Data storage knowledges, online data storage, data storage skills and more!
On Feb. 20, 2013, Seagate unveils its Seagate Korea Design Center, dedicated to developing advanced 2.5-inch hard drive solutions and small form-factor products for the mobile compute market. The new R&D Hub is located at Gwanggyo New Town, Gyeong-gi Province, is a seven-story, 26,000 square-meter building. Seagate has invested US$ 136.5Million (Approximately KRW 142.34Billion) in…
Seagate and Virident announced a strategic agreement to jointly deliver solutions for the growing enterprise flash storage market. Under the agreement, Seagate will immediately offer a complete line of flash-based PCIe solutions to its OEM and distribution partners. In addition, Seagate and Virident intend to leverage their mutual strengths to create next-generation hardware and software solutions for the solid-state storage market. In conjunction with the agreement, Seagate has made a strategic equity investment in Virident, and will appoint one member to the Virident Board of Directors.
“Seagate is thrilled to team with Virident, a technology leader in one of the fastest growing markets in enterprise and cloud computing, together, we are working to develop the next-generation hardware and software solutions in the PCIe space. Our solid-state strategy is founded on both in-house development and through strategic partnerships with innovative companies to deliver the broadest portfolio in the industry. We believe that this strategic agreement immediately strengthens our leading position in the enterprise storage market by adding a broad line of Seagate flash-based PCIe solutions powered by Virident to our portfolio. We look forward to a long, productive partnership with Virident.”said Gary Gentry, senior vice president and general manager, Solid State Drives at Seagate.
“We are extremely pleased to have Seagate as a strategic partner and investor, this partnership validates Virident’s vision of pervasive flash in the performance tier and accelerates our shared vision by bringing next-generation SCM solutions to the enterprise and web datacenters worldwide. The agreement also expands Virident’s routes to market today by making our best-in-class PCIe flash products available to Seagate’s world-class channels.” said Mike Gustafson, Chief Executive Officer of Virident.
About Virident Systems
Virident Systems is a leading provider of enterprise-class Storage Class Memory (SCM) solutions that deliver unconditional, consistent performance to data-intensive applications. The inherent advantage associated with this disruptive technology revolutionizes computing by speeding application response time and optimizing datacenter efficiency for new levels of ROI. Virident Systems is backed by strategic investors, Intel®, Cisco® Systems and a storage solution provider, as well as Hercules Technology Growth Capital and venture investors Globespan Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, Mitsui Global Investments and Artiman Ventures. For more information, visit www.virident.com.
You’ve heard it thousands of times — backup your data. A good data backup strategy is to have two copies of your data – one local (it resides in your office or place of business) and one offsite (you pay an online data company to store it remotely on their secure servers).
Online backup is now a must have for all computer users, as we now live in a digital age where our whole digital life is store online. Our files, photos, music, video, financials and more are all stored on our computer hard drives. But what happens if your hard drives crash? All hard drives will fail eventually and they usually happen at random when you least expect them. We no longer have CD collections, or DVD racks with our films, or photo albums of our photos, they are all stored on our hard drives. Theft, Fire, Accidental deletion, hardware failure, all these can contribute to lost files. Files which are no longer just binary text, these files are irreplaceable memories which money cannot buy back.
Online Backup for Small Business
Tips For Buying Online Backup Services:
Below are some of the main factors to consider when selecting an online data backup providers:
1. The Kind of Backup User You Are:
A service designed for home users or small businesses is quite different than one designed for the enterprise. The latter requires complex features such as ability to backup operating system files, live database, historical backup, and extremely tight encryption, while the former would be happy with a relatively low priced service that provides common features such as scheduled backup, web access, ability to send files by CD/DVD, and share files with others.
2. In general, online backup users should ask the following questions:
3. Security
To ensure that your data is secure while it is being transferred from your computer to the provider’s data center, most providers offer the option of encryption and password protection. In this way, only someone with your password can access your data.
In most cases a 128-bit encryption is sufficient. For some businesses that want absolute privacy, security might require a much stronger encryption. Although not very common, some providers offer a 448-bit encryption. In addition, data has to remain secure once it reaches the destination server, which means providers have to have proper policies to ensure employees do not access client data for non-authorized reasons. Most providers take the issue of security very seriously, as it is one of the reasons why computer users are hesitant to backup online.
4. Speed, Reliability and Uptime
As backups are usually a last resort way of recovering data after a disaster or system failure, backup providers don’t have much of a margin of error. The data has to be there when needed. No amount of explanation on why the data is not available will calm a user that just lost an entire computer hard drive and is trying to restore from a backup.
