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Personal Storage

Hard-driving Seagate Sues Solid State Maker

17 April 2008 Bob Snyder Personal Storage

Hard-driving Seagate Sues Solid State Maker

Seagate sues STEC for patent violations with the side benefit of stalling the other 50+ makers of solid-state storage who eat into HDD sales.

Contested patents cover "surface mount stacking method and device," "hardware assisted memory backup system and method," and "method and system for host programmable data storage device self-testing."

"We have spent $7 billion over the last 10 years to optimize how our disks work," says Seagate CEO William Watkins. "This Continue reading...

World’s Smallest 8GB USB Drive

11 April 2008 Bob Snyder Personal Storage

Super Talent Technology shows three new 8GB USB Flash drives, including the world’s smallest 8GB drive.

These new drives include: PICO-A, with a swivel lid; the retractable PICO-B; and ultra small PICO-C. Super Talent’s patented PICO series USB drives are manufactured using chip-on-board (COB) technology, which enables up to 8GB of Flash storage to fit into an incredibly minute case. PICO-C drives weigh less than a nickel (about 4.7 grams) and measure only 31.3mm x 12.4mm x 3.4mm. Continue reading...

EMC Buys Iomega, Goes Consumer

11 April 2008 Bob Snyder Personal Storage

EMC acquires Zip-drive maker Iomega for $212.5 million, stopping a stock-swap merger with Great Wall Technology. Great Wall gets a $7.5 million deal-termination fee.

The darling of personal storage in the ‘90s, the makers of Zip and Jazz drives, Iomega was once one of the hottest stocks in high tech, selling at $110 per share.

Enterprise storage player EMC paid only $3.85 a share as a way to move into the high-growth consumer and small-business markets. Recently EMC paid $75 million Continue reading...

Toshiba Readies Solid-State Drives

14 January 2008 Bob Snyder Personal Storage

Toshiba will manufacture flash-based solid-state drives for laptops early next year, which the company says will offer faster boot times and lower power consumption than hard disk drives. The drives will initially come in three capacities: 32GB, 64GB and 128GB. High prices for NAND flash memory have limited adoption of the drives so far, but Toshiba and other memory makers such as Samsung are expected to ramp up production, which should lower prices and spur wider use. Solid state drives are Continue reading...

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