Hasta La Gadget!

Got a hankering for smaller, faster, more capacious magnetic storage? Compellent says you’ll get it soon, at long as you’re buying for the IT market. According to The Register, the enterprise storage provider listed 900GB, 10,000RPM 2.5-inch hard drives on its product roadmap, as well as 300GB models that spin at 15,000RPM. Sure, we’ve seen smallish drives with those speeds or that capacity before, and you can get a 600GB, 10,000RPM Velociraptor even in the consumer marketplace, but it seems like the puzzle pieces are all coming together. Quick disclaimer: Compellent doesn’t actually make hard drives, but it most certainly sells them, so we’d expect a company in their position to know what’s what. That, or they could be making stuff up. Perhaps platter density makes those sizes and capacities inevitable, but we can’t pretend that we’re not jazzed about the possibilities.

Distributor roadmap shows super speedy 900GB, 2.5-inch HDD originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 May 2010 15:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We all knew Seagate’s FreeAgent line couldn’t hang around forever, and tonight the storage mainstay has revealed the next logical step for the line. The GoFlex family is one of the more varied ranges out there from any hard drive maker, with the primary intent on the HDD side being to create drives (ranging from 320GB to 2TB) that are friendly with both Macs and PCs (simultaneously) while also giving users the ability to upgrade their connection or switch it out depending on what workstation they interface with. The new crew supports USB 2.0 out of the box, though upgrading to USB 3.0, FireWire 800 or eSATA can be accomplished via the new GoFlex cable system. Also launched today is the GoFlex TV HD media player, which essentially acts as a liaison between your tele and your media, regardless of whether it’s stored locally, on the LAN or on the internet. Moving on, there’s the GoFlex Net media sharing device, which transforms any USB mass storage device into one that’s happy to pump out content via the ‘net — think Pogoplug, and you’ve pretty much got the idea. It looks as if the whole crew will be available for purchase starting this week, with the full list of details and prices just beyond the break.

Continue reading Seagate introduces new GoFlex range: multi-port HDDs, media players, etc.

Seagate introduces new GoFlex range: multi-port HDDs, media players, etc. originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 May 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How much information is out there?

For most of us, “a crapload” is a sufficiently accurate answer. But for a few obsessive data analysts, more precision is necessary. According to a recent study by market-research company IDC, and sponsored by storage company EMC, the size of the information universe is currently 800,000 petabytes. Each petabyte is a million gigabytes, or the equivalent of 1,000 one-terabyte hard drives.

If you stored all of this data on DVDs, the study’s authors say, the stack would reach from the Earth to the moon and back.

That’s a 62% increase over the amount of digital information floating around the year before — but it’s just a down payment on next year’s total, which will reach 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes.

If these growth rates continue, by 2020 the digital universe will total 35 zettabytes, or 44 times more than in 2009.

It’s interesting to compare IDC’s study with a recent UC San Diego report on how much information Americans consume per year. According to that study, media consumption in 2008 added up to 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, or about 34 gigabytes per person per day.

Much of the media we view (TV shows, streaming video from YouTube) is centrally stored, on internet-connected servers, so the totals for consumption are naturally higher than the storage requirements.

IDC notes that while data storage will increase 44-fold by 2020, the number of IT professionals worldwide will only grow by 40%, which means each IT guy is going to have a lot more data to oversee.

Good luck with that, guys!

See Also:

• Just How Fast Is Cisco's New Router? Really Freaking Fast
• In the Future, One CF Card Will Hold 200 Years' Worth of Porn …
• Internet Mysteries: How Much File Sharing Traffic Travels the Net …
• Wired 11.02: VIEW

Gadgets on the Go: Follow Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter for real-time tech updates.

EMC-IDC Digital Universe Study

Contrary to popular belief, one solid state drive isn’t the same as another solid state drive necessarily. OCZ‘s new Agility 2 is proof of that, boasting the final (v3.0.5) version of SandForce’s SF-1200 firmware. The issue here is that Corsair’s recently released Force series of SSDs are shipping (and continue to ship) with v3.0.1 installed, which — according to SandForce — will never be viewed as the final version ready for mass consumption. As the story goes, v3.0.1 may experience a reliability issue with a power management state, but v3.0.5 caps small file random write performance as to better separate the SF-1200 drives from the pricier SF-1500 drives. Our compadres over at AnandTech were able to put the (factory limited) Agility 2 SSD through its paces, and for the most part, it came out looking pretty decent. Critics found 5- to 10-percent performance gains when compared to Intel / Indilinx offerings, but unless you have to have the absolute best, paying extra for that bump may not be the most intelligent move. The other point here is that while the Agility 2 may be capped with the v3.0.5 firmware, at least its upgrade path is a lot clearer than the aforementioned Force; if you ever take v3.0.1 away from that unit, you can kiss that extra performance goodbye. Hit the source link for the full, drama-filled look.

OCZ’s Agility 2 SSD reviewed: despite limits, SandForce SF-1200 drive performs well originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fully 12 years after the original G3 iMac dropped support for the 3.5-inch floppy disk, Sony has finally decided to stop making them. The reason is a lack of demand. The surprise is that it took so long.

If you still rely on the massive 1.44MB of space to move files quickly around between far-flung computers, don’t worry: Sony will keep the production lines running until March 2011, giving you a year to stockpile the things. You won’t be alone. Apparently, “lack of demand” is somewhat relative, and Sony sold a jaw-dropping 12 million floppies in Japan during 2009.

The 3.5-inch floppy has delighted giggling schoolboys with its name ever since its invention back in 1981 and subsequent Japanese launch two years later. Now it joins the cassette tape and the 8-track in fondly remembered obscurity.

It’s pretty mind-boggling to think that I could (and had to) boot my old Amiga from a floppy, as it had no hard drive. Back then we used to get out pirated games via sneakernet or by MailTorrent, as it was never called, and the one and a half megabytes and creaky 1000 kbps transfer rate seemed bottomless and blistering compared to the cassette tapes they replaced.

RIP, my floppy friend. If anyone out there actually still uses these fragile old things, tell us why in the comments.

Sony to discontinue 3.5 inch floppy disk in Japan [Examiner]

Photo: BinaryApe/Flickr

See Also:

• Bye-Bye Cassette Tape: UK Chain Kills Romantic Format
• Floppy Disk as USB Thumb Drive
• Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage
• Floppy Disk Finally Dead?