Prestigio is at it again, this time bringing a somewhat prestigious portable hard drive wrapped in supple, sure-to-be-costly leather. This tidbit of luxury sports a 0.69- x 3.20- x 5.16-inch enclosure, which is covered in a “stylish classic black or brown leather coating,” and houses your choice of 40, 60, 80, 100 or 120GB 2.5-inch hard drive. Additionally, it boasts a “one touch” backup system, allowing you to clone your data onto the portable drive with just the press of a button, and while it supports a software-based password system, the lack of a biometric scanner keeps it from true greatness. The classy Data Safe II comes packaged in a “fashionable box,” derives all the power it needs from just a USB 2.0 port, and should be available real soon. Although there’s no price set just yet, you can sign up for the “pre-sale” on the company’s website should you so desire.

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from engadget

Do you want a high-end disk to go with your ultra-fast InfiniBand setup? (We do.) Texas Memory Systems has just built some super-speedy solid state storage that can operate in pure InfiniBand (that’s an extremely fast serial data connection) and mixed-InfiniBand environments, and due to its low latency and high speed, the company claims that its disk is the fastest storage in the world. The RamSan drive has seriously ludicrous access times — usually in the neighborhood of 15 microseconds, 250 times faster than your garden-variety hard drive for mere mortals. Further, it’s got up to 50,000 random I/Os per second per single-ported controller, which is more than 100 times quicker than regular off-the-shelf drives. We’re not sure how much this will cost, but you can bet that it’ll be a lot more than the under-a-dollar per gigabyte trend that we’ve been seeing lately, and will be used only by very particular businesses for very particular needs. Like ours, for, um, whatever the heck we want.

[Via TechWorld; thanks, Evan]
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from engadget

Our mother always used to tell us, “you’d lose your head if wasn’t screwed on,” but we’re sure that had she grown up in this decade she’d say, “you’d lose a USB key carrying sensitive data if Microsoft didn’t patent a technology to counteract the problem.” Or something like that. As you might’ve guessed, Microsoft has a new patent, and this one is to help that hapless soul charged with setting up a wireless home network, who, Microsoft admits, “faces a daunting task” at such a prospect. See, Windows can load network set-up details onto a CD or other form of removable storage, but if the user loses the item, they also compromise their network security. We figured this could be solved by some sort of “don’t be an airhead” message on the box, but Microsoft put its brain to the task and came up with self-destructing USB memory keys, with enough juice in them to power the key for one hour, after which the data disappears fuhevah. The keys are brightly colored so the user doesn’t slap anything important on them, but it seems like an interesting solution to a completely ridiculous interesting problem.

[Via New Scientist]
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from engadget

Until now we’ve heard idle talk of 8GB SD memory cards coming by the end of this year, and now Toshiba has actually announced one. The bad news is this SD-HC008GT4 card, like all SDHC cards, isn’t compatible with existing devices that use those old-fashioned SD memory cards. That’s right, if you want to cram all those angels on head of this pin, you’ll have to spring for a shiny new device that supports the SDHC (that HC stands for “high capacity”) standard.

Just what we needed, a new standard. But those eight gigs might just come in handy, and there’s talk of these cards eventually being able to hold a 32GB of stuff, and they’re faster, too. Neat. Hope this one’s cheap. – Charlie White

Product Page (in Japanese) [Toshiba]
from gizmodo

Alfa Media has unveiled a tiny miniSD card reader that is just slightly larger than the memory card itself. Pricing and availability have not yet been announced.

The USB 2.0 compliant reader has no cables and simply slides into the USB port providing transfer rates of around 25MB/s depending on the card being used. Of course the device is plug and play and supports both Windows and Mac systems

[Source]
from techeblog

Debuting at CES 2007 in early January is the world’s first SD card that comes loaded with bi-stable display technology. Bi-stable is a fancy way of saying the SD card has a very small display integrated into the card that does not require additional power sources to function. The display will show the available space on the card and name of the card. With so many gadgets using SD, it is hard to juggle them all. The Info SD won the innovations award for computer accessories at CES 2007.

The Info SD is a big step forward for memory cards, but I think I know a better step. Here is my million dollar idea: find a way to add a mini-USB port onto the actual card. No need for card readers or any of that jazz, just plug the card directly into your computer. Anybody want to tackle this? I’ll give you a cut of the profits. – Travis Hudson

A-DATA
from gizmodo