Articles about Storage

There is no shortage of diminutive bus-powered portable USB storage drives on the market nowadays -- both SSD and 2.5-inch HDD variants. Unfortunately, these drives typically offer relatively small capacities. Some professionals (and home users) need an external drive with much higher storage possibilities and being portable doesn't always matter. In these cases, a 3.5-inch-based USB drive is preferable, as plugging into a wall outlet for power is not an issue, and more importantly, it is available in higher capacities.

Today, Western Digital unveils a new external desktop drive line that should meet the needs of many. Called "My Book Duo," it actually leverages two 3.5-inch mechanical hard drives in RAID-0 to offer capacities up to 20TB. For example, the top capacity offering is comprised of dual 10TB drives. It connects with the latest-and greatest USB-C connector. Making it even more useful, it even includes an integrated two-port USB-A hub. This makes the My Book Duo storage system particularly ideal for machines without USB-A, such as the newest MacBook Pro. It will not charge a connected laptop, sadly. The external drive also features 256-bit AES hardware encryption and comes with a respectable 3-year warranty.

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Mechanical hard drives may not be fashionable nowadays, but they absolutely still have their place. For many folks, leveraging the cloud or a small solid state drive is passable, but for others, not so much. For gamers and professionals in particular, there may be a need to store a lot of data locally, such as games, images, and video files. Luckily, manufacturers are still cranking out affordable large-capacity 3.5-inch drives for these needs.

Today, legendary company Toshiba introduces a new 8TB capacity to its existing "X300" internal desktop SATA HDD line. This series is designed for both gamers and professional users alike. Toshiba's 8TB mechanical drive spins at 7,200 rpm and features a 128MB cache. The company is including a two-year warranty for the product.

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Portable solid state drives are better than mechanical hard drives for a few reasons. Obviously they are faster, but more importantly, they are more durable, as there are no moving parts. For those that travel a lot, for instance, a portable SSD is a safer product for throwing in a bag. Another big benefit is size -- modern portable SSDs are getting quite small, meaning they take up less room on a desk or in a backpack.

Today, Samsung launches its newest such drive, called the "Portable SSD T5." This beautiful drive features a USB-C connector and comes in two color options -- Deep Black and Alluring Blue. Since this is a Samsung product, it should last. If there are any issues, however, the company is including a three year warranty.

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SATA is so out of style. Nowadays, all the cool kids are using much-faster NVMe PCIe-based solid state drives that utilize either U.2 or M.2 connectors; I prefer the latter, but I digress. Of course, to maximize the performance of these ultra-fast drives, you will not only need the appropriate connectors, but PCIe 3.0 too. If you don't have the correct connector, all is not lost. Thanks to PCIe adapter cards, you might able to add compatibility to your system without the need of a new motherboard.

While M.2 adapter cards are very commonplace, U.2 variants are not. Today, StarTech is back with another very useful product -- the U.2 to PCIe Drive Adapter Expansion Card. If you don't have a U.2 connector port, but do have a PCIe 3.0 x4 or higher slot, this card will allow you to connect a compatible drive at top speed. It will work with PCIe 1.0 and 2.0 too, albeit at much slower speeds. You can mount the 2.5-inch U.2 drive (15mm, 12.5mm, 9.5mm, 7mm, and 5mm height) directly on the card, meaning there are no unsightly cables.

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Solid state drives are all the rage nowadays, but as fast as they are, they don't often compare to mechanical hard drives from a capacity standpoint. Heck, my pricey MacBook Pro came with a very fast NVMe drive, but with a mere 256GB of storage. This is quite paltry when cheap laptops using a HDD can often exceed four times that capacity. Of course, there is a big speed tradeoff, making the smaller capacity preferable to some. It stinks that many consumers have to choose between a fast yet small SSD or a slow and roomy HDD.

