Storage
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Hard drives of the future could be made of DNA
Our data-driven society is churning out more information than traditional storage technology can handle, so scientists are looking for a solution in Nature's hard drive: DNA. A pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center recently wrote a full computer operating system, an 1895 French film, an Amazon gift card and other files into DNA strands and retrieved them without errors, according to a study published in the latest edition of Science.
LaCie's Thunderbolt drives are built for your MacBook Pro
If you bought a new MacBook Pro (or really, any Thunderbolt 3-equipped PC), there's a good chance that you're looking for high-capacity external storage that takes advantage of your system's newer, speedier ports. Well, you're in luck: As is its custom, LaCie is launching a pair of external drives that promise a load of extra space using newer interfaces. The centerpiece is the d2 Thunderbolt 3. While the hard disk itself is only slightly faster than before (240MB/s) and won't come close to saturating USB-C or Thunderbolt 3, the choice of connector makes it easy to daisy-chain other devices without sacrificing performance. You can hook up a 5K display, two 4K displays or five additional Thunderbolt 3 drives, so you may have to plug only one cable into your computer to power your entire setup.
'Link' packs a 2TB SSD and LTE hotspot into a 2-inch cube
Amidst the CES madness, a company called Fasetto has unveiled a pretty interesting mobile storage product. The Link, first seen in prototype form at CES last year, gives you up to 2TB of storage via an app and WiFi connection to your smartphone, camera or other device. It can also stream video, images and audio, making it essentially a tiny NAS that can be used at home or on the road.
Spotify's desktop app writes tons of data to storage drives
Over the last few months, Spotify desktop users on both Mac and PC have noticed the app has been writing massive amounts of data to their storage drives on a daily basis. Reports in the company's own forums, Reddit and Hacker News indicate that tens up to hundreds of gigabytes of data are written on an hourly basis. Sometimes the amount of data exceeds the terabyte mark. Of course, continuing to write that much data over a period of time could affect how long an SSD will last.
Western Digital finally offers a consumer SSD
Western Digital has enjoyed a long run supplying data drives for all markets, but had stubbornly resisted releasing solid-state ones for consumers. This was an odd position back in 2008 when the technology began entering the mainstream and it's only become a more glaring omission in the interim. But today, WD is finally offering its first SATA SSDs for personal computers.
Drobo's USB-C drive array is tailor-made for your new PC
You haven't had a whole lot of options for very high-capacity external drives on computers with USB-C ports. How are you supposed to archive the video projects from your MacBook? Drobo wants to help: it's launching the Drobo 5C, a five-bay self-managing drive that, unsurprisingly, plugs into your system's USB-C port. You won't gain a speed advantage over a USB 3.0 box (it averages 250MB per second if your drives are fast enough), but that's not the point. This is about giving you future-proof storage that you can upgrade at any time. As with other Drobos, you just have to swap in a new disk if you're running low on space or encounter a failure. There's no need to shuffle files or configure a RAID array.
Apple kills off 16GB storage for the iPhone 7
If you're looking for just a little bit of on-device storage in your next phone, the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus aren't for you. At its fall announcement event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Apple revealed that its newest handset iterations will no longer offer 16GB hard drives. Instead, the new phones will offer a minimum of double that and be available all the way up to 256GB. But don't think you're getting these devices for cheap. The iPhone 7 starts at $649 for the 32GB model and the iPhone 7 Plus starts at a jaw-dropping $769. Luckily, with Apple's installment plan, those figures work out to $27 and $32 a month, respectively. Click here to catch all the latest news from the Apple's "See You" event.
Google Drive for Android now creates file and folder shortcuts
Google's latest Drive update makes it easy to access your favorite files on Android. It adds the ability to add file and folder shortcuts to your homescreen, so you don't need to launch the app every time there's something in there you want to open. You can do that by going to your device's Shortcuts menu and choosing Drive shortcuts, which could be next to the Drive scan and toolbar options. That might sound minor, but it could help you become more productive if you use the app as your primary cloud storage.
Plex streams your music collection to Sonos speakers
If you're using Plex to store your music and video files, there's a new option for listening to those tracks around the house. The company announced today that access to your audio collection is now available inside the Sonos app. This means that you'll be able to browse and control playback of any stored music on Sonos' line of speakers. Plex says users can also expect access to their libraries away from home as well thanks to the Sonos mobile software. You know, in case your pals have one of the company's audio setups, too.
Atom-scale storage holds 62TB in a square inch
Storage tech doesn't get much better than this. Scientists at TU Delft have developed a technique that uses chlorine atom positions as data bits, letting the team fit 1KB of information into an area just 100 nanometers wide. That may not sound like much, but it amounts to a whopping 62.5TB per square inch -- about 500 times denser than the best hard drives. The scientists coded their data by using a scanning tunneling microscope to shuffle the chlorine atoms around a surface of copper atoms, creating data blocks where QR code-style markers indicate both their location and whether or not they're in good condition.
