Storage

One and two terabyte disk drives are the new home standard. But a thousand billion bytes is not nearly enough...

In Tuesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches Carbonite sue its disk array manufacturer, while admitting it lost more than 7,500 customers' backups (ouch indeed). Not to mention how Australians make beer...

In Wednesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches bloggers ask, "Is IBM buying Sun?" Not to mention 61 things on my cat...
(IBM) (JAVA)

Everyone knows to be wary of version 1.0 releases of software; better to wait instead for the first few bug fixes. This applies to hardware too. Here are three examples of updates to existing hardware, in each case resulting in a great product.

Samsung decided to see what a team of engineers could prove by stringing together 24, high-capacity solid state disk drives. The results were pretty impressive, including 2GB/sec throughput.

The computer plugs at about $50 each can act in concert over a house's internal wiring and via internet connection to the outside world to manage your digital information

In Friday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches HP CEO Mark Hurd impose pay cuts across the board. Not to mention misheard lyrics...

In Wednesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches IBM get serious about cloud computing. Not to mention if Apple made batteries...

Mission: Impossible without the smoke: Fast erase solid state disk technology ensures that this message will self destruct in a matter of seconds.

Affectionately known as the Woz by Apple fans, Steve Wozniak has been a bit of a joke lately.  There was his relationship with Kathy Griffin.  There are all of the photos of him riding everywhere (including to the bathroom) on a Segway.  He always gets an interview or two in at Apple events and waits in lines with other Apple fans to be the first to have an iPhone.

But the guy, in his time, was one of the best hackers around.  He basically built what would be come the gold standard in personal computers, the Apple // (with all due respect to the Altair 8800). 

A recent Computerworld article discussed the deployment of EMR/EHR proposed by the Obama administration, but the concerns are more generic than who recommends it.

Compellent has a valuable ILM capability that provides metadata for each block -- this enables them to move unused blocks to lower tiers of storage and back to high tiers when needed. This level of granularity should provide greater economic value to IT professionals.

While hard disk passwords can offer great security, there are two sides to every coin. Here we examine the limitations of hard drive passwords and take a first look at bypassing them.

The often-overlooked hard disk password feature can offer improved security. On some computers, hard disk passwords can be used in conjunction with power-on passwords to offer two independent security schemes with a single password. ThinkPads do this, the Acer Aspire One netbook does not. At least the Aspire One offers hard disk passwords, many computers don't.

One defensive computing topic that doesn't seem to get the attention it deserves is protecting the hard disk with a password. The protection is a big step up from a Windows or power-on password, it requires hardly any time and effort and it's free. If you can get it.