storage

Featured Freeware: Gspace

This highly recommended Firefox extension takes the small pile of gigabytes that the Google folks throw at you for your Gmail account and turns them into a drive with storage and music-playing capabilities.

Accessible via a toolbar button or from the menu bar, Gspace opens a new tab with an FTP-style interface. You can transfer files by highlighting them and hitting the directional arrow. Drag-and-drop is not available, but the plug-in is still replete with goodies. Uploading a file sends an e-mail with it attached to your Gmail, so you can create Gmail's native filters and folders to keep … Read more

Is carbon storage just a pipe dream?

Researchers are committing billions of dollars to technologies that take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it underground, as more scientists and environmentalists question the wisdom of these plans.

Researcher Anders Hansson's at Linkoping University's Department of Technology and Social Change in Sweden this week published a study that concluded that the risks and complications of carbon capture and storage are grossly underestimated, according to a report in ScienceDaily.

"In full scale, this technology only exists in the imaginations of the people developing it," Hansson said. "It's overly optimistic to place such … Read more

Snag a 500GB external hard drive for $79.99 (after rebate)

Got storage? You can get a Cavalry 500GB external USB drive for a mere $79.99 shipped. Granted, you'll have to wait on a $15 mail-in rebate, but you can spend the time filling this half-terabyte drive with all your videos, MP3s, backup files, and so on.

The NTFS-formatted Cavalry drive spins at a peppy 7,200 rpm and supports both Mac and Windows systems. Plus, it's stackable, so you can build a tower of terabytes if that's your thing.

Having recently experienced a near-catastrophic hard drive failure, I can't recommend an external drive highly enough. … Read more

Hitachi hawks a 320GB notebook drive

Following Fujitsu, Hitachi is now stepping up to the plate with its 320GB hard drive for notebooks that also spins at 7,200rpm.

The 2.5-inch Travelstar 7K320 can read and write data at 7,200rpm, which is the fastest spin speed for drives currently on the market.

Hitachi is the third-largest producer of hard disk drives in the world, with 17.3 percent share of the market. The leader is Seagate Technology, which owns more than a third of the hard drive space.

Battery life is often a concern with faster spinning drives, but Hitachi claims it has improved … Read more

Mosso to add cloud-based storage

Mosso, the cloud computing division of hosting provider Rackspace, plans to add online storage to its menu of services later this year.

The storage service, called CloudFS, is available to a limited number of customers in a closed beta test and will enter more a more widespread public beta test sometime later this year, the company said.

Developers and businesses can sign up to take part in the initial beta service now.

CloudFS gives developers access to almost unlimited amounts of storage for 15 cents per gigabyte, including replicated copies of backed-up data.

Mosso in February launched an online service … Read more

Wash dishes where you store them

When it comes to storing dishes, I'm a big fan of efficiencies. That's why I've always admired the over-sink dish racks of my European friends. The over-sink racks let the dishes dry where they're stored so that you don't have to transfer them from drying rack to cupboard.

The Mural Dishwasher, a student work spotted by MoCo Loco at the University of Quebec in Montreal Design Grad Show, does that concept one better: instead of hand-washing dishes, how about automatically washing them where they're stored? The wall-mounted cabinet is subdivided into six sections, and … Read more

Seagate: 1 billion hard drives and counting

Seagate has come a long way in the data storage business, from its 5MB ST506 hard drive in 1979 to its latest 1TB Barracuda introduced last year. And today the company announced that it is the first manufacturer to ship 1 billion hard drives.

If you can't visualize that many storage devices, picture this: You can circle the globe 13.7 times with the 1 billion hard drives placed end-to-end, according to Seagate.

Not all of them bear the Seagate brand. The number also includes the ones manufactured by Conner, which merged with Seagate in 1996, as well as … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 713: Chore Wars--The Cleanening

There can be only one (see Highlander II, you n00bs) MMORPG that makes you clean your room. And we have found it. Chore Wars. Also, iPhone comes to Canada and we go green: new Prius talk, disappearing ink to save on energy and people, and how to stop buying CDs (uh, once the labels get on board). Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 713

XP SP3 is out today! (oh wait… never mind)

iPhone coming to Canada http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9931208-7.html

Psystar in the wild http://gizmodo.com/384526/exclusive-video-psystar-in-the-wild

OQO hacked to run Leopard, now world’… Read more

Convert Gmail into your network drive

I started e-mailing files to myself as a form of ad-hoc backup soon after I signed up for a Gmail account. I'm not affected by Gmail's 20MB limit on the size of individual attachments, and I'm nowhere near my storage cap of 6.6GB.

I decided to formalize the process a bit by using the Gspace extension for the Firefox browser. The add-on lets you send files from your local PC to a virtual Gmail folder and view them much like you would in Windows Explorer.

After you install the Gspace applet and restart Firefox, you find … Read more