Data Transfer

With its promise of data transfer rates 10x greater than current USB 2.0 devices USB 3.0 is a technology much anticipated by those of us regularly dealing with the transfer of huge files. Symwave’s VP of Marketing, John O’Neil, provided Gizmag with a first-hand demonstration of some of the USB drives utilizing the company’s technology starting to appear on store shelves from the likes of LaCie, OCZ and Super Talent. The peripherals impressed with not only their transfer speeds, but also their low demands on a PCs CPU.  Read More

We've seen vertically oriented transistors, now it's time for entire chips to explore the z-axis. Collaborating with Swiss research institutes EPFL and ETH Zurich, IBM has made another important step toward creating faster, higher-efficiency "3D" processors stacking their cores vertically to increase the number of interconnections and sensibly reduce heat.  Read More

Asus has announced the world's first motherboard to support the upcoming USB 3.0 standard, allowing data transfer rates approaching 600MB/s. It also includes the latest generation SATA, which will support transfer speeds of up to 6Gbit/s, and the company has also flagged a cheaper alternative in the form of an add-in card that will offer these two functionalities for motherboards of the same family and will be sold for under US$30.  Read More

A new technology that applies the same principles used by ADSL to improve the capacity of data transfer over copper and wireless broadband could potentially increase the data capacity of optical fiber cables tenfold. It’s creators say the technology, known as optical Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (oOFDM), offers an inexpensive way drastically boost the capacity of increasingly strained broadband networks and improve download times around the world.  Read More

Though it may not make it into everyone’s ‘top ten’ list of most desirable technological developments, replacing the spaghetti-junction of wires that typically gathers behind a desk or workspace would undoubtedly be a welcome advance. Wireless peripherals are helping the situation somewhat and wireless power will be a massive boon once perfected but, in the meantime, we’re looking to technologies like optical cables to handle high-volume data transfer. Intel’s recent research in this area should be of particular interest, since it’s designed to replace or augment connections used in consumer-based electronics, such as USB2.0, HDMI, Firewire, DVI and the like.  Read More

How is it that my cell phone still loses connection in the city and my laptop barely gets the Internet in the mountains, yet NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) can keep in touch with Earth from 238,800 miles away, 24 hours a day? Additionally, LRO can transmit 461GB of data per day (the equivalent amount of information found in a huge library), sending this information at a rate of up to 100Mb/s, while my so-called high-speed Internet service struggles to provide about 1-3Mb/s. Obviously, it’s not what you know but who you know!  Read More

July 26, 2007 Just how fast does wireless data transfer have to get before it ceases to be a limiting factor in application design? Researchers in Georgia are working on new ultra-high-frequency radio technology that has already achieved a phenomenal 15 gigabits per second (Gbps) over short distances. For reference, that’s a whole DVD worth of data transferred in a little over 3 seconds – and they’re hoping to double that speed within 12 months. With such transfer rates available, high-definition media streaming and file sharing becomes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it affair. Backups and full hard drive synchronization between different machines will be quick and painless, and distributed application and file sharing around networks will become, for the most part, something the user will simply not have to think about. It’s estimated at about three years from hitting the market, but this amazing technology is set to make big waves.  Read More