Posted 02/15/09 at 11:44:15 AM by Justin Kerr

Gigabit Ethernet may still outrun all but the most extreme SSD Raid configurations, but researchers can never rest on their laurels. Always hoping to invent the next big thing, scientists now have their sights set on Terabit Ethernet to help quell our insatiable hunger for bandwidth. A team from Australia, Denmark, and China has combined their efforts to demonstrate terabit-per-second speeds using fiber optic cables, laser light, and an unusual material named chalcogenide.

The group documented the results of its most recent trial in a white paper published in the February 16th 2009 issue of Optics Express. Though the technology is promising, Ben Eggleton, research director for CUDOS (Center for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems), points out the current limitations. “The problem isn't injecting that much high speed data into an optical strand, called multiplexing, but retrieving data at such high rates”. Conventional electronics are capable of injecting dozens of 10 Gbps streams, but trying to retrieve these streams any faster than 40 Gbps is beyond our current capabilities.

The breakthrough here however isn’t in the speed itself, but in proving the concept.  Until the processing hardware catches up with our transmission capabilities, you won’t be finding this in routers anytime soon. Eggleton speculates that these concepts can be adapted to achieve slower and more manageable results, but the goal of this experiment was simply to prove that it was possible using fully photonic chips built using the same methods employed by current CMOS circuits. "It's years to complete," Eggleton said, taking these research efforts into a production technology. But these demonstrations "are starting to establish this is a serious proposition."

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Posted 07/08/08 at 06:44:51 PM by Mark Edward Soper

The Drobo storage robot adds FireWire 800 ports for faster performance, and provides a discount for first-generation models. USB 2.0 users also get faster performance, and it's easy to figure out exactly how many (and how large) the drives you need to add to get the storage you want. So, how much is the new Drobo, what can you save on an "old" Drobo, and what else is different?

For all the answers, I'll see you after the jump.

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Posted 07/04/08 at 01:23:24 PM by Mark Edward Soper

 

Data Robotics, the creators of Drobo, "The World's First Storage Robot" and DroboShare, which adds network capabilities to Drobo, have taken Drobo to the next level. Endgadget reports that Data Robotics has opened Drobo+DroboShare up to developers through its new Drobo Developer Community (DDC) and SDK program.

To understand why the network media server category has just gotten even bigger, catch me after the break.

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Posted 06/27/08 at 04:35:09 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Maxtor, Seagate's home storage brand, is set to centralize home network storage with its new Central Axis network drive. In a world of other network attached storage devices, what makes it different than the competition?

Read on to discover how Central Axis is designed to "play nice" with today's diverse network configurations, and how much it will cost to add it to your home network.

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Posted 07/25/07 at 10:37:21 PM by By Mark Soper

With Gigabit Ethernet storage devices abounding, it's time to look for routers with faster ports.

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