Just how much it will cost to expand your Xbox Series X or Series S' storage with an official Storage Expansion Card has been confirmed, and you should probably start saving now. While the two new next-generation consoles come with either 1TB or 512GB of internal SSD storage as standard, for maximum performance that can be boosted with a Seagate plug-in card.
In addition to living in a digital age, our lives have also started to revolve around clouds, that is, cloud storage and services. This elusive and ephemeral concept, however, still needs to be tethered to physical realities and limited by physical storage solutions. In other words, that fancy cloud storage you're using to collaborate and store your files ultimately gets stored in the old but proven technology of hard disk drives. That, however, is far from ideal and Microsoft researchers are looking into an old yet new idea of using holograms to store data in a much smaller physical space.
A lot of the narrative around protecting user data often happens in the context of the cloud or the Internet, where data is often vulnerable to snooping and hijacking. Data stored on local storage, however, are just as or even more vulnerable, especially when talking about portable external storage. Encryption is, of course, an option, but one that comes as the cost of speed and flexibility. Western Digital is now boasting that its new ArmorLock encrypted NVMe SSD can let you have your security cake and eat it, too.
Western Digital announced a new addition to its lineup of My Passport external SSDs today. Simply called the My Passport SSD from WD, it might be somewhat easy to confuse this new SSD with other ones, but it seems the hardware inside will be the real difference maker. WD's My Passport SSD uses NVMe drives, which promises solid read and write speeds in an external drive that has a smaller footprint than previous models.
It seems like things are looking up for the PC market, with shipment numbers finally showing a rise last quarter. That has mostly been thanks to the rise in demand for desktops, laptops, and even tablets as the world adjusts to remote work and school setups. Ironically, those same global conditions are causing manufacturers NAND and DRAM products like RAM and SSDs some trouble as there is now an oversupply of these memory components and not much demand for them.
Google released a phone backup system to Android and iOS users "wherever Google One is available" this week. This system is free, so long as you're using less than the 15GB storage that comes free with a Google Account. You can attain a Google Account for free, and back up your smartphone's data for free, so long as you use less than 15GB to do so.
Samsung today announced a new lineup of 2.5-inch quad-level cell SSDs that will all be part of the 870 QVO series. Storage options for these drives start out in familiar territory with 1TB, 2TB, and even 4TB models, but for the 870 QVO, Samsung is rolling out the big guns, announcing that the series will be home to an 8TB drive as well. Expect that to cost a pretty penny when it releases later this year.
Western Digital, one of the biggest names in the data storage industry, got dragged into a rather complicated controversy regarding hard disk technology and marketing. That drama also dragged others like Seagate and Toshiba, though all three companies have, by now, made their official statements and clarifications. WD, however, is still working to clarify its position and its product line and it is doing so by introducing a third category in its Red family of NAS drives.
It looks like SD Express is in for a fairly big improvement to transfer speeds, as today the SD Association announced what the SD 8.0 specification will do for the format. According to the SDA, the next generation of SD Express cards will potentially reach transfer speeds of up to 4GB per second, which blows even earlier SD Express generations out of the water.
Samsung's newest SSD is now available, with the Samsung T7 announced back at CES 2020 finally ready to slip into your pocket. Smaller and cheaper than the T7 Touch Samsung already launched - and which has a fingerprint sensor along with its solid-state drive - the regular T7 opts for simplicity instead.
An interview with Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney suggested the next-gen console PS5 will keep gaming consoles alive for at least another generation. Where devout PC gamers would seem to always have an edge on gaming consoles due to their ability to upgrade all parts at will, Sony appears to be keying in on storage optimization. This bit could - and likely will be - vital to the console's success.
You might think that buying and using a hard drive is a simple matter of picking one from a catalog and connecting it inside a computer. That may be true fro the simplest of desktops but when you factor in devices like NAS products, the selection process can be quite daunting, especially when data storage manufacturers aren't so forthcoming with critical details. To dispel any lingering doubt and confusion, Toshiba and Western Digital have released the list of hard drives that use the now somewhat controversial SMR technology and which ones don't.