To ensure the provider has taken sufficient steps to keep service reliable, you should ask the following questions:
Does the backup provider have a “backup†copy of all clients’ data somewhere on a secondary data center, away from the primary?
Is the backup center equipped with uninterruptible power supply, backup generator and is it located in a safe and secure location?
What is the uptime for the data center?
How many clicks does it take before the actual backup is started?
How fast is the data center?
How much CPU or disk resources does it chew up when the backup is running?
Where is the geographic location of the data center?
Is the backup continues?
How many years has this Online Backup Service Provider been in business or does the company have solid financial resources?
How fast can files be restored?
Who are the clients of this company?
How many paying customers does the company have?
5. Quality and Accessibility of Technical Support
Does the company have a toll free number?
Is technical support available 24/7?
Does this company reveal its email address in their site or does it force me to fill in a time consuming form?
Is there an emergency user support?
Does the company have a physical address listed in their site?
What is the turn around time for email queries?
Does the company have an international presence?
Does the company publish a customer support satisfaction survey stats?
What is the wait time for phone support?
6. Cost
How much does this Online Backup Service Provider charge per GB per month?
Is there a set-up fee?
Is the cost per account or per PC?
How often and how much data are allowed for backup per day or per month?
Is there a no obligation free trial period before I sign up?
Can I cancel at any time or am I tied in for a minimum period?
What is the cost for exceeding the allowable traffic and storage quota?
Is there extra cost for telephone technical support?
7. Some these Online Backup Service Providers:
mypcbackup.com
justcloud.com
backupgenie.com
sosonlinebackup.com
zipcloud.com
sugarsync.com
mozy.com
box.com
crashplan.com
carbonite.com
Online Backup is like insurance, for a small monthly fee (Less than the cost of a Cinema Ticket) you will never have to worry about your files again. If you get a new computer and you need to restore your files and documents its literally a click of a button.
For fun, here is a comparison of some old storage media with something in our data recovery lab right now.
On the left is an IBM 3380 ‘direct storage access device’ circa 1980. Capacity: 1 GB. On the right, a RAID recovery on one of our lab workbenches, set up in a couple of storage cases.
Capacity: 48 TB.
The cases and the old IBM device are about the same size… ~30cm across, but of course 30 years difference.
Gigabyte:
The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte fordigital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units (SI), therefore 1 gigabyte is1000000000 bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB or Gbyte, but not Gb (lower case b) which is typically used for the gigabit.
Terabytes:
The terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte digital information. The prefix tera means 1012 in the International System of Units (SI), and therefore 1 terabyte is 1000000000000 bytes, or 1trillion (short scale) bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte in binary prefixes is 0.9095 tebibytes, or 931.32 gibibytes. The unit symbol for the terabyte is TB or TByte, but not Tb(lower case b) which refers to terabit.
IBM Corp. said Monday it acquired Butterfly Software, a privately held data analysis and migration software company headquartered in Maidenhead, England.
Butterfly’s main feature is its ability to migrate data center infrastructures. According to the company website, it focuses on lowering the cost and risk of maintaining legacy storage and backup & recovery environments. This allows companies to consolidate enterprise data and analyze it for strategic purposes.
IBM has staked its claim in the analytics market. This acquisition plays to that strategy.
IBM said Butterfly makes storage planning software and migration tools, which can help companies save time, storage space, IT funds, and power consumption.
The companies did not disclose terms of the purchase.
Shares of IBM lost 69 cents to close at $205.29 Monday.
Sept. 10, 2012 – Western Digital Corp. today announced it is sampling a 5mm-thin hard disk drive(New 5 mm Standard Slashes Storage Footprint by Almost 50% Compared to Traditional 2.5-inch Hard Drives) featuring hybrid technology. Western Digital has developed hard drives slim enough for integration into today’s thinnest notebook PCs, which provide high-capacity storage and robustness while featuring instant-on and application performance similar to today’s client solid state drives (SSDs). The new technologies will be showcased during WD’s Investor Day, Sept. 13, 2012.
“Mobile devices are becoming smaller, thinner, lighter and more responsive, working with our technology partners, WD has developed new 5 mm hard drives that enable high capacity storage along with excellent performance and superior economics to allow our customers to expand their thin offerings.”- said Matt Rutledge, vice president of client storage solutions at WD.
