Over at Hackaday they’ve gone a bit fiery destruction crazy, and posted a guide on how to destroy HDDs with thermite—that’s the super-high temperature chemical mix used in welding, fireworks, and generalized military destruction. The guide shows how a kilo of burning thermite melts clean through a PC case, hard drive platters and all, turning them into pools of melted metal…which may be handy if you, uh, ever need to, um, “destroy” your data in an emergency. Hmmm. Check out the video, which is pyrotechnically cool, then see the hard drives post-incineration.
Iomega, maker of many a sexy storage device, has a new eGo out specifically tailored to the MacBook Air set. The 2.5-inch eGo Helium Portable Hard Drive encloses 320GB in anodized aluminium. In case that’s not enough space, the drive can utilise an online backup service for “cloud computing.” The entire package is less than an inch thick, weighs 7 ounces (about 200 grams) and can be dropped from up to 4 feet 3 inches (1.3 metres) onto industrial carpeting without worry. Not that any of you will experiment with that, I hope.
We all love the idea behind Drobo, the four-drive storage robot from Data Robotics that promises auto-mounting on both OSX Macs and Windows PCs. It’s a little pricey at $US500, especially since the drives cost extra, but the system just got more powerful: its new shoe fits snugly underneath, providing a gigabit ethernet network connection and support for “all major file systems” (NTFS, HFS+, EXT3, FAT32). And unlike most NAS devices, this one can be connected locally when necessary, then easily reattached to your network. Of course, it will cost an extra $200, but it’ll probably make your initial investment worth more. [Data Robotics]
In a recent presentation at the Captains of Industry Conference, Google BP Sukhinder Singh Cassidy wanted to drive home just how much the growth of storage alone has driven innovation. After pointing out that the factor of storage prices had fallen by 3.6 million since 1982, she told the group: if this trend continues, and the cost of storage continues to decrease, we estimate that somewhere around 2020, all the world’s content will fit inside an iPod, and all the world’s music would sit in your palm as early as 2015…rendering the CD format unnecessary.
LaCie’s no stranger to getting designers to fashion up external hard drive designs, what with Sam Hecht, Ora-Ito, Karim Rashid, GmbH and the LEGO guy (actually also Ora-Ito) lending their name to designs. This latest one by Neil Poulton looks like the 2001 monolith sans naked monkeys, but with an eerie blue ambient light on the front emanated by an LED on the bottom. You’d normally have to pay some kind of huge price premium for designs, but LaCie’s $US149 for 500GB seems pretty reasonable. Ships January. [LaCie via PC World]
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The Sony TZ91 is available in two flavours. You can get the computer with a standard 5400rpm hard drive, or you can load it up with a 64GB solid state drive (for around a $1150 price premium). Check out this video to watch the SSD toast the moving hard drive by about 12 seconds when booting up. So just what is your time worth again? [sysadmingear]
As a response to many companies and end users installing hard drives into cars for portable entertainment systems, Toshiba’s introducing the MK8050 hard drive that has increased shock tolerance and vibration dampening. The disk has a cushion of air around the head to prevent scratching, which causes data loss, swearing and begging. Expect to see it in GPS units and do-it-yourselfer kits next March. [Toshiba Storage via Electronista]
In addition to Micron’s traditional solid state drives announced today, they also showed off a concept for a SSD module that resembles RAM and would fit into a similar port. The design uses a SATA interface and is only 4 mm thick. Micron claims the advantages of such a design are the small size and the ability to line up multiple drives next to each other. In addition, this design requires no wires or mounting to the motherboard, reducing the risk of the SSD becoming disconnnected or loose inside a computer. While this product is nowhere near ready for market, Micron says they would need to work with an OEM or someone who can offer a compatible computer solution. [Micron]
Micron announced today that they will be releasing the RealSSD line of solid state drives, including a 64GB drive. While the entire line ranges from 1GB to 64GB, the 32 and 64 GB models are geared toward notebook and desktop use. The drives feature a SATA II interface and draw a mere 2 watts of power.
Your hard drive is seriously f*cked, and you have some big shiny balls (or you’re dumb as hell), you might be interested in how a fellow from Mandible Games claims that he recovered data from his drive. According to the article, he noticed that his drive would spin, but it would not show up in BIOS and there was a distinct and repetitive clicking noise.