Samsung's 4TB SSD is built to replace your hard drive
It's not hard to get a capacious solid-state drive if you're running a server farm, but everyday users still have to be picky more often than not: either you get a roomy-but-slow spinning hard drive or give up that capacity in the name of a speedy SSD. Samsung may have finally delivered a no-compromise option, however. It's introducing a 4TB version of the 850 Evo that, in many cases, could easily replace a reasonably large hard drive. While it's not the absolute fastest option (the SATA drive is capped at 540MB/s sequential reads and 520MB/s writes), it beats having to resort to a secondary hard drive just to make space for your Steam game library.
Samsung's world-first UFS memory cards are blazing fast
We've heard arguments for and against removable storage on smartphones, but we can all agree on the fact that the more the merrier. And we're not just talking about memory space here, as the speed becomes more crucial when it comes to capturing higher video resolutions on our smartphones and drones. To satisfy our need for speed, Samsung is the first to announce a series of UFS (Universal Flash Storage) removable memory cards, with its 256GB flavor boasting an SSD-like sequential read speed of 530MB/s -- that's about half a gigabyte per second and almost five times faster than the top microSD cards these days. It can also do 170MB/s sequential writing, which is almost two to three times faster.
Apple's new file system revolves around encryption
One of Apple's quietest announcements at WWDC might also be its most important. The company has introduced a brand new file system, simply called Apple File System (APFS) that makes security its centerpiece. It offers a unified encryption method for virtually every device Apple makes, ranging from the Apple Watch to the Mac. That includes multikey encryption, which makes it tough to crack even if you have physical access to the storage. In short, the FBI won't be happy: Encryption is now a core part of the operating system, not just something bolted on after the fact.
Google Play will suggest neglected apps for you to uninstall
When you add an app from Google Play and space on your phone is tight, you're often stuck wondering which of your darlings programs you should kill delete. According to Android Police, Google Play is going to help your decision-making process by offering up suggestions as to what you no longer need. When you've run out of on-board storage, you'll be given a list of your least-used apps, ranked in order of weight. So, in the example, the store suggests that you wipe Google Translate or Facebook Messenger and free up some much-needed space. It's not clear if the feature is rolling out to users worldwide or if this is a limited trial, but we've asked Google to let us know.
IBM's optical storage is 50 times faster than flash
Flash storage is too slow for your device's main memory, but RAM is expensive and volatile. Thanks to a breakthrough from IBM, phase-change memory (PCM) might one day replace them both. The crystal-based storage has been used in optical disks and other tech for at least 15 years, but the technology has been limited by the cost and storage density -- cells are either "on" or "off." However, IBM researchers have figured out how to save 3-bits of data per cell, dramatically increasing the capacity of the original tech.
Tesla drops its largest consumer Powerwall model
If you're thinking about buying Tesla's Powerwall home energy storage battery, you're down to one option. The company tells Greentech Media that it will discontinue the larger $3,500 10kWh model due to lack of demand. "We have decided to focus entirely on building and deploying the 7kWh Daily Powerwall at this time," a spokeperson says. While the larger model was able to store more energy, it's rated for just 500 cycles, while the smaller $3,000 model is for daily use and has a 10-year guarantee.
WD's PiDrive gives your Raspberry Pi 314GB of storage
Sure, you can already add storage to your Raspberry Pi, but it's usually an exercise in trade-offs: SD cards don't hold much data, and USB drives (even the portable ones) tend to be too big and power-hungry for a mini PC. WD doesn't think you should have to compromise, though. It's shipping a new PiDrive that stuffs 314GB into a slim design that won't overwhelm the Pi's power system, but is fast enough to make full use of the USB connection. It even has a special version of BerryBoot (a multi-operating system tool) to help you load your platform of choice and fill that abundant space with apps.
Seagate will launch the 'fastest-ever' SSD this summer
Geeks of all stripes agree: there's no such thing as being able to move data too fast. Luckily for them, Seagate will soon show off a "production-ready" solid-state drive that push those bits like no one's business. That SSD -- which is expected to officially launch this summer -- can move data at up to 10GB per second, making the Samsung drive that last held the record seem pokey by comparison.
Samsung is building 256GB memory chips for smartphones
Your smartphone may soon have as much storage as a typical PC. Samsung has announced that it's mass producing 256GB embedded chips, double what it had last year, using the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard. That gives them read speeds nearly twice that of typical SATA-based SSDs at 850MB/s, though write speeds are lower at 250MB/s. It also supports 45,000 IOPS, more than double the speed of last-gen UFS memory. Samsung's memory division VP says the company is "moving aggressively to enhance performance and capacity" of smartphone memory and SSD products, too.
Google wants hard drives designed to store your cloud data
Take a look at the hard drive in your desktop PC. It might hold terabytes of data, but the basic 3.5-inch design can be traced back to the early days of computing -- not really relevant in an era when a lot of your content sits in the cloud, is it? Google wants to change that. It's hoping to work with both the tech industry and researchers to design hard drives that are tailor-made for cloud-based storage. It wants to optimize the "collection" of disks instead of focusing on individual drives, and is more concerned about capacity and performance -- the things that matter most in a bustling data center -- over sheer reliability.
