Crystal USB devices latest in trendy fashion

Last year’s launch of the Active Crystal drives from Philips & Swarovski must be some success. The ladies must really dig the crystal-clad flash drives in heart & purse shape, and now they want more. The 2008 collection collection of thumb drives ranging from sparkling robots to glamorous moon might be just what they like.

The robot-lookalike Naughty Raymond is accompanied by cutely Happy Laura, the two can be either used as a pendant or a charm. Their heads house the actual flash drive, and their crystal ears flash during data transfer. The Moon USB Memory Keys have a polished stainless steel body with either a fully faceted Chrome or clear crystal. Unlike the robots, they come with a retractable USB connector that can be released by pressing the crystal chaton on top. All four are now in 2GB, a rather disappointing upgrade taken account into their pricing. The Moons currently retail for €190 each while the Robots cost €40 less. (link)

Power failures can still corrupt data

When the power fails, no individual component gets a clean shutdown command; power is just removed. When this happens, some parts of the machine may last longer than other parts. One of the first things that will happen, is that the memory DIMMs will no longer be refreshed properly (DRAM needs to be refreshed constantly otherwise it will lose its data) and very rapidly, the memory will contain only garbage. The hard drives and DMA controller however, will run a bit longer; so if data is being written to disk, the DMA controller will keep reading data from memory, but it has no idea that this data is corrupted. Some file systems are more sensitive to this kind of failure, because of the different kinds of journaling they do.

There are certain machines which are protected against this type of data corruption, by having the power supply send an interrupt to the operating system when power fails, but ordinary class PC hardware does not. (link)

Vista not optimized for SSD, delayed

“The next generation of SSDs will use multilevel cell (MLC) technology, which will require a more sophisticated controller - a crucial component in solid state drives. These drives will have capacities ranging up to 128GB, 160GB, and later, 256GB. MLC drives are expected to appear in a wider selection of notebooks later this year.”

Yes, yes, less details. I don’t really care about what you need to do, just get me faster bigger drives at an affordable price.

“… Chief Executive Officer Eli Harari said that Windows Vista will present a special challenge for solid state drive makers. “As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid state disk,” he said.”

Vista poses problems for all of us dumb users who upgraded. Tell me something I don’t know.

“This is due to Vista’s design. “The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls,” he said.” (link)

No surprise here, everything else has to compensate for the resource hungry Vista. Is Vista optimized for anything?

Toshiba 400GB … in a 2.5″ hard drive

400GB too much? I have a theory about the average user. Most only have about 80GB of data. The casual user has even less maybe 10 - 40GB. The heavy user is going to have 250GB - 1TB. The question is: will heavy users be willing to shell out for a 2.5″ 400GB drive? Would that lead them to purchase a Toshiba product over another brand? I’m guessing most heavy users opt for an external drive to house the bulk of their data while only essential programs are installed on the laptop. Seems like a very targeted product but then again, do you see anyone else producing these drives yet? Exactly. Innovation breeds user confidence which means more money for Toshiba.

“Toshiba Launches 400GB 2.5-Inch HDD Introduces New Line-up Of 7,200rpm Drives

400GB Drive Cuts Acoustic Noise During Data Seek By 2dB(1) For near Silent Operation
Toshiba Corporation today announced a new line-up of high performance 2.5-inch HDDs, including a low-noise flagship model that boosts areal density to 477Mbit/mm2 (308Gbpsi) to achieve a capacity of 400GB on just two platters, plus five drives that bring new levels of performance and 7,200rpm rotational speeds to the company’s full range of storage capacities.” (link)

Tom’s Hardware: ‘funny thing … SSD’s are more efficient’

The conclusion, however, that Flash SSDs are often misleadingly presented as energy savers to increase your battery mileage on notebooks, is not invalidated. The truth is that more and more Flash SSDs will be increasingly efficient. But many conventional hard drives can also be more efficient than today’s Flash SSDs in the scenarios some of you were demanding: when providing data under a defined workload such as video playback or in idle until the notebook battery runs empty.

