In no particular order, cool stuff at Storage Visions 2010 and CES.
- Mobo-mounted SSD. Soligen has announced an SSD that mounts on motherboards. The drive mounts firmly, requires no special cooling and takes little board space.
- Tiny USB drive. Verbatim has announced a tiny USB thumb drive that is a fraction the size of most current thumb drives. Call it a thumbnail drive. Perfect for keychains.
- Super Talent is showing a 2 TB PCI-e SSD and claiming strong performance. At $6k gamers won’t buy it, but enterprises might.
- Raidon is showing a nice collection of 2.5″ drive enclosures, including 8 drive arrays. Not much larger than a 5.25″ drive. Can’t find them all on the web yet, though.
- A 32 GB Class 6 Micro SD is close to announcement. Micro.
- Supermicro showed a 48 drive JBOD/36 drive server chassis. The server is almost as dense of Sun’s Thumper – and drives are front and rear accessible.
- Eye-fi’s Wi-Fi enabled SD cards don’t handle AVCHD video files, but they’re working on it. With all the SD card using consumer, prosumer and even pro camcorders using SD, this will be a popular market for them.
- How about a double-ended flash drive: one end for personal; the other for work? Developed with the help of the social community at Quirky.com. They pay developers and influencers a percentage of the revenues. Cool!
- PoketyPoke is a con-call management service that reminds you of your concalls and optionally records them and provides transcripts for $9/hr. I like.
In other news
I moderated a too-short panel on Cloud storage at Storage Visions. Several technologies are out there that will change the current economics and application profiles of online storage. The field is young.
Got an update on USB 3.0 from Symwave, the fabless IC firm that makes USB 3.0 chips. Bottom line: unlike USB 2.0, whose marketing made promises the protocol could not keep, the new version can achieve over 400 MB/sec.
Here’s the 30 seconds over USB 3.0 video:
The StorageMojo take
No blockbuster, sector-defining new products. But many stepwise enhancements that move us forward.
USB 3.0 is going to push consumer storage as we can move gigabytes in seconds rather than minutes. But it looks like Apple is poised to miss this one – which could cost them a big chunk of their pro market.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. Fixed the pooched hyperlinks and a couple of other minor edits.
The SuperMicro 4u JBOD chassis holds 45, not 48 disks (24 in front, 21 in the back).
I like these.
Not even Intel looks all that enthused by USB 3.0 so I’m not really sure how bad the impact really will be. I do love the idea of Light Peak however but will it really ship in quantity in 2010 or is that hopeless speculation?
Robin,
would it be possible to know more details on the Cloud storage technologies that caught your attention? I’m very curious to get the scoop on everything that went on in that panel of yours!
Thanks,
Roman.
Do you have a link to the motherboard mounted SSD’s from Soligen and the 8 x 2.5″ drive enclosure that is not much larger than a 5.25″ drive? I could not find either of these on the Internet.
John, I updated the post with the right link. Sorry.
Roman, I’m writing a post about the session. Bottom line: cloud storage today is analogous to what the TRS-80 was in PCs.
Robin