Storage

By manipulating matter at the nanoscale level, engineers from North Carolina State University led by Dr. Jagdish Narayan have developed a new material that could make it possible to manufacture terabyte memory chips the size of a fingernail, boost vehicles' fuel economy significantly and reduce heat dissipated by semiconductors, with applications ranging from spintronics to solar panel technology.  Read More

SanDisk Corporation has begun shipping 64Gb flash memory cards based on the company’s advanced X4 flash memory technology. Five years in the making, X4 (4-bits-per-cell) technology holds twice as many bits in each cell as conventional multi-level cell (MLC) NAND memory chips. Based on 43nm process technology, the 64Gb NAND flash chip is the highest-density single-die memory device in the world to enter production. SanDisk is shipping 8GB and 16GB SDHC cards as well as 8GB and 16GB Memory Stick PRO Duo cards with X4 technology.  Read More

For those who love getting out on the water, but lack the extra space required to store a recreational vessel, comes the Citbot Folding Kayak. Lightweight and easily assembled, the kayak can carry up to 95kg and folds down into a convenient backpack weighing just 11kg.  Read More

Kingston recently released MobileLiteG2, the second generation of its portable Flash card reader. The 18.9g plug-and-play unit shows up as two separate devices on your system to make it easier to transfer data between Flash memory cards using only one USB port.  Read More

Hard drives aren’t just getting bigger, they’re also getting faster. And, for the time being, there's no bigger or faster desktop hard drive than Seagate’s new Barracuda XT. It's a 7200RPM drive that boasts 2TB of storage space and a blazing 6Gb/second SATA interface. This high performance, high capacity drive is aimed at gamers, digital video editors and other storage- and speed-hungry desktop computing applications.  Read More

Westfalia-Automotive has created a towbar-mounted bicycle rack that, in a matter of seconds, converts into an extra boot by attaching a cleverly-designed waterproof lid. Portilo – the bike rack – is built to hold two bicycles in stands, rather than hang them from the frame (which is becoming increasingly difficult these days, given the variation in frame sizes between brands). The PortiloBox fits the Portilo easily with no tools needed to secure it. It’s only small but, if you just need that little bit of extra space, it’s ideal.  Read More

The Nexto eXtreme ND2700 is a 320GB 2.5" SATA drive in an enclosure with two memory card slots, enabling the backup of CompactFlash, SD/SDHC, MMC/MMCPlus, MS/MS Pro-HG/MS Pro MagicGate, and xD cards (and more, with an optional adapter) without a computer. It can also backup straight from your camera using the USB OTG port, and features USB 2.0 and eSATA connectors, the latter of which means you can pull data off the drive at an average of 60 megabytes per second.  Read More

Any professional photographer who has bought a cheap flash memory card and spent hours offloading gigabytes of images, or had their memory card stall when trying to shoot in burst mode, would know that not all memory cards are created equal. SanDisk’s new line of Extreme Pro CompactFlash memory cards proves this point by offering 90MB/s peak read and write speeds – double the performance of previous SanDisk high-end camera memory cards.  Read More

Graphite has long been known to have unique electrical properties and has therefore been put forward by many as a possible substitute for silicon for use in integrated circuitry. Now, in a major step towards making graphene-based electronics, researchers from Rice University have published the results of work on graphite-based mass data storage and reprogrammable gate arrays.  Read More