We looked into all of that to find answers to the questions. You will see that there is indeed one Flash SSD that beats the living daylights out of any hard drive now, and you will see that answers can only be found for specific applications. (link)

TrueCrypt 6.0: I swear I don’t know how that porn got on there

You and I may have taken the 4th of July off, but the folks over at TrueCrypt didn’t. Instead, they pushed out version 6.0 of their on-the-fly encryption utility, with more options than ever for protecting - and hiding - the critical data on your hard drives. Available for Linux, OS X, and Windows, the software is licensed under its own TrueCrypt license, which is not OSI-approved.

The basic idea behind TrueCrypt is “plausible deniability” - that someone who examines your hard drive, even someone who demands and gets your password, shouldn’t be able to find all of the encrypted data. They employ a variety of strategies to achieve this, starting with the fact that you can hide a TrueCrypt-encrypted file system inside of any file. You can also put a “hidden volume” on the drive - a TrueCrypt volume inside another TrueCrypt volume, which is statistically indistinguishable from random noise.

TrueCrypt can use a variety of algorithms for its encryption, including AES, TwoFish, Serpent, and combinations of these. The developers have been good about dropping support for algorithms that have been significantly weakened over the software’s lifetime. (link)

Toshiba crams 160GB into 1.8″ hard drive

Toshiba the pioneer in small form factor hard disk drives, continues to deliver innovative storage solutions with today’s announcement of the industry’s highest-capacity series of SATA 1.8-inch HDDs. The new 5,400 RPM HDDs come in single-platter 80GB and dual-platter 160GB models, delivering market-leading capacity, high-performance and durability in compact packages for space-efficient mobile PC systems.

The storage capacities offered by the 160GB MK1617GSG and 80GB MK8017GSG mirror those of larger form factor HDDs, while reducing the storage footprint by nearly 40 percent compared with the 2.5-inch form factor. Combined with the new micro-SATA connector, Serial-ATA 1.5Gb/s
interface and 5,400 RPM spin speed, the MKxx17GSG series offers small and light-weight solutions at increased data transfer rates for enhanced performance in sub-notebook PCs. (link)

Fire and waterproof hard drives

ioSafe has released the “3.5 series”, a range of hard drives for home and business PCs to data centre servers at a price that not only seems pretty reasonable for the protection – but also because it includes up to $2500 in additional data recovery per drive, if needed.

Designed to be used like any other hard drive, they’re being marketed as an extra insurance policy in an uncertain world, and given they’re the first of its kind, it’s pretty impressive.

ioSafe says its new drive is “engineered to protect data from fire (up to 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit or 760 degrees Celsius) and flood (full immersion in fresh or salt water).”

ioSafe have managed to do this by putting a 2.5-inch hard drive into a 3.5-inch disk enclosure, making the size compatible with 3.5-inch drive bays. The space between the 3.5-inch enclosure and the 2.5-inch drive is where the ioSafe protection against fire and water technology lies, while also “resolving heat dissipation issues found in all computer systems.” (link)

Fujitsu designs hard drive for 24 hour heavy use

Fujitsu Limited today announced that it has developed a new series of 2.5″ hard disk drives (HDDs) specifically designed for 24-hour continuous operation and are available in a category-leading capacity of 250 GB and a rotational speed of 7,200 RPM. Sales of the new MHZ2 BK Series will start at the end of July 2008.

The MHZ2 BK Series is intended to be used in demanding environments with high-frequency access, including entry-level servers or storage systems in enterprise IT equipment, and ATMs or POS systems in industrial applications, where reliability is paramount.

Another feature of the new series is that it has industry-leading power conservation, requiring a low 2.3 W for read and write operations. The series is one of many new products announced as part of Fujitsu’s Green Policy Innovation program, unveiled in December 2007 to promote energy-efficient products and services as a way to help customers lower their ecological footprint. (link)

Greenhouse claims fastest SSD

The new drives read at up to 130MB/s with write speeds of 67MB/s, with capacities that range from 16GB up to 128GB. Drive size is a standard 2.5-inches, with a 9.5mm height. Greenhouse says the SATA-compatible boxes will be available in late May (in Japan at least), no word on pricing. (engadget)