storage

Today's technologies, both software and hardware, have made it easier to do work almost anywhere and everywhere and in almost any condition. Of course, when it comes to extreme conditions, you will need equipment that won't easily break under pressure or even under water. That's where rugged devices come in and LaCie's three new SSDs make the perfect partners for equally rugged laptops and smartphones used for crafting the next YouTube hit.

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This week the folks at Western Digital released a new collection of WD_Black series hard drives (HDD and SSD) with radical new industrial designs. When you're buying a hard disk drive or solid-state drive, especially an external HDD or SSD, you'll first look at the capabilities of the drive - mostly innards. Then you'll look at the external bits - the way the case looks, the bits you'll be seeing every time you access your gaming machine. Because of this, Western Digital went the extra mile (in the right direction) with their latest round of WD_Black.

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The current state of technology is pretty much a compromise when it comes to data storage. HDD's have high capacities and are cheap but sometimes unreliable while SSDs are thinner, more durable, but also more expensive. On smaller devices, PCIe attached NVMe storage offer speeds that even UFS much less eMMC storage can only dream of but users are mostly stuck with what's soldered onboard. Toshiba, however, is saying you don't need to choose with its new XFMEXPRESS form factor that is practically an SSD card not unlike a microSD card.

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Throughout all of Samsung's troubles in terms of smartphone revenues, its silicon and data storage businesses have always brought in the dough. There is news that those are now also in peril, which is why it is now boasting of its sixth gen V-NAND data storage that crams more than a hundred layers in a single stack of 3D memory.

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Earlier today I happened upon the Android app called Photo Map. This app was developed by Levion Software, and it seems to deliver exactly the service it intended to provide. Much like a similar iPhone/iOS feature that's been in play for several years, this "Photo Map" app creates a lovely spread of photos the user took and uploaded to Google Photos. For that, it's a great piece of work, and the developer deserves their accolades. What I did not expect was that this app would remind me to check my email at exactly the right moment - the moment Google would deliver a foreboding message.

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The amount of data we generate and accumulate is sometimes too much for our laptops or even desktops to accommodate. Normal external hard drives are veritably just that, hard drives you plug in as needed. Networked Attached Storage or NAS provide some speed, reliability, and power but at the price of complexity. Enter Direct-Attached Storage or DAS like the new TerraMaster D2 Thunderbolt 3 that offer the reliability of NAS drives without the hassle nor the latency of networks.

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Today OWC revealed its latest external SSD, the Envoy Pro EX. The Envoy Pro EX works with both PCs and Macs and promises pretty ridiculous transfer speeds for an external drive, with OWC saying they can go as high as 980MB/s. It's available in a number of sizes as well, though depending on what you're after, the price you pay has the potential to get expensive quickly.

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OneDrive is making some big changes today, doubling the storage in its standalone plan, while adding a new OneDrive Personal Vault for maximizing security around the most important files. The new Personal Vault features is an extra-protected subset of data, which can be only be accessed with secondary authentication.

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Google Drive and Google Photos will soon de-sync photos and videos hosted between the two. Google suggested that "automatic sync" between the two services was just "confusing" for users, so they've decided to "simplify" the experience. Accidental deletions and appearances of counting data twice will soon be out the door - sort of.

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Smartphones and digital cameras are getting more capable and more sophisticated and that's not yet considering the new breed of 360-degree 3D cameras that are starting to pop up here and there. This means that internal storage may no longer be enough to hold even the shortest videos and common microSD cards may be too low and too slow to meet the need for speed. Enter the first generation of 1 TB microSD cards now led by the SanDisk Extreme. With promises high capacity and high speed, this card will breeze through your video and data workload, if it doesn't burn a hole in your wallet first.

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Intel may be best known for its CPUs but the company has also dabbled in other markets where its silicon prowess could be used. Although it has pretty much failed in producing a noteworthy graphics card, it's making quite an impression in the flash memory department with Optane. Now it is combining two of its best technologies in the Intel Optane Memory H10 with solid-state storage to give laptops, 2-in-1s, all-in-ones, and mini PCs an edge in data storage and access.

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Collaborating with the University of Washington, Microsoft has demonstrated a system that can store information in synthetic DNA and then retrieve the data afterward. The proof-of-concept device is among the first of its kind and can automatically encode data into a DNA sequence and then convert the information back to ones and zeros again so it’s readable by digital machines.

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