What if consumers didn't have to choose though? A new NVMe SSD series from Micron, dubbed 9200, offers both extreme speed and monstrous capacity. How much storage, you ask? Up to 11TB! The drive is more focused for businesses, however, as it will likely be priced well out of reach of the average consumer. In other words, it isn't designed for your fancy gaming rig, but instead, servers. Still, it is exciting to think that these large capacity SSDs will trickle down to consumers eventually.

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Enterprise hardware products aren't the sexiest things around. Most of the time you'll struggle to stay awake reading the announcement. But not this time. Intel's newly unveiled "ruler" form factor for server SSDs is quite intriguing for a change.

Intel has moved away from the traditional design that we have come to expect in consumer and enterprise SSDs to a "long, skinny" shape that enables it to push the envelope in terms of storage capacity.

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It used to be that SSDs, for all the benefits they provided over a hard drive, were hard to justify due to their super high prices and limited storage options. But, nowadays, there's something for everyone in the SSD market, and the selection is frequently getting better.

Toshiba's new SG6 series is a good example, being offered in both SATA 3 and M.2 2280 form factors, in three storage options that can make many of us happy, and with transfer speeds that put the vast majority of drives to shame.

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Toshiba has announced that it is moving forward with its plans to build a new memory chip plant without its partner Western Digital.

The company will spend $1.8 billion on the construction of Fab 6 of its new Yokkaichi semiconductor facility that will be located in Western Japan. Toshiba currently owns the land and buildings at the factor though it has divided investments in production equipment with SanDisk since the two companies began their joint venture in 2004.

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IBM has revealed a major step forward in its storage capabilities with a new world record.

The computing giant has revealed that researchers have been able to fit 330 terabytes of uncompressed data into a single palm-sized tape cartridge -- equivalent to around 201 gigabytes per square inch.

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In the past companies have relied on different secondary storage solutions for backup and recovery, and for archiving large amounts of structured and unstructured data.

But as businesses need to store larger amounts of more diverse data this creates headaches for administrators as the same information collects on both solutions and may need to be handled via different interfaces.

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The all-flash storage market is predicted by Gartner to be worth $9 billion by 2020. But while flash offers speed advantages it's also expensive so it seems likely that the foreseeable future will see a mix of storage.

We spoke to Lazarus Vekiarides, CTO and co-founder of ClearSky Data, which offers enterprise storage, backup and DR as a fully managed hybrid cloud service, to find out more about flash storage and how best to exploit it.

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There are a number of benefits to how quickly cloud technology has progressed, but now one of IBM's cloud products that launched in 2015 will soon become obsolete.

The company's Bluemix's Object Storage v1 which launched in December 2015 will be switched off in August 2017 after receiving two updates in total.

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SATA solid state drives aren't particularly exciting nowadays, but they are essential for consumers looking to upgrade existing computers without breaking the bank. By purchasing a 2.5-inch SSD, a computer user can easily upgrade their laptop. Not only should the notebook get a speed boost, but it can improve battery life too. Heck, these drives are great for desktops too -- especially if they do not have M.2 NVMe slots.

Today, Toshiba announces a new SATA SSD that is aimed at upgraders. Called TR200, it is a 2.5-inch drive that features 64-Layer 3D 3-bit-per-cell TLC flash memory.

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With the rise of public and private clouds, enterprise file storage has become much more complex in recent years.

Aimed at simplifying storage and removing capacity limitations, the latest Enterprise File Services Platform from CTERA Networks allows users to securely access, share and protect an unlimited number of files in the cloud as if they were stored locally on their desktop or on shared network drives.

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It's no secret that today's technology sector is interested in software-defined storage (SDS) -- you'll often hear talk of its ability to reduce costs and increase simplicity. But while many companies are pointing to their technology as SDS, most only have a portion of what’s necessary to be considered truly software-defined.

In order to fix this confusion, we need to agree on a concrete definition of SDS in order to get the best use of the technology and understand how organizations can use it as a cost effective data management solution. We spoke to Ashok Rajagopalan, head of products at elastic block storage provider Datera, to understand this hype and find out how vendors in today’s cluttered market can stand out as true SDS solutions.

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