Articles about Storage

As a system builder, I am constantly trawling the web for good deals on components. I am a fairly cost-conscious person; spending  $1700 on any processor is not something I would ever do -- value is what I target. Actually, this weekend I will be doing a budget build with an AMD Athlon X4 845 which sells for less than $70, but I digress.

Patriot is a company that makes excellent memory-based products, like RAM, flash drives, and SSDs to name a few. While its offerings are usually priced competitively, its newest product takes affordability to a new level. The all-new Spark SSD will be available in a 512GB capacity for a super-low $105!

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As more people are switching from HDDs (hard disk drives) to SSDs (solid state drives), more data loss is occurring, a new report by Kroll Ontrack suggests.

SSD disks might be solid in their state, but don’t seem to be more reliable than HDD disks. Still, it doesn’t stop their popularity growth. Out of 2,000 global respondents to the Kroll Ontrack survey, 92 percent are using SSD technology, with more than a third (38 percent) having experienced an SSD failure. Of those failed disks, almost a quarter (23 percent) lost data.

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The growth of the Internet of Things, increased reliance on analytics to support decision making, and greater use of video means businesses are storing more and more data. That data has become a crucial asset and storing it so that it's accessible and safe is a major challenge. Solutions from major vendors are costly but data storage operating system specialist RAIDIX has come up with a product that can offer fault tolerance on commodity hardware.

We spoke to Sergey Platonov, product owner at RAIDIX to find out more about the solution and why data storage is now a major challenge.

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One of the things keeping hard disk drives relevant is the price to gigabyte ratio. While an SSD offers great performance as an OS drive, their often small capacities can make them a poor choice for storage -- depending on needs, of course. While there are larger capacity SSD offerings, they are often too expensive for the average consumer to afford.

Today, Patriot announces a new addition to its SATA-based "Ignite" line of solid state drives. The new member of the family has a wonderfully large 2TB capacity, which could make SSD-based consumer storage a reality. Well, depending on pricing, that is.

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Disaster recovery solutions have usually been a fixed cost for business, involving paying for a fixed amount of storage whether you actually used it or not.

Data protection specialist Druva is launching new usage-based pricing for its Phoenix public cloud solution for backup, archive and disaster recovery. There are no additional hardware or software costs and enterprises will now pay only for the actual storage they consume.

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When USB flash drives first hit the market, they felt like magic. Don't forget, at that time, we weren't far removed from floppy disks. Flash drives were brilliant for students, businesses, and general home use. Over time, these USB drives became faster, while gaining greater capacities.

While the explosion of cloud storage has made flash drives less necessary, the USB devices are still very useful. Even if you do choose to store your data in the cloud, making a local backup is very wise -- redundancy, folks! Today, I am looking at one of the most intriguing such USB drives -- the VisionTek USB 3.0 512GB Pocket SSD. That's right -- a half terabyte!

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IBM’s researchers have found a way to build computer memory that’s incomparably faster to anything we have today. Besides being that much faster, it’s also more enduring and dense. Sounds a bit like science fiction, doesn’t it?

The new technology is called PCM, or phase-change memory, and it revolves around storing three bits of data per cell. It doesn’t lose data when powered off, and it can live through "at least" ten million write cycles (average USB stick can endure some 3,000 cycles).

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For a while there was a scary trend of Android manufacturers shying away from expandable storage. Thankfully, consumer demand largely reversed that course. Many of the newest flagships, such as the HTC 10 and Samsung Galaxy S7, are embracing microSD cards. The versatile card format is utilized in many other types of devices too.

Today, Samsung announces the class-leading EVO Plus 256GB MicroSD Card. If you recently bought SanDisk's 200GB card, you no longer have the largest. With that said, the price tag for this 256GB card is rather high -- more than double SanDisk's 200GB offering.

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Just because your data is stored in the cloud is no reason to stop backing it up. While cloud service providers are responsible for making your data available, they’re not responsible for managing and protecting customers' data from accidental or malicious behavior.

As a recent survey showed accidental deletion by users is a major source of data loss from the cloud. Now the company behind that survey, Spanning, is launching a solution for Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive for Business users.

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Enterprises of all sizes have become increasingly reliant on file syncing and sharing services. But for smaller companies business focused services can be expensive, leaving them reliant on free consumer services that offer limited space and functions.

Backup and storage specialist Datto is launching a new inexpensive yet powerful file sync and share (FSS) service leveraging the low cost basis of the company's 200 petabyte (PB) private cloud, coupled with a global license agreement with ownCloud, an established open-source leader in the FSS industry.

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Solid state drives are quite mature and ubiquitous nowadays -- the technology is no longer cutting edge. While some computers still ship with slow mechanical hard disk drives, SSDs are now largely the default option.

SATA based drives are slow compared to newer NVMe PCIe variants, but still more than fast enough for most consumers. These 2.5-inch SATA drives are often less expensive too, making them a wise option for OEMs looking to build low or medium-cost laptops. Now, SanDisk announces the Z410 -- a drop-in solution for manufacturers, featuring a capacity of up to 480GB.

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Now that users are generating more data than ever before, Microsoft has begun to explore the idea of using DNA molecules to store data.

To begin investigating the possibility of accomplishing such a complex task, the company will be purchasing 10 million strands of long oligonucleotides -- or lab made DNA molecules -- from a startup in San Francisco called Twist Bioscience.

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With increased cloud usage and more demand for remote working, the ability to move large files around efficiently has become more and more important.

Delays or latency in moving data can create serious challenges for a business and the size of files being moved is increasing, causing additional strain on bandwidth.

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It seems that Mega -- the enfant terrible of the cloud storage world -- could be on the brink of closure. Founder of Mega (formerly known as Mega Upload), Kim Dotcom took to Twitter to warn people to back up their files ASAP.

Not for the first time, Mega is out of the control of Dotcom, and is currently in the hands of what he refers to as "the fifth most wanted criminal in China". For many people the idea of their cloud storage being in criminal hands would be concerning enough, but Dotcom says that Bill Liu wants to float the company in Hong Kong.

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The results of a new survey show that many organizations continue to demonstrate a complacent, lax attitude toward backups, leaving them vulnerable to evolving threats.

The study from cloud-based backup provider CloudBerry Lab finds that almost half of respondents (49 percent) have only one copy of their business data, which could cause major operational disruption in the event that data becomes inaccessible.

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