With device volumetric efficiency a key concern for system makers, WD began shipping 7 mm height hard drives for thin-profile notebooks earlier this year (historically, standard notebook hard drives have been 9.5 mm). WD 5 mm hybrid hard drives will enable the market’s thinnest computers to offer 500 GB of capacity, utilizing almost 50% less volume compared to current 9.5 mm hard drives and at one tenth the cost of similar capacity SSDs.
“Acer is partnering with WD to bring advanced notebook performance and capacity in the smallest form factor, It’s a part of our ongoing commitment to present leading technology that ultimately improves the total user experience of our customers.”- said David Lee, associate vice president of Mobile Computing Product business unit at Acer.
“We are seeing a shift in the computing world to more powerful mobile computing solutions, notebook business unit. with this in mind, ASUS and WD are collaborating to create slimmer and more mobile notebook solutions — without sacrificing capacity or performance — to deliver smaller form-factor to consumers.” – said SY Shain, senior vice president of ASUS’
Hybrid Technology and Client Tiered Storage
WD’s innovative hybrid technology pairs MLC NAND flash storage for fast SSD-like data throughput and instant-on responsiveness with magnetic disks for efficient, high-capacity storage. Similar to the practice of multi-million dollar enterprise systems, WD’s hybrid technology utilizes the concept of tiered storage. Data accessed most frequently (often referred to as ‘hot’ data) is managed using speedy NAND flash to ensure fast response times, while data accessed less often (‘cold’ data) resides on the robust magnetic disks. The tiered design of hybrid hard drives, compared to current dual-drive solutions, also provides a redundancy benefit for users. The magnetic disk backs up all files residing in the NAND, protecting the user from inevitable NAND wear and preserving it for the more hot data handling. WD’s hybrid technology works in conjunction with the PC operating system to deliver higher performance than current hybrid offerings while minimizing NAND wear to allow the use of less expensive MLC NAND.
Hybrid hard drives combine NAND flash and magnetic disks, simplifying storage-element integration for OEM customers and providing a host of end user benefits: superior performance, responsiveness, lower power consumption, greater operating shock tolerance, and data protection. And unlike dual-drive designs, WD’s hybrid technology provides single-unit design homogeneity that OEM system manufacturers have long sought from the storage industry.
Following their press releases issued on May 23, 2012 and June 14, 2012, Seagate Technology plc and LaCie S.A. announced the completion of the purchase by Seagate of all of the shares of Philippe Spruch and his affiliate, representing 64.5% of the outstanding shares of LaCie for a provisional price of €4.05 per share. The price payable to Philippe Spruch and his affiliate may be increased by 3%, to €4.17 per share, in the event that within six months following today’s date, Seagate holds at least 95% of the share capital and voting rights of LaCie.
The completion of the transaction follows the required clearances from the French Ministry of Finance and the US and German Antitrust Authorities.
As a result of the completion of the transaction, Seagate intends to file in the coming weeks with the FrenchAutorité des marches financiers an all-cash simplified tender offer on the remaining LaCie shares.
As previously announced, Ricol Lasteyrie & Associés has been appointed as independent expert by the Board of Directors of LaCie on May 23, 2012.
Following discussions with the Board of Directors of LaCie, in particular with the independent members, Seagate has increased the proposed offer price at which it will file its tender offer to €4.50 per LaCie share (without an additional 3% price supplement in the event that a squeeze-out procedure is implemented). Seagate may carry out a squeeze-out procedure at the same price of €4.50 per LaCie share if it were to hold at least 95% of the shares and voting rights of LaCie.
The Board of Directors welcomes the revised offer price and intends to support the revised offer as long as the final report of the independent expert affirms the valuation.
About Seagate
Seagate is a world leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions. Learn more at www.seagate.com.
About LaCie
With operations in the Americas, Europe and Asia, LaCie is the leading manufacturer of storage devices for PC, Apple, and Linux. LaCie has differentiated itself through sleek design and remarkable technical performance. Find out more about our products at www.lacie.com.
New WD Red™ Drives Optimized for Compatibility in Always-on 1- to 5-Bay NAS Systems; Provide Buyers More Choices Tailored to Their Needs.
WD®, a storage industry leader, today announced the debut of WD Red™ NAS hard drives, an innovative line of SATA hard drives specifically designed for home and small office NAS (network attached storage) systems with one to five drive bays. Compatibility-tested with top NAS box manufacturers and optimized for power and performance, WD Red hard drives are now shipping in 3.5-inch 1 TB, 2 TB and 3 TB capacities.
