The first products using this technology will be 1TB drives used for archival storage. GE expects this to reach the market in two to three years with another two or more year before it’s available to consumers.

GE is anticipating that this technology can store an entire 3D move that would be impossible to store on current blu-ray disk. The holographic drives will have a 3ms access time and data transfer rates up to five times faster than a DVD.

Holographic storage involves holograms, images of data being stored in layers on a DVD size disk. The drives work by splitting a laser beam into a reference beam and a signal beam, which is encoded with data. By crossing the two beams an interference pattern is created which is then stored on the disk.

Older versions of holographic drives store pages of a million bits stacked ten thousand deep at hundreds of locations on a disk. GE researchers discovered by reducing the page size to a single bit, called micro holograms, they could store as much data per unit area but was much easier to read. It turns out that the upper data layers can be read by a standard Blu-ray player and by slightly increasing the tracking range of the Blu-ray read head all layers can be accessed.

GE is planning to license the technology to manufactures for construction of the drives and disk. Peter Lorraine, GE lab manager stated at the Emerging Tech Conference, that license announcements could be expected soon.

Source: The Inquirer

Diesel does have aluminum housing; it’s black in color (feels like an anodized paint) with the word DIESEL on the front with the capacity listed on the bottom, and another OCZ logo on the back.

The cap is plastic and it fits tightly on the USB connector so you won’t have to worry about losing it, but I would have liked to see some sort of strap for when it is off.  On the bottom is a clear plastic loop that has a place for a strap or a keychain.  I would have like to see OCZ include a strap for the drive, incase you like to wear it on your neck, or hang it up in your office.

Specs:

Model: OCZUSBDSL16G

-USB 2.0 Certified      
-Mainstream Speeds      
-Aluminum Chassis      
-True Plug and Play (Compatible with MAC OS X)     
-2 Year Warranty

The OCZ Diesel does have a red LED indicator in the bottom end that blinks to show activity.

Testing:

 Although many of you already know the difference between FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS format, here is a quick overview for those of you that are not very familiar.  Sometimes like myself before using a USB flash drive I wonder which file system to format the drive with.  The first thing you need to establish is weather you will be transferring large files, will you be using it on more then one computer system like PC and MAC, what’s more important to you speed or file size.  Here is a quick breakdown of file systems and various pros, and cons:

Fat16:

Pros

• Decent Disk Space Economy
• Fast Transfer Rate with Small File Sizes
• Average Fault Tolerance

Cons

• Max Volume Size 2GB
• MAX File Size 2GB
• No Built-In Security

Fat32:

Pros

• Max Volume (32GB) and File Size Larger than FAT16
• Average Disc Space Economy
• Better drive performance (On Smaller Volumes than NTFS)

Cons

• MAX File Size 4GB
• No Built-In Security
• Minimal Fault Tolerance

NTFS:

Pros

• Max File Size Nearly Unlimited
• Max Volume Size 2TB
• Maximum Fault Tolerance
• Built-In Security

Cons

• Not a Great Performer with Small File Sizes
• NTFS may wear it out faster (disputable with modern USB sticks)
• Not compatible with MAC and FAT OS

I am sure there are other pros and cons that I have missed, so if you can think of any, post it in the comments and I will add them.  Now I can not tell you which file system to use, so you have to figure out what is more important to you and where your flash drive will be used the most.

I have decided just for comparison purposes to run couple of test on both FAT32 and NTFS just to see if there will be a major difference in speed, and here is what I got:

 FAT32:

 And now NTFS:

You will notice that the only difference in read and write speeds are visible if you transfer smaller file sizes between 512 bytes and 2MB.  Once you start using larger files the speed is practically identical.  All in all based on the results you see above this is a very fast and durable drive.

Later we may put this drive agains a few other flash drives that we have on hand, for some comparison purposes.

Conclusion:

Overall I really like the OCZ Diesel 16GB flash drive.  It feels very durable, and due to its small and sleek size, makes it very portable, and can be placed on your key chain.  If you are looking for a USB flash drive that is good quality, good performance at a very reasonable price, you can not go wrong with OCZ Diesel.

Pros:

• Small
• Portable
• Fast
• Durable

Cons:

• Plastic Cap (easy to loose when its off)
• No Strap Included

Apple has release a 2TB Time Capsule.  It is not listed on their web store.  From what it looks like, it is exactly the same as the existing model, as far as we can tell, accept for a much larger internal storage.  The listed price is $499, which made the previous 1TB model drop in price to $299, and 500GB model listed for $199.

Direct Link

The idea behind quanp is to turn storing and sharing pictures, music, videos, etc. into a more enjoyable experience by making it more visual.  The service is currently free and is aimed at US market.  Similar service is being offered in Japan as a paid and free service.  The US version is being managed by a Ricoh office based out of Cupertino in California.

A new network attached storage line up consists of NAS 440 and NAS 420 storage server. These new solutions have a new robust backup applications for business professionals and home office users.

More details:

Available in late July, Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220– $449.99 for 2TB and $699.99 for 4TB

Available now, Seagate BlackArmor WS 110–$159.99 for 1TB and $309.99 for 2TB

Available now, Seagate BlackArmor PS 110–$159.99 for 500GB

Source:  Seagate

Western Digital has announced its SiliconDrive III product range which targets industrial and embedded computing, data centre, aero-space, military and OEM medical markets, with reliability as a most important thing in mind.  These products are SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces. 

The SiliconDrive III family replaces the SiliconDrive II products, with upgrades like faster read/write speeds, increased capacities, and scalability. Western Digital says that the drives are meant for applications like multimedia content delivery, and data centre media.

The drives range from 2.5in Serial ATA (SATA) and parallel ATA (PATA) and 1.8in Micro Sata products, to native Sata 3Gb/s or ATA-7 interfaces with target read speeds of up to 100MB/s and write speeds up to 80MB/s, and reaching capacities up to 120GB.

Source:  TheRegister

HotHardware has gotten their hands on OCZ Z-Drive which is basically 4 OCZ Vertex series SSD drives setup in RAID configuration, and combined with a PCI Express RAID controller.  The onboard RAID controller is powered by PCIe slot and the drives require a single 4-pin molex power connector.  The current configuration shown is 512GB capacity with four 128GB SSDs setup in RAID 0.  I am sure much larger capacities will be available eventually.

Read more

Update:  Z-Drive has been listed at Amazon, and the asking prices are as follows:

250GB – $1,561.30

500GB - $2,450.50

1TB  - $3,368.99

Ouch!  This is a great product I am sure, but come on ….