• Efficiency will hold down storage growth, IDC says

  Lean storage techniques will keep a lid on storage investments over the next few years, though the world's enterprises still are on track to buy 138 exabytes of storage system capacity in 2017, IDC said.

• Samsung mass produces 1.4GB/s PCIe flash cards

  Samsung has started mass shipments of its XP941 PCIe flash drive, a card for untra-slim notebooks that delivers a sequential read performance of 1,400MB/s throughput.

• Nationwide makes SSDs standard on PCs, to employee applause

  Nationwide Insurance is moving off Windows XP and the misery of an eight-minute boot-up time for some 40,000 users.

• The new MacBook Air gets a 45 per cent performance boost with PCIe flash

  Apple has slipped new superfast PCIe flash into its thinnest of thin notebooks -- the new MacBook Air models released on Monday

• Apple's Mac move could spur PCIe flash flurry in other notebooks, desktops

  With Apple's announcement that it'll bypass a SATA SSD in its Mac Pro and MacBook Air and go straight for the stratosphere of flash with a PCIe card, some pundits are speculating other laptops and desktop vendors may not be far behind.

• Open source FreeOTFE encrypts disks handily

  FreeOTFE may sound like a political bumper sticker, but it stands for "Free On The Fly Encryption." The "Free" part is self-explanatory; "On The Fly Encryption" refers to the encrypting/decrypting of data as it is written to or read from your hard disk.

• How to pick NAS for any business

  Network-attached storage (NAS) can make your business easier to run and more efficient in multiple ways.

• Creating a live USB drive from a live CD image

  Although live CDs have a lot of advantages, they don't fit in your pocket easily, which means you may not always have one around when you need it. Fortunately, most live CD images can be installed onto a USB flash drive, giving you most of the benefits of a live CD.

• Disaster-proof your PC: image your drive

  Last week I told you how to make a new computer hassle-free; to wit, I described how to create a system-repair disc, dump the junkware, and set up security. Now that you've got your PC just the way you want it, it's time to perform what I consider to be the ultimate hassle-prevention steps: imaging your hard drive and setting up a backup routine.

• Restore data after motherboard death

  Peter's motherboard died. How can he retrieve the data on his hard drive?

• Here, there, everywhere: 3 personal Cloud storage systems

  Cloud storage has become increasingly popular, both for individuals and companies, as a place to stash everything from tax records to family photos. Services such as Dropbox, Box, SugarSync or Google Drive offer the chance to easily store your data and then access it from any of your devices.

• New storage technologies to deal with the data deluge

  Enterprise storage demands are reaching a critical point, and vendors are scrambling to develop new products to deal with the data deluge. We look at how these technologies will help manage the major pain points for storage administrators.

• How big is the sound of music?

  Music fans and major recording artists are adopting lossless audio file formats to keep copies of their music thats as close to a master recording as possible, leading to multi-terabyte-sized home music storage systems.

• Tape storage finds new life in the enterprise and beyond

  Tape is not dead - far from it. In fact, many enterprises depend on it for cost-effective long-term storage. Tape is also finding new applications in the virtualized and increasingly video-centric world of IT. As enterprises deal with bigger sets of data, tape will play a vital role going forward.

• 2012: The year in quotes

  Some of the most memorable IT-related quotes were uttered in courtrooms this year, which involved a steady stream of legal challenges about intellectual property. In no particular order, these are some of the comments that stuck with us as 2012 winds to a close.

Whitepapers about storage

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  Process Automation – What the Best CIOs Ask

  In the current economic and regulatory environment, there is significant pressure on today’s CIO to not only keep the business running within an allocated budget, but to actively transform a business through the smart deployment of technology. Find out what questions the best CIOs ask and answer when transforming their businesses with process automation.

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  Virtualisation and Cloud Computing: Optimised Power, Cooling and Management Maximises Benefits

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  Top 10 Mistakes in Data Centre Operations: Operating Efficient and Effective Data Centres

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  Data Centre Physical Infrastructure: Optimising Business Value