Data Storage
Hitachi develops "incorruptible" glass-based data storage technique
Back when compact discs were first coming out, they were touted as being able to store data “forever.” As it turns out, given no more than a decade or so, they can and do degrade. According to an AFP report, Hitachi has unveiled a system that really may allow data to last forever – or at least, for several hundred million years. It involves forming microscopic dots within a piece of quartz glass, those dots serving as binary code. Read More
Unlike Iomega’s eGo Helium portable hard drive, a new hard disk drive platform developed by Western Digital (WD) subsidiary HGST actually does fill hard drives with helium. Rather than just making the drive a little bit lighter, replacing regular old air with helium and sealing it within the drive enclosure has allowed HGST to increase hard drive storage capacity by 40 percent while reducing power consumption by 23 percent. Read More
What if there was an iPhone case that could add three major functions to the device? That is exactly what Charlie Corry set out to do when he came up with the iExpander. He made an iPhone case that adds support for microSD cards, charges your phone and improves the function of the camera's flash in low light situations. Read More
Harvard geneticist stores 70 billion copies of his book in DNA
George Church is a professor of genetics at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and also co-author of the book Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves in DNA. With a title like that, it’s only fitting that the book was used to break the record that it recently did – Church led a team that encoded 70 billion html copies of the book in DNA. That’s 1,000 times more data than the previous record. Read More
A lot of people like the idea of being able to carry things like photo or video files with them on their iPhone, but depending on what capacity model they have, may not necessarily want to take up memory on the phone with those files. That’s where ego & company’s Hybrid Series USB Case comes into play – it’s a case for the iPhone 4 and 4S, with a built-in USB Flash drive. Read More
Backing up data is a simple and yet forgettable part of modern life. If files are important, they need to be stored in multiple places. A desktop or laptop hard drive is the first, and an external drive, disc or the cloud is generally the second. But even if you're diligent - and more than three quarters of us aren't according to data collected by Parks Associates - pictures, videos and other files uploaded to social networking sites might miss that crucial backup. Backup Plus, a new line of storage devices from Seagate, offers to save those photos and videos you posted on Facebook, Flickr and elsewhere with the click of an icon. Read More
These days, Flash memory is almost the defacto standard for data storage in consumer devices, being found in everything from PCs and digital cameras, to smartphones and USB thumb drives. But a team of researchers at University College of London (UCL) has developed a new type of memory chip that is much faster than Flash memory, while also offering greater storage densities and requiring much less power. Could the days of Flash memory's dominance be numbered? Read More
Fingerprint recognition has long been used to protect sensitive data on USB drives - here’s another approach. This 8GB USB storage device uses voice recognition software to detect a password spoken by the user. Read More
According to Dr. James M. Tour, a synthetic organic chemist at Houston’s Rice University, flash memory devices can only be built smaller for another six to seven years – at that point, they will reach a technological barrier. Already, however, Tour and his colleagues have developed a new type of memory chip, which they believe could replace flash in thumb drives, smartphones and computers. Not only does their chip allow more data to be stored in a given space, but it can also be folded like paper, withstand temperatures of up to 1,000ºF (538ºC), and is transparent – this means that devices’ screens could also serve as their memory. Read More
When completed in 2024, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the largest, most sensitive radio telescope ever created. It will consist of 3,000 individual ground-based dish antennas, linked to act as one big telescope – an arrangement known as an interferometer. While their combined total surface area will be about one square kilometer (0.39 sq mile), they will be spread out across a geographical area approximately 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) in width. They will be gathering about one exabyte of astronomical data per day, which is twice the amount of data that is handled by the World Wide Web on a daily basis. Today, IBM announced that it has partnered with ASTRON (the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy), in an effort to develop computer systems that will be able read, analyze and store all of that data, and do so in an energy-efficient manner. Read More