The WD Red line features NASware™ technology, designed to improve reliability and system performance, reduce customer downtime and to simplify the integration process. This new product line addresses the unique environment of NAS and the growing demand for affordable, reliable and compatible storage that reduces customer total cost of ownership. WD Red hard drives also feature 3D Active Balance Plus, an enhanced balance control technology, which significantly improves the overall drive performance and reliability. In an exclusive for WD Red customers, WD is offering free premium 24×7 dedicated support and a three-year limited warranty.
The addition of WD Red expands WD’s “Power of Choice” client hard drive solutions. WD recognizes that customers and their applications are diverse and they should be empowered to choose the drives that best suit their specific storage needs. With distinguishable colors, the “Power of Choice” storage solutions are clear and easy to identify: WD Blue™ (solid performance and reliability for everyday computing) WD Green™ (cool, quiet, eco-friendly), WD Black™ (maximum performance for power computing), and WD Red (home and small office NAS). The four colors enable quick selection of the best WD drive for customers’ application or usage requirements.
The network attached entry level storage market is poised to grow at an 86.2 percent 2011-2016 CAGR1,” according to John Rydning, IDC’s research vice president for hard disk drives. “WD’s new WD Red hard disk drives offer a unique combination of product features and customer support for users seeking to expand the capacity of their entry-level network attached storage solutions.
Until now, customers had to choose between using desktop or high-end server drives for their home or small office NAS systems – neither of which were both cost effective for consumer solutions and fully NAS compatible, WD saw this challenge as a perfect opportunity to design a better solution so we developed WD Red drives, an optimized product for this rapidly growing segment. said Melyssa Banda, senior director of product marketing for WD.
WD Red hard drives integrate seamlessly with WD NAS solutions and are qualified to work with a wide array of WD OEM partners. An updated list of WD Red-qualified products and manufacturers is available on the WD website at: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810
Availability and Pricing
WD Red hard drives are available now at select resellers and distributors. Manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) for the WD Red 1 TB drive (model #: WD10EFRX) is $109.00 USD, the 2 TB drive (model #: WD20EFRX) is $139.00 USD and the 3 TB drive (model #: WD30EFRX) is $189.00 USD. More information about WD Red hard drives including terms of the limited warranty may be found on the company website at: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810
WD Red NAS Hard Drive Launch Partners
WD Branded Products
“The My Book Live family has received strong reception from consumers and the WD Red drive offers attributes ideal for small NAS systems,” said Scott Vouri, vice president and general manager of WD’s connected home solutions group. “My Book Live customers will benefit from WD Red’s NASware features in the future.”
QNAP Systems, Inc.
“The rapid growth of the global NAS market has led to hard drives optimized specifically for entry-level NAS use,” said Richard Lee, CEO of QNAP Systems, Inc. “The launch of WD Red NAS hard drives offer QNAP® four-bay NAS products a reliable solution for 24×7 operations. QNAP also provides a broad range of high-end business level NAS solutions well matched with WD RAID level hard drives.”
Synology Inc.
“Synology® is thrilled to be teaming up with WD to offer customers a reliable storage solution featuring WD Red NAS hard drives, which are optimized for consumer NAS systems,” said Vic Hsu, CEO of Synology Inc. “The award-winning Synology DiskStation makes it easy for users to build secure private clouds that operate at maximum uptime. By delivering our unique technologies together, Synology and WD will provide users with greater reliability, cooler operation and a higher quality of user experience.”
Thecus Tech., Corp.
“The compatibility of Thecus® NAS with the new and dynamic WD Red HDDs is excellent news for all,” said Florence Shih, general manager of Thecus. “To realize this vision, users can experience firsthand true power and performance. Ultimately, the congruency among WD Red hard drives with Thecus NAS brings great opportunities to the storage industry.”
Portable storage devices are pretty important in today’s day and age. You can hardly go anywhere without seeing someone or the other with a flashy hot pink one or sporting a USB braided in between funky strings around their neck. Perhaps that’s going a bit too far but you might as well always have one in your wallet or your car dashboard. That is just how essential they have become for us that at any given time, we may feel the need for more storage. But of course, like all things that give us some technological advantage, there are drawbacks.
Easy to Store, Easier to Lose
In the case, of portable drives, the major disadvantage comes with the concerns of privacy and security. In short, these drives are almost a sure fire way to get yourself upped with a keylogger app or some computer monitoring software or the other. And then what happens. Not only do you compromise your security with risks of losing data but also risk all your personal information falling into malicious hands.
