How DNA Could Replace Hard Drives

The capacity of our digital storage devices has skyrocketed in recent years. But there’s one storage medium that still kicks the crap out of our state-of-the-art solid state, and humans didn’t invent it. It’s called DNA. Read more…

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How DNA Could Replace Hard Drives

The World’s Thinnest 4 TB External Drive Doesn’t Need Extra Power

Chances are if you’ve opted for an ultra-portable laptop , you’ve made a few compromises when it comes to on-board storage. So an external hard drive for archiving your mountains of media is a must, and Samsung’s now squeezed four terabytes of storage inside a housing that matches your computer’s svelte dimensions. Read more…

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The World’s Thinnest 4 TB External Drive Doesn’t Need Extra Power

Has Your Network-Connected Back-Up Drive Been Indexed By Search Engines?

Connecting a hard drive to your home network is a smart idea: it can let you access your files no matter where you are. But now it seems that, in some cases, Google has been indexing the private files held on such devices. Read more…

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Has Your Network-Connected Back-Up Drive Been Indexed By Search Engines?

Windows Does Defragment SSDs, But It’s Okay

You’ve likely heard before that you should never defragment your SSD. Conventional wisdom says not only do solid state drives not need defragging, doing so would cause unnecessary writes to the drive. This is only partially true. In fact, Windows does sometimes defragment SSDs—on purpose. Read more…

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Windows Does Defragment SSDs, But It’s Okay

Western Digital’s New Hard Drives Are Filled With Helium

Digital storage is always getting cheaper and more capacious—but Western Digital has a plan to fill it with helium to make hard drives way more efficient than ever before. Read more…        

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Western Digital’s New Hard Drives Are Filled With Helium

University wins record $1.17 billion verdict against Marvell Semiconductor

flickr / BestBoyZ GmbH A Pittsburgh jury found that hard drive control chips made by Marvell Semiconductor infringe two patents owned by Carnegie Mellon University. Following a four-week trial in federal court, nine jurors unanimously held that Marvell should have to pay $1,169,140,271 in damages—the full sum that CMU’s lawyers had asked for. If the verdict holds up on appeal, it would wipe out more than a year of profits at Marvell, which made a bit over $900 million in 2011. It would also be the largest patent verdict in history, beating out this summer’s $1.05 billion verdict against Samsung for infringing patents and trademarks owned by Apple. The two CMU patents describe a way of reducing “noise” when reading information off hard disks. The jury found that Marvell’s chips infringed claim 4 of Patent No. 6,201,839 and claim 2 of Patent No. 6,438,180 . At trial, Marvell hotly contested that CMU had invented anything new; they argued that a Seagate patent , filed 14 months earlier, describes everything in CMU’s invention. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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University wins record $1.17 billion verdict against Marvell Semiconductor

Add a RAM Disk to Your Computer for Faster-than-SSD Performance

Feel the need for more computer speed? Even if you’re already rocking a fast SSD ( one of the best upgrades you can make), you can still improve your computer’s performance by adding more memory and turning it into a RAM disk, which can be as much as 70 times faster than a regular hard drive or 20 times faster than an SSD. More »

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Add a RAM Disk to Your Computer for Faster-than-SSD Performance