Storage World

Recently, I maxed out the small and old 30GB hard drive on my laptop. I needed more storage, but it also had to be portable.

Corsair recently launched the perfect solution to my storage dilemma: a 64GB flash drive. The 64GB USB Flash Voyager has enough capacity for a library of full-length movies and tens of thousands of high-resolution digital images. The drive’s rubbery shell is cool, too. In fact, it makes the drive water resistant and rugged, so you can rest easy, knowing your data is safe from the elements.

The Corsair 64GB USB Flash Voyager is also bootable, so you could store a full operating system and applications on the drive. Thanks to this drive, I’ve been able to clean up my laptop’s hard drive without having to sacrifice easy access to any of my important files.

Click for more: Corsair 64GB USB Flash Voyager

Tags: hard disk

It’s been a blue year for Toshiba. The company threw in the towel to end the so-called format wars last March, making the HD DVD obsolete
overnight. As of press time, the company hasn’t jumped on the blue bandwagon with its own Blu-ray Disc (BD) players, which play the winning high-def format from its erstwhile rival, Sony.

Instead, Toshiba is still swinging at Blu-ray, just with the other fist. Its new DVD player can up convert existing movie collections to HDTV resolutions so well, the company doesn’t quite say, that it makes Blu-ray disc irrelevant. The new player is totally unrelated to HD DVD’s downfall.

The XDE in the XD-E500’s name stands for eXtended Detail Enhancement. When it’s connected to an HDTV using an HDMI cable, the player can upconvert DVDs to 720p, 1080i, and 1080p resolutions.

In addition, the XD-E500 offers three optional picture modes. Sharp
is self-explanatory, adding definition to object edges. Color boosts blue and green hues. Contrast improves the level of detail in black
and dark parts of the picture. The Color and Contrast modes both include Sharp mode.

So is the XD-E500 a BD killer?
Not really. There’s no substitute for more pixels than DVD, which BD delivers along with DVD upconversion, but the player does supply picture quality that’s hard to tell from true HD.

From Lord of the Rings: Return of the King to fine details in a calibration disc to the landscapes in a Toshiba demo DVD, the XDE500 produced noticeably crisper detail than the Oppo. Fabric textures, tiled roofs, etc. looked very close to high-def. You would need true HD video to get any sharper.

It can’t automatically letterbox 4:3 full-screen video, so it only plays
it in screen-filling stretch mode. I had to manually adjust the TV’s aspect ratio every time I switched between fullscreen and widescreen DVDs. Also, the XD-E500 exhibited video artifacts during playback of SVCDs (Super Video CDs).

The audio situation was disappointing, too. The Toshiba’s analog audio outputs are limited to stereo (2-channel audio) Dolby Digital, albeit with an optional E.A.M. (Enhanced Audio Mode) 3D sound setting. If you want to listen to 5.1-channel surround sound and/or DTS (Digital Theater Systems) soundtracks, you have to hook up a suitable audio receiver to the XD-E500’s HDMI or coaxial or optical digital outputs.

The XD-E500’s video upconversion technology is great, but minor quibbles keep the player from getting my full endorsement.

Should you consider a DVD upconverter?
With prices just over $200, BD players that upconvert DVDs don’t cost much more than the XD-E500. Then again, those are low-end
players with limited audio format support, average DVD upscaling, and no Bonus View or BD-Live features. While relatively advanced BD players still cost $399 and up, a good $149 DVD upconverter makes sense.

For more, click Toshiba XD-E500 Upconverting 1080p Extended Detail DVD Player

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Internal hard drives, both for desktops and laptops have dropped so dramatically in price in recent years that many consumers regularly replace their drives with beefier models to accommodate their ever-expanding collections of video files, music, and other storage hungry content.

But that practice can present a challenge: Do you try to sell the old drive for pennies on the dollar or simply discard it? Now, you don’t have to do either. Thermal take has devised a unique solution to using internal hard drives that are no longer installed in your computers.

The Thermaltake Blacx Se HDD Dock with USB Port lets you plug in any 2.5- or 3.5-inch SATA hard drive up to 1.5TB.

The Blacx Se accommodates hot-swapping, which means you can simply plug in a hard drive to the dock while the dock is connected to your running PC. Although this convenience could prove handy for backups and for accessing files on older drives, the design does expose part of the hard drive, in turn potentially allowing for EMI issues.

Further, drives inserted in the dock are limited to USB 2.0 speeds, but this dock is intended as a supplement to existing internal hard drives.

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SpiderOak announced an upgrade to its suite of online backup-related services for home and business users. New features in SpiderOak 2.0 include a fourfold increase in application speed, faster file retrieval from extra-large folders, and reduced memory usage during backups as well as browsing. These enhancements augment SpiderOak’s other benefits, including ‘multi computer – multi platform – single location’ backup and advanced de-duplication that cuts backup/sync time by as much as 90% while conserving storage space.

SpiderOak enables users to store, backup, access, share and sync files to their personal “SuperCloud” from any combination of Windows, Mac and Linux computers as well as external storage media. No other service offers this full range of functionality, operating system support, or device acceptance.

These capabilities allow users to create a virtual personal network from which they can access stored documents, music, photos, movies and other data 24×7 from any computer anywhere in the world with a click, including historical versions and deleted files that are irretrievable with most online storage and synchronization services.

Other unique SpiderOak features include the ability to create password-protected ‘ShareRooms’ for access by designated users, the ability to aggregate multiple devices on one account to take advantage of bulk storage rates, and an industry-first no-password-storage security policy that prevents even SpiderOak employees from viewing user information including file and folder names.

SpiderOak is free for the first 2GB of storage, $10/month from 2 to 100GB, and $10/month for each additional 100GB increment for an unlimited number of devices.

Tags: hard disk