmail users running short on storage are getting a reprieve starting today. The company has announced they'll be increasing the speed in which they've been adding storage to their popular e-mail service, along with bumps to Google Apps users. You might have seen the storage counter that's been running on the Gmail's start page, which is nearing the 3 GB mark bit by bit--and now, it's doing it just a little bit faster. Meanwhile, Google Apps users are getting a slightly better end of the deal. Standard and Educational users are getting a size match … Read more

Digital Bucket stores all your stuff in a familiar fashion

Waiting for Google's online hard-drive service to launch? Check out Digital Bucket, a new storage service that's simple and intuitive. We've seen plenty of virtual desktop services here at Webware, and the one thing many have in common is attempting to emulate an existing GUI. In the case of Digital Bucket, that look and feel is the Microsoft Windows file explorer, and as I've found by using the service this morning-- this isn't a bad thing.

When it comes to files, drag and drop is by nature a very effective way of moving things around. … Read more

Iomega targets Apple fans with new hard drive offerings

Iomega announced today that the company is expanding its lineup of products geared towards the Mac community. The announcement, made at the Apple Expo 2007 in Paris, covers both existing and new products. Support for the HFS+ file system, new designs, and a wider array of connection options are designed to attract the attention of Apple fans.

Dual-drive RAID products: The UltraMax Pro Desktop Hard Drives feature two hot-swappable SATA-II drives for RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurability. The industrial design mirrors that of the Apple Mac Pro desktop line. The UltraMax Pro lines comes in two configurations. The first … Read more

iForem launches 'lifetime' storage service

iForem is a new service making its debut at the DemoFall conference. Currently aimed at enterprise users, the company is set to step into the consumer space early next year. The basic premise of iForem is that users pay for storage up front, similar to purchasing actual physical media to save their files. iForem then keeps the files safe, secure, and redundant as long as you've got the proper passwords--all without a subscription.

iForem creators Stephen Pieraldi and TJ de Luna started the company as a response to some of the free online storage solutions out there that offer … Read more

Storage start-up fits 250 hours of HD content on one disc

An Israeli start-up has created a way to store a whole lot of data on optical discs using fluorescence.

The TeraDisc looks like a regular CD, except it's chartreuse and see-through. Mempile says its disc will start off able to store 600GB to 700GB and in a year will be able to write 1TB worth of data. There are two physical layers of plastic, but 200 virtual layers on the one-sided disc. That means 250 hours of high-definition content or 300,000 digital photos. HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc can currently hold about 50GB of data on dual-layer discs. … Read more

Nirvanix picks up $12 million

It seems some investors are thinking about where all this user-generated content is headed.

Nirvanix, a new storage provider for online media applications, has received $12 million in funding from Mission Ventures, Valhalla Partners and Windward Ventures, the company announced Tuesday.

Nirvanix, which launched in early September, provides storage and retrieval tools for online media applications that host user-generated content. The company intends to specialize in large-scale media sites where millions of users may generate, store and retrieve content.

It's offering itself up as a viable alternative to Amazon's Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with the addition of … Read more

Report: Facebook may be headed for data storage

Remember when Facebook was just a way to "poke" that kid who sat in front of you in macroeconomics class? Yeah, that was a long time ago. Rev2 reported on Sunday that technobabble on the Facebook Developer Wiki may be hinting that the "social utility" wants to expand into data storage.

So far, this appears to only apply to developers who have created applications on the Facebook Platform and have until this point provided their own data storage for the apps. A Facebook data storage plan would allow them to rent or purchase storage (or perhaps, … Read more

Here comes the flow battery

DAVIS, Calif.--What is a flow battery? It's a battery with tanks of electrolytes that effectively lets the battery store more energy than normal batteries. The electrolyte flows or circulates through the system. The larger the tanks, the more electricity it can store.

"They are cheaply made out of plastic. They are low maintenance," said Rick Winter, an executive at Deeya Energy, which makes flow batteries. The company has been busy this summer setting up manufacturing facilities in India, CEO Saroj Sahu told News.com a few weeks ago.

Flow batteries won't appear in watches or … Read more