Articles about Storage

SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a monitoring system which reports on various reliability indicators, and sometimes highlights imminent hardware failure of HDDs and SSDs.

These predictions can sometimes be questionable, but SMART still has plenty to offer, and the open source HDD Guardian (also available in a portable edition) provides a simple and straightforward way to find out more.

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When it comes to technology, it is almost impossible to stay on the forefront. You will drive yourself nuts, and empty your wallet, chasing after every new thing. Got the newest and most expensive graphics card? Yesterday's news within months. The newest iPhone? You can make that claim for one year at best.

Hard drives are no different and are probably the longest-running way for manufacturers to take money from nerds. I bought a 4TB drive earlier in the year thinking it would be high-end for some time, but sure enough, it is now yawn-worthy. Why? Today, Seagate begins shipping 8TB hard drives. Yup, twice as big as my 4TB drive. I haven't learned my lesson though as I already want one!

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OneDrive and Dropbox users with access to an iPhone or iPad rejoice: both iOS apps were just updated with major improvements with the release of Microsoft OneDrive 4.4 and Dropbox 3.3.

Both apps gain new features -- the ability to search within Word and PowerPoint documents in Dropbox, a brand new Photos view in OneDrive -- as well as a number of improvements and stability fixes.

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From being an expensive technology and something of a niche, flash storage is shifting into the mainstream, particularly in enterprises.

According to new research by IDC, although the technology has been available for a while, the adoption of flash-based storage is only now showing real growth thanks to falling prices and a growing familiarity with the benefits it offers.

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SanDisk has unveiled a new super-fast tiny USB flash drive designed to appeal to media savvy customers that want top performance inside a small package.

The Ultra Fit USB 3.0 Flash Drive comes in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB incarnations and is designed to offer transfer speeds that are up to 10 times as fast as the current USB 2.0 flash drives on the market.

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Storing data in the cloud is convenient and makes for easy sharing and collaboration but it inevitably raises security concerns, especially when using public services.

Content Raven produces a cloud-based file distribution toolkit which adds an extra layer to provide content control, security and deep analytics to files stored in the cloud. It already integrates with Box and Dropbox but from today adds support for Google Drive too.

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The way that many enterprises use data places heavy demands on storage, both in terms of capacity and performance. Whilst SSDs can solve the performance issue they don’t always offer the capacity required.

California-based BiTMICRO is a pioneer of SSDs having been involved with them since 1999. With the launch of its new MAXio E-Series PCIe drives it's aiming to deliver capacity, performance and reliability for companies that need to support high volume application workloads.

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AVG got into the cloud storage business with its LiveKive offering. I won't go into the gory details but the service did not work so well. Now the anti-virus maker has elected to kill off the product, and perhaps it was a merciful death.

Users began receiving warning messages in their email before the shutdown took place. Customers could grab their data, though depending on how much was there, the download could have been painful.

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Cloud storage service Dropbox has detailed a new partnership with mobile operator Deutsche Telekom, that will result in its Android app being preloaded on the majority of devices sold in certain parts of Europe by the German company and its subsidiaries.

This partnership also impacts Deutsche Telekom's current customer base, who will be helped to "discover" Dropbox. The Android devices that will come preloaded with the app will be available, starting in October, in Central and Eastern European markets.

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There are a number of reasons why businesses might move data to the cloud. To reduce storage costs, improve accessibility or simply reduce the need for on-site equipment. But how can you be sure that moving data to the cloud is the correct decision?

We looked at how businesses can approach this earlier today. Now archiving specialist DocuLynx is using the Microsoft Worldwide Partnership Conference in Washington to launch a new product aimed at making cloud storage decisions easier.

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A new report from research specialist Gartner says that the physical location of data is becoming increasingly irrelevant and that by 2020 a combination of legal, political and logical location will be more important.

Gartner research vice president Carsten Casper says that the number of data residency and data sovereignty discussions has soared in the past 12 months, and that this has stalled technology innovation in many organizations. Originally triggered by the dominance of US providers on the Internet and the Patriot Act, the perceived conflict has since been fueled by revelations of surveillance by the NSA made public by Edward Snowden.

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The battle for dominance between Microsoft and Google continued, with Microsoft offering a huge storage boost for Office 365 and OneDrive users. This was quickly trumped by Google later in the week at 1/0 2014, when the company announced unlimited storage for Google Drive for Work users. Microsoft is basking in the glory of being heralded as cooler than Apple by Joe -- and stunts like offering cashback deals to sway MacBook Air owners into switching into Surface Pro 3 certainly helps. Microsoft opened a new store on Long Island, while Google branched out into new territory with a trial run of a new domain registration service. Microsoft also ventured into new waters with its first Android smartphone, the Nokia X2.

In something of an interesting twist, Microsoft opted to use Opera Mobile as the default web browser. Opera is also returning to Linux after the surprise release of Opera 24 Developer. Linux Mint 17 "Qiana" KDE was also released. Linux also managed to hit the headlines for facilitating the hacking of Google's Nest thermstats. If this hasn’t put you off, Logitech added support to its Harmony remotes.

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Last year around seven percent of all data was stored in the cloud, but by 2016 it's estimated that 36 percent of data will be in cloud storage, generating a potential revenue of over $4 billion. Of current storage users, 38 percent say they already use the cloud with 34 percent planning to do so.

Salesforce and Google Drive linking specialist Cirrus Files has been looking at the three main public cloud providers, Dropbox, Box and Google Drive to see how their services compare in this fast-growing sector.

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The hype machine is still in overdrive in the storage market, cranking out myths that businesses need to see through if they don't want to be bamboozled into adopting solutions that won't meet their requirements.

While there are plenty of things storage vendors want you to believe, here are 10 things they don't want you to know.

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Storage is often at the heart of many of the problems companies encounter when running their data centers in the cloud.

Analytics specialist CloudPhysics is looking to help admins pinpoint and resolve storage-related issues with a new Storage Analytics product. This uses big data analysis techniques to predict problems and issue Smart Alerts so that issues can be fixed before they become critical.

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