Mmm, flash. Fusion-io’s product line has largely targeted enterprise users, but with the introduction of the ioXtreme PCI Express SSD back at E3, it was clear that the next-gen storage outfit was serious about breaking into the consumer market. Today, the 80GB ioXtreme and ioXtreme Pro (which was previously unheard of) have both broke cover over at Hot Hardware, with the former being useful for single-drive installs and the latter good for multi-drive setups. We should note that Fusion-io is obviously behind schedule on these, and there still doesn’t look to be a definite price and release for the laypeople out there. That said, if the company’s shipping out products that punch out an average write rate of 300MB/sec and read rate of 775MB/sec (yes, seriously), we’d say it’s darn near ready for the real world.

Filed under: Storage

Fusion-io ioXtreme and ioXtreme Pro PCI Express SSDs sneak out originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Iomega’s Ix2-200 NAS shows that you don’t need to run Microsoft’s Windows Home Server to take care of everything a home, or even a small business, needs for its network storage. It’s just surprising that it’s this cheap.

The Price:

1TB for $270, 2TB for $370 and 4TB for $700

The Verdict:

It does a lot, and it does it pretty well, for not a lot of cash.

Here’s a list of the exciting bits on the Ix2-200’s feature list:

• Automated backup and restore: Full Time Machine support for Macs as well as Retrospect, a different backup scheme, for PCs and Macs.
• Automated copy jobs, which can automatically and incrementally copy (either with Windows file sharing or rsync) files off of network shares and dump it onto its own storage, or the other way around. Perfect for backing up other network shares for double data security
• RAID1
• DLNA, iTunes Servers
• Quiet running
• SMB features like email notifications, event logs, iSCSI, automated video surveillance (provided you have a compatible camera) and USB printer support
• A load of networking support, like Apple File Sharing, Bluetooth, FTP, NFS, Rsync, SNMP and standard Windows File Sharing (CIFS)
• Torrent downloading
• Remote access

Instead of building a Windows Home Server, like so many others have done, Iomega decided to build their own system from their own technology, and came out pretty feature-rich because of it.

The setup process is slightly finicky—you install the Iomega Solutions CD and wait while it searches your network for the server. This can actually take a few hours (we thought the Mac version was malfunctioning until it completed its setup and discovery process), but once you’re up, you’re up.

You control the server with a web interface, which works with a local app to provide integration into your file system. It’s pretty simple to use, and there aren’t too many tabs or options to confuse users with.

Backup and file storage

Time Machine works as well as if you were just shoving in a USB hard drive, and there’s little difference compared to running your backups over the network as if it were a Time Capsule. Iomega tells us that they’ve learned from HP’s first Windows Home Servers, the ones who weren’t able to run a complete Time Machine restore in the event of a total drive failure, so Mac users shouldn’t need to worry.

Retrospect, another backup software, can also configure backup plans on a schedule and automatically execute them without any input from you. Just choose which drives and folders you want to back up—it even backs up your network folders—and pick your schedule. If you don’t have a Windows Home Server on your network to handle your Windows backups, this is a pretty good substitute. And of course you can use Retrospect to restore your backups to your machine, in case of data failure.

Automated copy jobs is another feature that’s especially sweet for me, since I have a lot of network storage and I always worry about what would happen if one fails. This way, the Ix2-200 can maintain up-to-date copies of whatever’s sitting on other network drives, and act as the schoolmarm for all your data.

Networking and other features

Some of the other features are pretty much evaluated on a yes/no basis in terms of whether or not they work. The fan is very quiet even when transferring a mass load of files—although the hard drive is not, so that’s kind of moot—but is virtually silent otherwise. RAID1 works, and comes set up by default. The DLNA and iTunes streaming works in their respective clients, and Xbox 360/PS3 has no problem streaming files off of the server.

BitTorrent download works, but the server gets confused if you give it a URL to download a .torrent file from, so to play it safe you should just go ahead and download the .torrent yourself and feed that instead. Download speeds are decent, and you can configure what the maximum upload/download speeds are so as to not saturate your internet connection. You should also change your default port as well, since ISPS throttle that 6881 port hard.

All the networking stuff works as expected, as do the email notifications and event logs. The rest of the higher end stuff, like video surveillance integration and iSCSI we didn’t test, so we can’t say if there are any issues with them or not. It’s more than likely that they do work, but we don’t know if there are any quirks you should watch out for.

It’s a pretty good deal

Iomega’s aiming this at both the prosumer and the SMB market, which means that for most people, it’s going to have a lot of features that they don’t need. But that doesn’t matter! The Ix2-200 is so packed with stuff that it should satisfy the needs of just about any user who’s hurting for a network storage solution. And at a starting price of only $270 for the 1TB version, it’s a cheaper alternative than Windows Home Servers, and can do just about all the same things. Plus with its user-replaceable drives and three USB ports, you can easily upgrade the storage yourself and expand your storage after the fact. [Iomega]

Great backup options including Time Machine and Retrospect


Small, quiet and fast


Feature loaded


Fairly cheap for what you get


Setup process isn’t as easy as it could be

North Carolina State University engineers have created a new material that could allow a fingernail-sized chip to store the equivalent of 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text — fifty times the capacity of current memory chips.

