Digital Trends

Innovations In Storage

Several companies showed off new storage solutions at CES. It seemed like everybody had a USB flash memory product as they were found everywhere in every color.

The flash memory products with built in 802.11b or 802.11g seem to be very useful. Several companies stated that they were "the first" but we saw several of them. Companies are adding more than just wireless to the thumb drives though. The Cruzer Titanium from SanDisk is a virtually indestructible 512MB drive. There were several smaller companies out of Taiwan and China showing off thumb drives with different twists such as neck pendants, key chains, bright colors, laser pointers, belt clips, and different shapes.

Storage capacity in these drives is increasing dramatically. SanDisk and Lexar both touted new 2GB flash drives, with SanDisk also entering a new line in the Memory Stick format.

Several companies offered products using the 1.5GB Cornice Storage Element and announced prototypes for new products using 2GB and 4GB Cornice or Tosbiba drives. Such devices included USB2.0 drives that require no external power, flash drives, and MP3 players. We'll see these devices on the market this summer. Toshiba also announced a new .85-inch drive which will power a new wave of portable storage and mp3 players later in the year.

China's MagicStor also introduced some striking storage products. Their main announcement was a new series of 1-inch hard drives with capacities of 2.4GB and 4.8GB. The drives were shown as Compact Flash Type II devices, USB 2.0 devices and as internal drives for small form factor designs. MagicStor also announced plans for developing a 0.8" hard disk drive.

XIMETA expands upon their NetDisk line with the new NetDiskOffice, a network attached hard drive with an integrated 8-port 100mbps switch. The NetDiskOffice can be used stand-alone as a USB2.0 drive, or hooked directly into a network. It adds seven more ports to a network, perfect for a SOHO situation where the 4-port router has run out of ports. The NetDiskOffice features a  250GB 8MB cache hard drive and should be available in February 2004.

XIMETA's NetDiskOffice with integrated 8-port switch.