Storage World

Corsair Flash Voyager 8GB

I doubt there are many of you out there who would deny the convenience of a USB flash drive. I can’t count the number of writable CDs and DVDs I’ve saved by jockeying large files around from PC to PC on a flash drive. But I’m sure virtually all of you will agree that, despite their convenience, USB flash drives could never be too fast or too spacious. With that in mind, I present Corsair’s latest Flash Voyager. The new Flash Voyager 8GB shares the same durable, rubberized outer shell and blue...

750GB Laptops In Three Years

Get ready for monster laptops as drive manufacturer Hitachi predicts that 750GB notebook storage will be common by 2010. The company just shipped its millionth Travelstar drive using the new, more compact PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) scheme. Hitachi plans to introduce 200GB and 250GB drives using PMR to the portable market in 2007, but this technology has proven so reliable and scaled so quickly to high-volume production that the company says it expects enormous capacity gains very soo...

OCZ Technology Secure Digital Dual 2GB

OCZ Technology, well known for its extensive line of high-speed system memory, also has a broad range of flash memory products in its arsenal. Many of OCZ’s flash-based offerings, however, incorporate innovative and useful features not found on competing products. Take the Secure Digital Dual 2GB memory card for example. At first glance, the SD Dual looks just like any other SD card. But it isn’t. OCZ has incorporated a USB interface onto the card itself. Slide off a thin protective sheath and i...

The Platters Strike Back

We don’t want to start a spec war or anything, but just as SanDisk bumps up speed and reliability of portable storage with its UATA 5000 flash drive, Fujitsu ups the capacity ante with its 300GB MHX2300BT series of drives. The 2.5-inch SATA drives use PMR technology to pack even more gigabytes into a portable form factor. Although the rotational speed is a modest 4,200rpm, Fujitsu is promising a second generation PMR design that uses less power and has improved shock tolerances. Fujitsu hasn’t ...

Hard Drives Get Solid

Pointing toward a future of solid-state massive storage for PCs, SanDisk wowed attendees at CES this year with its release of the UATA 5000, a 32GB flash RAM drive for notebooks. The 1.8inch drive boasts a sustained read rate of 62MBps for a 512byte transfer rate the company claims is 100 times faster than typical hard drives with moving parts. In addition to sheer speed, the solid-state design substantially reduces both power consumption and failure rates. What does not plummet in this drive is...

Plextor PX-SP08U

There are several reasons for carrying large amounts of data around.Those who work or play with digital video,photos or music will soon find that a flash drive or USB key won’t do the business. A portable hard disk,which works on the same plug-and-go principle,offers much more room and can still be compact. The snappily named PX-SP08U from Plextor is even claimed to be shock proofed to withstand the occasional fall. The PX-SP08U is a 2.5in hard disk in a light alloy case.It comes with a sili...

New Sleepworking Drive Saves Battery Life

Microsoft and Samsung Electronics recently showed a prototype hard drive that can record data while idling, a twist that has the potential to significantly cut power consumption in notebooks. The trick is that the hard drive contains a 1GB flash-memory chip. Incoming data is directly recorded to the chip. When the chip is close to full, the hard drive wakes up, takes the data, records it, and goes back into idle. Typically, hard drives rotate, but in the hybrid model, the drive rarely spi...

Linksys Instant GigaDrive EFG80

Linksys, more commonly known for its wireless equipment, has now entered the Network Attached Storage (NAS) market with the Instant GigaDrive EFG80. Designed primarily for thesmall/home office markets it provides a simple-to manage, quickly deployable storage solution. The Linksys GigaDrive EFG80 is supplied with a single Maxtor 80GB Ultra ATA/100 drive installed in one of the two lockable drive bays. The additional drive bay can be fitted with any E-IDE drive up to 120GB. This would allow yo...

USB Drive Reads Flash Cards

LaCie’s Universal Media Drive reads wide variety of solid-state storage media LaCie has launched a new USB media reader that allows users to read and write to most formats of Flash storage from any PC or Macintosh system with a USB port. The drive could help users to move files more easily and quickly between handheld PCs and desktop or notebook PCs. LaCie’s Universal Media Drive, available now, supports CompactFlash, Smartmedia, Secure Digital, MultiMedia Card and Sony’s Memory Stick Fla...