So you should be aware of the risks that come with using these cheap and easy tools. Starting with the basics, they are pretty flimsy and can get damaged very easily. This means you need to be extra careful with them so you don’t damage them to the point of no return…which means you losing all your saved data which is usually comprised of your entire backup. But that is the obvious and physical aspect of it which you probably already know. The solution to that is to use the software backup option that most USBs come with. This way if the USB is damaged, you still have the information stored somewhere on cloud. And if not, opt for cloud data storage.
What Organizations Dread
Let us come to the more sinister side, the side that is susceptible to all sorts of dangers including malware, spyware such as computer monitoring software, bugs, Trojans and the never ending list of cyber calamities goes on. People have horror stories about free keyloggers, and even paid ones that were used to infiltrate their privacy. Just like other hard drives, CD ROMS, and floppy disks, USBs and other portable hard drives are just as targetable by virus and similar spyware risks. So for organizations, the fear that their workers can lose and mishandle information they store on portable drives in order to change work environments (for e.g, from work to home or to a remote system), is more real than any other malicious malware threat around.
To secure themselves from a nightmare scenario where things get ported out too fast and without warning, most organizations make sure they have complete virus and spyware protection solutions in place. But that’s the thing with these portable drives; threats can go completely and thoroughly undetected. So again, what is the solution?
What Is Available
Well really no easy solution. At best, for organizations they can attempt to disable USB usage altogether. So instead of restricting USBs on premises (which is really a fallible plan), companies can use special computer monitoring software to block any one storing and transferring data via the portable device. Of course, for this, a lot of investment needs to be done on the part of the IT Department. But as the menace of data and security breach continues, it seems to be worth looking into. However, the question that raises itself is whether the future of technology can find a cheap and reasonable solution to this problem.
Author Bio
Jane Andrew is a writer and guest blogger of mobistealth with years of experience in tech industry. She loves to write about computer monitoring software and keylogger. You can also follow her on Twitter @janeandrew01 to get tip and news about cell phone.
Microsoft’s forthcoming Surface tablet could be easier to repair and upgrade than its buttoned up rivals like the MacBook Pro.
Increasingly, iPads, Mac notebooks and high end smartphones are turning into sealed units with few or no user-serviceable parts (for example, iFixit called the MacBook Pro with retina display “the least repairable laptop we’ve ever taken apart”).
It’s nothing new; getting into the original Mac required a large gadget called the case-cracking tool to lever apart the seam of the case, as well as a set of Torx screwdrivers, although Apple’s new MacBook Pro takes this to extremes. There are reasons for sealed units that have to be professionally serviced, as well as good arguments against them.
Sleek, seamless, integrated devices need careful construction; it’s about fitting components together as much as it is about stopping you adding a different hardware component that might or might not perform well in the device.
But it’s nice if hardware design makes it easy to replace the battery or upgrade the storage; even the sleekest PC notebooks have removable panels to simplify that.
Even if you don’t want to tinker yourself, it means you can shop around if your device ever needs repairing. And if you don’t care about the on-going costs of keeping your device working, can I suggest a charity donation, because you obviously have spare cash in your pockets?
The back of the Microsoft Surface looks as sleek and seamless as you can get, until you snap up the kickstand hinge. As well as giving you a stable surface it also reveals ten or so screws holding down a removable panel under the hinge mechanism. They’re Torx screws (not even the Torx Plus or Torx Security screws) so you can get a screwdriver to open them easily. And that could mean the Surface will be cheaper to repair and easier to upgrade.
Screws neatly under the hinge
Close up of the Torx screws (top left)
Don’t expect to be able to change most of the components, especially not on the Surface for Windows RT; both that and the Surface for Windows 8 Pro have a tightly integrated CPU and GPU, in a System on Chip design.
And it wouldn’t be surprising if the memory was soldered in the same way it is in the iPad and the latest MacBook Pros – that would avoid errors from RAM chips working their way out of the socket and possibly save a small amount of space. But Microsoft doesn’t have the scale to have a custom connector on the SSD the way Apple does in its latest models, so you might well be able to upgrade the storage.
Being able to open the Surface yourself should make it easier to replace the battery when it stops taking a full charge (which all batteries do eventually), or take it to a third-party repairer instead of having to trek to a Microsoft Store.
I’ve often argued that tablets are appliances rather than general purpose computers, but that doesn’t mean they have to hard to upgrade or repair. I can order official spare parts for my oven and dishwasher and fit them myself for a fraction of the cost of an accredited repair (one oven handle, one oven door, one dishwasher handle and umpteen oven lightbulbs later, I’ve saved a fair amount).
If Microsoft can make an ultra-thin tablet that you can still open up to repair, that’s another tribute to its design skills.
