Stories by Chris Mellor

Lasers could make disk drives a hundred times faster

Researchers have demonstrated disk write speeds one hundred times faster than current hard drives. The method uses a laser to heat the recording surface and alter its magnetic field. There is no equivalent read speed increase though.

Lenovo promises safe hard drive wiping

Lenovo has launched software to comprehensively delete data on PC hard drives, after surveys revealed a widespread failure to remove sensitive data from hard drives on PCs slated for disposal.

1TB optical disks now in prospect

Manufacturers are being offered the world's highest capacity optical storage technology to license, reportedly, leap-frogging 300GB holographic disks and offering 1TB in a DVD-size disk. But the technology has not been commercialized and product could be three to five years away.

IBM retains supercomputing supremo title

Sun is aiming to wrest the world supercomputing crown from IBM’s Blue Gene with a US$59 million (NZ$69 million) contract from the University of Texas for its Constellation design.

Mainframe users to get faster remote vaulting

Brocade has introduced pipelining technology for transferring data from a mainframe across a WAN and FICON (fibre connectivity) link to IBM and Sun virtual tape libraries. It says this can increase backup speed by up to 70%.

IT consultants jump on the green bandwagon

IT research organisations have started weighing in with advice for CIOs, including podcasts, market research and weighty practical guides to cutting datacentre power costs and emissions.

Dumb terminals promoted to cut global warming

The British government is launching a Green Shift taskforce to move users away from PCs and towards dumb terminals with a broadband link to a network of green datacentres. If implemented, the move would cut Microsoft’s Windows Vista and Office sales drastically.

German researchers find new storage medium

Scientific researchers claim to have discovered a storage technology that could combine solid state size, speed and reliability with hard drive capacity but without spinning hard drive mechanisms. The technique is experimental and depends upon almost perfect material consistencies at the nanoscale level. Don’t sell your Seagate stock though; it isn’t going to happen any time soon.

Brocade joins 'greener than thou' brigade

Brocade is singing its own green praises, saying its storage area network directors draw a third of the power needed by Cisco gear. Numbers don't lie it states and compares its own power usage figures with ones from Cisco-published information to show that Cisco customers pollute the planet nearly three times as much as Brocade customers.

Dell to ship PCs with 1TB drives

Dell is the first computer system supplier to ship 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) hard drives targeted at users needing to store large amounts of digital media.

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