“Instead of making a chip that stores 20 gigabytes, we have a created a prototype that can [potentially] handle one terabyte,” says Jagdish Narayan, a professor of materials science and engineering at NC State. That’s at least fifty times the capacity of the best current DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) systems.

The key to the breakthrough is selective doping, the process by which an impurity is added to a material to change its properties. The researchers added nickel, a metal, to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The result has clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers that can store data. Assuming a 7-nanometer magnetic nanodot could store one bit of information, this technique would enable storage density of more than 10 trillion bits per square inch, says Narayan.

Expanding current memory systems is a hot topic of research. At the University of California Berkeley, Ting Xu, an assistant professor of materials science, has also developed a way to guide the self-assembly of nano-sized elements in precise patterns. Xu is trying to extend the technique to create paper-thin, printable solar cells and ultra-small electronic devices.

Other researchers have shown a way to develop a carbon nanotube-based technique for storing data that could potentially last more than a billion years, thereby improving on the lifespan on storage.

A big challenge for Narayan and his team, who have been working on the topic for more than five years, was the creation of nanodots that can be aligned precisely.

“We need to be able to control the orientation of each nano dot,” says Narayan, “because any information that you store in it has to be read quickly and exactly the same way.” Earlier, the researchers could make only one-layer structures and 3-D self assembly of nano-dots wasn’t possible. But using pulsed lasers they have been able to achieve greater control over the process.

Unlike many research breakthroughs, Narayan says, his teams’ work is ready to go into manufacturing in just about a year or two. And memory systems based on doped nano-dots won’t be significantly more expensive than current systems.

“We haven’t scaled up our prototype but we don’t think it should cost a lot more to do this commercially,” he says. “The key is to find someone to start on the large-scale manufacturing process.”

See Also:

• New Technique Promises Billion-Year Data Storage
• Wired 8.04: Instant Access Memory
• Graphene memory makes Flash looks huge and ungainly

Photo: RAM (redjar/Flickr)

It’s been almost an entire year since we heard a peep from the good lads and ladies at Dane-Elec, but those very individuals have today informed us that a few USB 3.0 drives are on the way from its labs. ‘Course, we’d like to point out that it’s being a little ambitious with that whole “world’s first” thing, but given the youth of the format, we’ll take all the competition (and excitement) we can get. The outfit’s So SuperSpeed line of external drives will soon be taking on the US market, offering consumers up to 250MBps data transfers starting on December 11th. Sizes will range from 500GB to 2TB (in both 2.5- and 3.5-inch forms), and we’re told that the SSD options (80GB and 160GB) will indeed be Intel-branded under the hood. Looking for prices? Sure you are — they’re just past the break.

Continue reading Dane-Elec comes clean with external USB 3.0 HDDs / SSDs

Filed under: Software

Dane-Elec comes clean with external USB 3.0 HDDs / SSDs originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In response to widespread media coverage Monday, Apple has acknowledged a bug in its latest operating system, Snow Leopard, that involved some users losing a large amount of their data when logging into guest accounts.

“We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix,” an Apple representative said in a statement.

As far back as September, a number of Snow Leopard users documented the problem on several forum threads. They said the bug involves the home directory — the Mac’s primary user folder — being replaced with an empty folder after users log in with a Guest account. That resulted in loss of documents, downloads, pictures, music and other types of files, the affected users claimed.

“My home folder had been replaced with a ’straight out of the box’ home folder,” wrote user “dubaidan” in a Sept. 3 forum post. “Standard desktop, standard dock, nothing in my documents folder, standard library. My entire home folder is gone.”

Lost data can easily be restored with a backup of a hard drive. But if Snow Leopard users did not back up data prior to experiencing the bug, it would be difficult, and sometimes not possible, to recover lost files.

Though fewer than 100 Snow Leopard users have reported experiencing data loss, information security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski said this bug is considered a serious “screwup” in IT. He theorized the problem could be that the Mac OS confused the home folder for a guest account and accidentally flushed out the data.

Whatever the case may be, Zdziarski called this bug an “embarrassment” for Apple.

“Apple seems to be downplaying [the bug] to an asinine degree,” Zdziarski said. “It’s actually pretty serious to the end-user, and Apple is likely working hard to get their legal department ready to respond to massive lawsuits.”

Apple has yet to publish a fix, but for the time being, Zdziarski recommended for Snow Leopard users to back up their data regularly.

See Also:

• Apple’s Snow Leopard Is Less Secure Than Windows, But Safer …
• Apple’s Snow Leopard Ships With Older, Vulnerable Version of Flash …
• Review: Snow Leopard Combines Minor Improvements, Major Future …

Photo: Tambako the Jaguar/Flickr