CES Rolls Out Red Carpet For Storage

New storage devices are helping to continue narrowing the divide between IT and consumer electronics products as evidenced by a rash of new releases at the Consumer Electronics Show, being held this week in Las Vegas.

Storage vendors are taking advantage of CES, which has become the new Mecca for all things IT in the years since the closure of the Comdex exhibition, to exhibit a variety of storage drives, arrays, software, and related products with applicability to both business and home users and their solution providers.

Toshiba Storage Device Division, a division of Toshiba America Information Systems, Irvine, Calif., used CES to introduce its entry into the 1.8-inch external hard drive market and introduce what it calls the industry's highest-capacity 2.5-inch external hard drive.

The company's new USB 2.0 Mobile External Hard Drive is built around a 1.8-inch hard drive, and will be available in 60-GByte, 80-GByte, and 120-GByte models. It is aimed at mobile users looking for the portability of a USB flash drive with the high capacity of a hard drive, the company said Monday.

Going forward, Toshiba plans to include encryption and backup software with the new external drives in order to protect data should the drives be lost or stolen.

Toshiba is also using CES to expand its line of 2.5-inch external hard disk drives with a new 320-GByte version. Like the existing 250-Gbyte and 160-Gbyte models, the 320-Gbyte version includes a USB 2.0 interface and NIT Shadow software to handle the backing up of stored files.

The new 1.8-inch external hard drives are slated to ship this spring, while the 2.5-inch 320-GByte external hard drive is slated to ship this month.

Seagate, which until a couple years ago was known as a hard drive manufacturer but has since expanded rapidly into a provider of a variety of products and services for businesses and consumers looking to store and protect data, used CES to unveil its Digital Audio Video Experience (D.A.V.E.) technology platform.

D.A.V.E. is a mobile wireless storage platform that lets downloading, storage, and layback of photos, music, video and business documents to the users' own device. It allows digital data to be brought to users' devices without the need to alter those devices.

D.A.V.E. is compatible with industry standard protocols including USB, USB On The Go, Bluetooth 2.0 EDN and WiFi 802.11b/g. In addition to being a stand-along product, D.A.V.E. technology is available to telcos and OEMs to integrate with their products.

The D.A.V.E. platform includes 60 Gbytes of capacity, and connects to devices up to 30 feet away. The battery allows up to 10 hours of operation.

Seagate used CES to also unveil several partnerships around its D.A.V.E. platform. The first is a partnership with PortoMedia, of Galway, Ireland, which allows users to download up to 12 high-definition movies or 50 standard definition movies for transfer to playback devices such as cell phones and laptop or desktop PCs.

The second is with Sanyo Electric, of Osaka, Japan, under which D.A.V.E. will provide wireless storage capacity for Sanyo's Hi-Def Xacti Digital Movie Camera.

Seagate is also working with Harman/Becker Automotive Systems, a division of Harman International, Karlsbad, Germany, to incorporate D.A.V.E. technology into future multimedia system applications that can be used by automotive manufacturers to provide customers with a wireless storage upgrade for users while in their vehicles.

Seagate is also looking to help customers protect their data with the Maxtor BlackArmor storage solution. BlackArmor is an AES government-grade encrypting portable external storage device with a 2.5-inch, 160-Gbyte hard drive. List price is $149.

Next: More from Seagate, plus products from Imation, Intel, Netgear and others