ANY DEVICE

If you’re the IT director at a small-to-mid-size business, you might be considering NAS (Network Attached Storage), potentially combined with virtualization, to increase your server capacity while reducing maintenance and infrastructure costs. Consensus from large corporations and small business owners alike say this is a wise move. You can read more about the benefits of virtualization here.  But what should you look for in NAS solutions? As the technology advances, prices drop, so you can expect a lot more storage for the money than you could a few years ago. Here are some additional features to consider:  1 – Plug-and-play set-up – It’s not difficult, and it shouldn’t be time-consuming, to establish NAS across your network.  2. RAID level 5 or…

http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/seagate-to-acquire-lacie-20120523/ Seagate, which remains in the top three of hard disk drive manufacturers, will get even bigger as it purchases storage company LaCie, with U.S. headquarters in Hillsboro, Oregon. Seagate has agreed to purchase 65.4 percent of the publicly-held company’s total shares, buying out chairman and CEO Philippe Spruch, and taking control of the company’s future direction as the majority shareholder.  LaCie’s functional and aesthetically pleasing line of premium storage solutions, which includes NAS solutions, RAID drives, desktop hard drives, USB 3.0 drives and more do not overlap with most of the products in Seagate’s line of well-known hard drives. Seagate intends to offer the LaCie brand as complementary products, according to an article at Geek.com. As part of the…

The website ExtremeTech http://www.extremetech.com/computing/129874-hdd-pricewatch-higher-prices… has been tracking the prices of hard disk drives and solid state drives from manufacturers like Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung and Hitachi. Following the floods in Thailand, hard drive prices skyrocketed as manufacturers struggled to keep up with demand.  For the first time since 2011, prices seem to have stabilized, but at a new high, according to the report. In Q2 2012, prices are down from the beginning of this year, but have not yet dropped to Q3 2011 prices. Prices are now, on average, about 40 percent higher than pre-flood prices.  Solid State Drive Prices Drop It’s not the same story for Solid State Drives (SSD) though. With the HDD shortage, experts predicted that SSD demand, and,…

Seagate is breaking through previous storage capacity caps, once again, with hard disk drives that use new Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology that permits a storage density of 1 terabit per square inch (1 trillion bits per square inch).  In 2006, hard drive manufacturer Fujitsu developed HAMR technology, but Seagate is the first to apply it to a working hard drive and achieve the milestone 1 terabit per square inch storage density.  Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) does not suffer the same data storage limitations of today’s perpendicular magnetic storage technology. Using HAMR, hard drives can store single bits of information in a smaller area, by “flipping” the magnetic orientation of the heads. Traditionally, when small magnetic particles are flipped, they…

If you’re using a RAID 0 array and you experience hard drive failure, your RAID array fails to boot up, or you see the “blue screen of death” when you start up windows, you could be facing the loss of mission critical data. A RAID 0 array has no redundancy and actually opens users up to three different points of failure: the first drive, the second drive, or the drivers/RAID controller. Unlike RAID 1 and other levels, a RAID 0 array stripes data across two (or more) hard drives, providing faster performance and the ability to hold more data. But it doesn’t provide an automatic back-up of your data. If one hard drive in a higher level RAID array fails,…

So much has been written about cloud computing that half of it sounds like marketing hype. Cloud computing is less expensive to implement and maintain, more secure, unlimited storage, the future of applications, etc. But is it really all that… and a bag of (micro)chips? (As they say.)  That remains to be seen. According to InformationWeek Reports’ four annual State of Cloud Computing survey, only 28 percent of survey respondents said they’ve assessed the impact of cloud computing on their internal networks, although 73 percent use multiple providers.  There are several factors to consider when you select cloud computing providers or SaaS (Software as a Service) providers, or even when you’re considering whether or not to make the transition to…

It was mostly the provocative title of this article at NetworkWorld.com http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/041712-byod-258264.html?hpg1=bn  about the Bring Your Own Device trend that got us thinking about how the mobile insurrection is affecting IT departments facing a data recovery emergency. Network World and Solar Winds conducted a survey of 400 IT pros and discovered: – The majority of survey respondents (close to 85 %) issue mobile devices that have access to the corporate network. These devices include laptops, tablets and smartphones on every major platform. – Only 15.1% have a Bring Your Own Device policy, where employees’ smartphones and other mobile devices can access the corporate network (sometimes a stipend is offered to cover costs) – Of the BYOD supporters, 59.3% have no device restrictions,…

It’s a data recovery myth that’s as old as the original hard disk drives: freezing a damaged hard disk drive can help restore lost data. Unfortunately, if it was ever true, it’s not anymore. Freezing a damaged hard drive can create further damage, making it more expensive, time-consuming and risky for data recovery specialists to recover the lost data, after your do-it-yourself tactics have failed. Think about it: a freezer is filled with ice and condensation, two things that typically are not good for electronics.  But let’s explore the origins of this data recovery myth. Early Hard Drives and Freezing Back in the early days of hard drives, a common cause of hard drive failure was the spindle becoming misaligned…

The InformationWeek State of Cloud Computing Survey, a survey of 240 IT professionals, shows the growth in not only cloud computing but also in virtualization. While the two technologies are very different, they often go hand-in-hand because of the benefits. Both virtualization and cloud computing help conserve IT resources (technology, financial and human), reduce the likelihood of catastrophic data loss, and are increasingly becoming the choice of large and small companies.  Here are some of the study’s findings:  – 26 percent of the IT departments plan to begin using infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS) – 48 percent plan to begin using virtualization technology providers for cloud computing, an 8 percent increase from last year’s survey – 36 percent (five percent more than last…

In our last post, we talked about three do-it-yourself data recovery solutions that could actually render all the data on a hard drive unrecoverable. Private individuals and IT staff, alike, sometimes give in to the temptation to attempt do-it-yourself data recovery. But to minimize downtime and maximize the chances of complete recovery of your mission critical data, it’s best to call data recovery experts at the first signs of hard drive failure if you can’t access your files. Here are 5 more DIY data recovery methods that rarely work and are not recommended by experts.  1.  Don’t bang a hard drive on the table or hit it with a hammer or any tool to try to un-stick the platters. –…