Buffalo Refreshes its DriveStation Family of Storage Solutions

We use Buffalo Drive products a lot in our installations. It is always good news to hear that a company whose products you work with continue to grow and refresh their product lines. Buffalo’s popular DriveStation Duo and DriveStation Quad are getting the focus today. Combining performance and reliability, these new multi-drive external hard drives, equipped with NovaBACKUP Business Essentials, are ideal for small servers, creative professionals, offices and consumers requiring redundant and high performance external storage.

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Intel Showed its Q4 SSD Roadmap and We Are Excited!

Intel Released it Q4 Roadmap that shows some very exciting SSD (Solid State Drive) products. These products will be based on 25nm NAND flash memory chips and sold under the Intel X25-M, X18-M (mainstream) and X25-V (value) brands. The four drives will continue to carry the company internal codename “Postville”, with the same feature set as the 34nm Postville SSDs, except for the 25nm NAND chips, native data encryption, SMART, and higher performance.

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Are Solid State Drives Better Than Spinning Platter Based Drives?

This is a subject that we have been musing over quite a bit lately when talking to our clients and one that you will of course have to answer for yourself based on hopefully the information that I am about to give you. The two primary things that you need to consider are how much storage do you need and how much do you want to pay to decrease data access times.

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Intel Video-Why SSD's are a smart upgrade

This is a great video describing why Intel’s SSD’s are a great replacement to your workstation and notebook drives. Speed, increased battery life and drive reliability are the some of the main reasons to change out your laptop’s drives. Increased productivity because of quicker data access on your desktop is the primary reason I would suggest an upgrade on your desktop.

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SSD’s – The Reasons to Implement Solid State Drive Technology in your Power PC

Intel is one of the major players in Sold State Drive Technology. When is it the right time to use SSD Technology vs. yesterday’s moving parts, rotating platter technologies. Intel's Director of SSD Product Marketing, Troy Winslow, discusses four reasons to consider whether SSD is the right fit for you.

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Hard Drive Recovery is hit and miss at best

Here is an interview from Tekzilla that will give you a quick overview of drive recovery methods and what to do to try to attempt data recovery. Very interesting interview with Scott Moulton from Tekzilla’s - Which Hard Drives Fail The Least? Sleek Cell Phone Booster, Hard Drive Recovery Tools, Adobe Reader Alternatives, Space Pictures! – Tekzilla Episode.

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Windows 7 Search Features

When asked for some compelling reasons for moving to Window 7 one of the newer features that has vastly expanded in Windows 7 over Vista is the search capabilities. In Vista I loved how the search indexed all your documents, files and Outlook items to make it easy to search for information on your system. I am a hoarder when it comes to programs and data so it is important for me to be able to easily find and access data everyday. I use a lot of these features constantly and once you watch the video below you will see why you want to spend a little extra time updating the metadata on your pictures, videos and music files as well.

http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/ch9/4/0/3/5/3/4/Windows7FindSearchOrganize_ch9.mp4

A new feature in WIndows 7 called Federated Search gives you the ability to search external sources as well. This can be within your organization with data found on different servers or different SharePoint searches. But there are scripts that you can install for accessing much more. These are put together using search connectors that you can download.

There are already few search connectors available for download:

• Neowin Connector (Created by -Hiroshi-, more information)
• Flickr Search Connector
• YouTube Search Connector
• Google News Search Connector
• Google Blogs Search Connector
• Twitter Search Connector
• MSN Search
• Deviant Art Search

In Part 2 of Search and Find this video shows and talks about how this works.

http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/ch9/1/8/4/5/3/4/FindOrganizePart2_ch9.mp4

Can you find me Hard Drive Encryption software that will protect the hard drives if my notebook is lost or stolen?

Here is a great free product that will allow you to encrypt a partition, drive or a storage device like a flash drive. If you want to protect your data from prying eyes this is a great product. Take a look at it at: http://www.truecrypt.org/

Intel confirms data corruption bug in new SSDs, halts shipments | Storage - InfoWorld

Since I reported the price drop on these drive a week or two ago I only thought it would be appropriate to add this little bump in the road for Intel’s new consumer-class X25-M and X18-M SSDs (solid state-disk drives). Seems that if you initiate a  Bios password  on the drive you will lose your access to anything on the drive. Intel will be coming with a firmware upgrade to this issue shortly and you will be able to fix this problem. So far that is the only glitch in an otherwise great product. Shipments of these drives have been stopped until the fix is in and been applied to all channel held devices.

Intel confirms data corruption bug in new SSDs, halts shipments | Storage - InfoWorld