Category Archives: News

Fortunately, power outages are fairly rare, often the result of damage caused by a storm or other incident damaging a power cable. When they do occur though, the consequences can cause a lot of problems, highlighted by an incident in June where Amazon’s Australian cloud services became unavailable following a power outage caused by a storm. Read more

Last week’s request by one of the most popular cloud storage and data sharing services, asking users who created accounts before mid-2012 should be seen as a wake-up call. Not only does it show that the possibility of security breaches, the wait of about four years before performing a password reset on those accounts should not go unnoticed. Read more

The last 12 months has seen a large increase in the number of institutes, such as universities and NHS trusts have suffered many attacks. This has been taken by some sections of the press to indicate that they are being targeted by Ransomware attacks. Read more

Last week Western Digital Corporation started shipping their highest capacity datacentre drive to date, when by adding a 10TB version of their WD Gold drive to the range. The previous highest capacity was 8TB, meaning the latest 10TB drive increases the capacity by 25% while improving the operational power efficiency by 8%. Improved reliability and faster sequential access performance are important features of the latest addition to the WD Gold range of drives. Read more

Last month researchers announced a proposal which is being evaluated, which could significantly improve both the data density and performance of hard disk drives based on this technique. It proposes storing the servo tracking bits on a separate layer, allowing a higher data density and improved tracking of the read/write heads, which would improve performance of the drive. Read more

Solid State Devices have increased in popularity especially over the last few years, largely due to the large increase in data transfer speeds they afford. It is now common for many computers and laptops to be sold with an SSD and a traditional rotating hard disk drive. Read more

The ever increasing uptake of cloud storage services as expected, has seen a decrease in what is called traditional data loss incidents, which includes hard disk failures. There are now however, increasing concerns over security, especially as many of the services being used, store the data on public servers. Read more

For many years the storage at the atomic level has been seen as the Holy Grail, promising a huge increase in possible data density. The Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have published research giving the first practical demonstration capable of storing 1KB of data. Read more

Almost everyone taking a holiday, a wedding or even just a day trip somewhere tend to take a device capable of capturing digital photographs, sometimes taking a hundred or more photos in a single day. While the quality or subject of many of these photographs and videos are of dubious value, each one captures a unique moment, most of which we want to keep. Often, copies are uploaded to social media sites, but in many cases with a loss in resolution, so the original image or video may still be extremely important. Read more

The recent hot weather can be very bad for computers, in particular the hard disk drives contained in them. Although many companies have air-conditioning, there are an alarming number who do not and when the outside temperature rises, an office containing one or more computers can become excessively hot. At home very few people have air-conditioning, meaning that most home computers will also suffer from high temperatures. Read more