“Convenience storage” is a term that does not (yet) exist, but it hits the mark in identifying an upcoming trend: more and more users don’t really care whether they use one drive brand or another, they just want a storage product that can turn inflexible storage devices into truly convenient devices. Our digital lifestyles generate lots of data that not only has to be stored somewhere, it increasingly has to be backed up, synchronized, encrypted or treated in some special way. Clearly, conventional external or portable hard drives simply don’t cut it any longer. We looked at the latest mobile hard drive products from Buffalo, Fujitsu, Maxtor, Simple Tech and Western Digital to see who created the best solution.
(Full article ‘Portable Storage: Convenience is the Key’)

2005 was the year of the RAM drive. Gigabyte and a smaller company called HyperOS released their storage products, which were both meant to replace the conventional hard drive with blazing fast SDRAM. Both provided an exciting look to the future of performance storage products, as they blow away any other hard drive. Gigabyte’s i-RAM was the faster solution, thanks to its SATA/150 interface, while the HyperDrive III was limited to UltraATA/100, but supported more memory. HyperOS wants to adjust the ranking with its fourth generation HyperDrive, which offers both SATA/150 and UltraATA/133 interfaces. HyperOS even calls its HyperDrive 4 the fastest internal hard disk in the world. Memory is typically divided into volatile and permanent storage: your system memory or random access memory (RAM) is volatile, as the DRAM transistor states are lost when the power is gone, so any data stored goes as well.
(Full article ‘HyperDrive 4 Redefines Solid State Storage’)

Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to combine its storage and server businesses into a new group called Sun Systems, according to a blog posting last week by CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz. The realignment comes about two years after the vendor paid about $4.1 billion to acquire tape storage vendor Storage Technology Corp. The new business unit will be responsible for aligning the company’s server, storage, virtualization and networking technologies, Schwartz said. Such a combination could ease the process of managing IT systems at Oregon State University, said Chuck Sears, manager of research computing at the school’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. The university runs both Sun servers and storage systems, Sears said.

Most of our readers probably know how to install a hard drive: open the computer case, locate an available 3.5″ drive bay, insert the drive, screw it tightly, and attach power and data cables. UltraATA hard drives require a jumper to be set, while Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives only need to be connected to a SATA port.

Well, that’s the theory anyway – if only life were really that simple! In fact, our everyday life throws all sorts of surprises at us: we sometimes find ourselves trying to install a 2.5″ drive into a larger drive bay, researching options to implement unusual setups, trying to recover data from a hard disk, or simply attempting to put the wife at ease by dampening PC noise.

I did not specifically look for storage accessories to write this article, nor were there any products that we’d consider indispensable.
(Full article ‘Store, Swap and Organize: Storage Accessories’)