Toshiba offers increased storage

Toshiba has introduced a half-terabyte external hard disk drive for consumers looking for an easy-to-use, portable backup device for digital music libraries, home videos, and other files, says Information Week.

The USB 2.0 HDD comes with a glossy black finish and frost-white graphics and offers "ultra-quiet operation", Toshiba said.

The storage capacity is sufficient for up to 142 000 photos, 131 000 music files and 222 hours of DVD-quality video or 58 hours of high-definition video.

Ctera Networks has released the CloudPlug, a small, embedded Linux appliance that sits between an external hard drive and a router to turn the drive into network attached storage, according to Computer World.

The CloudPlug plugs directly into a wall socket and has a USB port for attachment to an external hard drive and a Gigabit Ethernet port for connection to the router.

Ctera also plans to sell appliances with hard drives built in. None will require users to load or maintain software on their PCs, said Ctera founder and CEO Liran Eshel.

Samsung Semiconductor has launched a 100GB solid-state drive for enterprises that can carry out 10 times more I/Os per second than a fast hard disk drive and offers a 30-time power saving, states The Register.

The SS805 single-level cell SSD offers a 230mbps sequential read speed and a 180mbps sequential write speed. It uses 1.9 watts of power in active mode and 0.6 watts in idle mode.

The device has a function that saves data that is being processed and hasn't been stored yet, if there is a power outage.