Articles about Storage

Apple's newest MacBook Pro with Touch Bar has four Thunderbolt 3 (USB Type-C) ports, making it amazingly versatile. While all the ports can charge the device, they can all transfer data and video too.

If you are investing in Apple's latest pro laptop, and you need blazing fast external storage, LaCie has a Thunderbolt 3 product that will make you giddy. Called "Bolt3", it offers 2800MB/s read, and 2200MB/s write. The beautifully designed drive also has two Thunderbolt 3 ports, so you can daisy-chain to other devices, such as displays or additional storage.

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The growth of cloud usage, increasing volumes of information and a switch towards software defined systems based on commodity hardware have all had an impact on the storage market.

About a year ago we spoke to Mark Lewis, Chairman and CEO of storage specialist Formation Data Systems  to get his views on the future of enterprise storage. This week we caught up with Mark again to find out how much the market has changed in just a short time.

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A new survey carried out by data management company NetApp reveals the trends in flash storage adoption throughout various industries in the UK.

The legal industry is currently leading the way, with (50 percent) of respondents having already adopted it. This is followed by finance and manufacturing (both at 46 percent), education (42 percent) and IT and telecommunications (40 percent).

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Depending on which iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus version you buy, you may experience slower storage and cellular speeds compared to other models in the lineup -- and, at least when it comes to the wireless performance, there may be nothing that you can do about it.

A report on the storage performance of the base iPhone 7 Plus, which features 32GB of storage, reveals that it is a couple of times slower at the same task than a 128GB iPhone 7, in both synthetic and real-life benchmarks.

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Storage architectures from the early days of computing typically used block storage and managed data as hierarchy of files. While this was fine when the amount of data involved was relatively small, as storage requirements grew it meant that the management of data became a major task. What was needed was a way of making handling data simpler whilst allowing scalability and ease of access to the information.

Object storage treats data as objects, each being made up of the data itself, metadata that defines it and a unique identifier. The advantage of this is that it makes it possible to store large amounts of unstructured data in a way that’s affordable, scalable and capable of a degree of self-management. In recent years its use has been driven by online sharing and streaming services, allowing a diverse range of digital content to be easily and quickly accessed from anywhere without the need for complex, specialist software.

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USB hard drives can be an important part of your backup plans. Whether for home or business, they allow you to easily backup your files and then take them with you. You can even lock the drive in a safe for extra security. While you can also use the cloud for backing up data, redundancy with a USB HDD is very smart -- just in case.

Western Digital's USB hard disk drives are wildly popular, and today, the company announces a refresh of two such models for Windows and Mac -- the 'My Passport' and 'My Book'. The concept is the same -- a mechanical hard drive in a USB 3.0 enclosure -- but they are now more stylish. The My Passport comes in six fun colors -- the Type-A cable even matches!

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Flash drives are less popular nowadays thanks to cloud storage. While the cloud offers convenience, there is extra control and security when local storage is used. Remember folks, when you leverage the cloud, you open yourself up to deficiencies of a third-party company -- a mass data breach could expose your secret files. For a business in particular, this could mean the loss of important information, or the leak of confidential information. Your company's reputation could be tarnished as a result.

If you are more comfortable using USB flash drives for storing and transmitting data, encryption is a must -- hardware being the best. Today, Kingston unveils the IronKey D300 USB Flash Drive. To secure your data, it uses FIPS 140-2 Level 3, 256-bit AES-XTS hardware encryption. There is also a "managed" version of the drive which allows companies to impose its requirements on employee-used drives.

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My first computer in the 1990's came with a 4GB hard disk drive -- very spacious at the time. When my friends saw the capacity, I was instantly the envy of the neighborhood. Nowadays, 4GB is rather pitiful. Modern memory cards, some smaller than a postage stamp, can dwarf my first computer's capacity. That's technology, folks -- everything gets better, and your current tech loses its luster.

Today, SanDisk (a Western Digital company) announces a product that is a major milestone in the technology market -- the world's first 1TB SDXC card. In other words, that is a monstrous 1,000 gigabytes. To put that in perspective, Apple only just stopped putting 16GB storage capacities in the iPhone. This card, which is only a prototype for now, will be a dream for photographers, allowing them to save more photos than ever before. Of course, if the card fails, that is a lot of data to lose...

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Apple yesterday unveiled new iPhones and the Apple Watch Series 2, but did not announce any changes related to the iPad line. Some folks expected it to unveil new models, but the company had other things in mind for its popular tablets.

One of the main changes that Apple introduced with the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus is the bump in base storage to 32GB, up from the 16GB that previous models shipped with at the entry level. That is a change that Apple has quietly applied to the iPad line too, along with a drop in price for the Pro models.

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The Anniversary Update may have introduced a whole host of new features but it has also caused a fair number of problems for Windows 10 users. Among the most annoying issues reported since its release in late-July are freezes on systems equipped with SSDs.

Microsoft has acknowledged the problem and provided a couple of workarounds that users could try, promising that a permanent fix would eventually be made available. Microsoft says that it has addressed the freezing issues in the latest Cumulative Update that it just released.

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Intel has just announced a series of new 3D NAND SSDs, aimed at PCs, data centers and Internet of Things devices. The company says the new array offers a "cost effective replacement for traditional Hard Disk Drives".

From the consumer side, there are two new devices: Intel SSD 600p Series, and Intel SSD Pro 600p Series. It uses PCIe Gen3x4, NVMe interface, resulting in a 17 times faster performance over HDD, and three times faster performance over SATA SDDs.

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A common concern among companies is if their resources are being used wisely. Never before has this been more pressing than when considering data storage options. Teams question the inherent worth of their data, and often fall into the trap of viewing it as an expense that weighs too heavily on the budget. This is where wisdom is needed with respect to efficient resource use and the task of successful data storage. Companies must ask themselves how storing particular data will benefit their business overall.

Incorporating a data storage plan into a business budget has certainly proven to be easier said than done. Many companies fail at carrying out their desires to store data once they recognize the cost associated with the tools that are needed. You may be wondering why the failure to follow through on these plans is so common. After all, who wouldn’t want to budget in such an important part of company security? The truth of the matter is that it can all be very overwhelming once the VAST amount of data that actually exists is considered, and it can be even more stressful to attempt to manage it all.

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Asian nations are not very secure places to keep your digital data, a new report by secure data centre Artmotion suggests.

The report was built on data from the UN, World Economic Forum and Transparency International, among other groups. Titled Data Danger Zones, it ranks more than 170 nations on how good they are at keeping data secure.

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Micron has announced a new 3D NAND chip for mobile devices, claiming it will give your smartphones more storage capacity and possibly even reduce the use of SD cards.

The memory technology, based on the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.1 standard, will come at first as a 32GB solution. The company promises its module will offer users seamless HD video streaming, higher bandwidth gameplay and faster boot up time.

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Seagate has announced the largest SSD in the world. The 60TB Serial Attached (SAS) SCSI drive, which is designed for data centers, provides enough space to store 400 million photos or 12,000 DVDs, and is said to have the lowest cost per GB for flash storage today.

Alongside it, Seagate also announced the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD at the Flash Memory Summit conference this week. The smaller model is also aimed at enterprises, promising four times the performance than "comparable drives" but without the downsides associated with a PCIe bridge or switch.

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