You can live forever digitally for a “nominal price”.
Here’s another contributor to the growth of content in the world: information immortality.
nEternity is offering to keep your digital life – photos, music, your blog – alive and available online forever – independent of your domain or the photo sharing service you’re using.
nEternity may or may not take off. More significant is the trend it points towards: the extension of the lifetime of digital data. Businesses will continue to lengthen their data’s life from here on.
The rules for data retention are changing as digital copies are increasingly the only copies that exist. This will create a new set of businesses focused on extending the life of digital records beyond the current technology on which they are stored. It makes today’s digital archives look downright transitory.
And you thought those backup tapes were troublesome…
As digital content moves into every corner of our lives, the winning products will be those that meet us where we are, and don’t try to turn us all into techno geeks.
Seagate recently launched two portable drives with very different personalities. Why? One size no longer fits all. But which drive is right for you?
Seagate FreeAgent Go - a great personal drive. It’s the thinnest portable drive in the world, with up to 500 GB and a desktop dock.
I use the FreeAgent Go for my personal data. I can drop the Go into a dock at work and easily use the files on my work PC. I don’t have to mix my personal and work content, but have access to both.
Maxtor BlackArmor – a great business drive. It’s the safest drive in the world, with government-grade 128-bit AES encryption and up to 320 GB.
I use the BlackArmor for backing up my work files. I keep it at home as a simple disaster recovery scheme. There is absolutely no risk of anyone accessing the data without the password, even if it were to fall out of my bag at a hacker’s convention.
SSD sounds great, but the reality doesn’t match the dream
Solid State Technology talked to Seagate and Fujitsu SSD leaders and came to the same conclusions posted here before - SSDs for notebooks may sound like a great match, but it’s just not happening.
Why? Price – big difference! Boot time and battery life – little to no difference.
Yes, there are small opportunities for ultra-high end early adopters and ultra-portable mini-PCs. But the total opportunity for SSDs over the next several years will be miniscule compared to disk drives.
Enterprise is a larger and more profitable niche for SSDs – but even there the opportunity is at the tip of the storage iceberg that will remain dominated by disk.
Seagate’s CEO Bill Watkins and Marketing SVP Pat King on the Wild West of storage
Chris Meilor listened in as Seagate CEO Bill Watkins and Marketing SVP Pat King talked about Seagate’s plans for home NAS, SSD, hybrid storage and more at a recent press event. It’s a good read – check it out here.
Chris refers to the consumer storage market as the Wild West, but that moniker could easily be used to describe the storage market in general. Dramatic change is underway across the spectrum, from the largest corporations overwhelmed with petabyte growth and data on the loose to the Dawning of the Digital Consumer.
The storage industry is exciting (and always has been) for those who work in it. It’s becoming more relevant and entertaining to those outside of the industry as content and its storage matter like never before.
External storage is the Rubbermaid of the digital content world
Sales for external drives should grow over the next 12 months.
How, you might ask, can any consumer electronics category expect growth this year, given economic uncertainties and a consumer spending freeze? It’s not because they look cool or have new features:
Consumers will delay new PC purchases.
Consumers will continue to buy and create new content (DVDs and iTunes gift certificates will be low-cost but still fun gifts for recession-weary givers).
Consumers will run out of space on their computers.
Consumers can now get a roomy external drive for less than $100.
Personal content growth is being driven by trends that are mostly recession-proof. External drives are the electronic equivalent of the storage containers we all regularly buy when our physical stuff overflows at home.
External storage will shift from a “that’s cool” accessory to a “keep my stuff organized” staple for many consumers.
The Seagate FreeAgent Go (500GB) is the portable hard drive to beat. Its innovative dock, stylish design, generous five-year warranty, and included software give you just about all you need from a portable external drive.
Let’s hear from owners this drive. What do you think?
Going digital is no longer a choice, but it doesn’t have to be scary
Byte and Switch shared with quote from the wife of Thomas Hogan, SVP of HP Software, after seeing his presentation material as he prepared for a conference:
“What is cloud computing and do I need to be scared?”
I don’t blame her! It does sound a bit ominous and intrusive. It reminds me to stop now and then, step back from the technobabble, and think about how this stuff fits into the bigger picture.
This is all the more important as the consumer and technology worlds merge. Going digital is no longer a choice.
Storage, for example, is not gigabytes or access time to most people. It’s photos, movies, and important papers. It’s memories and dreams. The Cloud is connection, insurance and convenience.
We need to adapt our language and even our products as the doors open wide and we bring what we do from behind the curtain to the mainstream world.
