============================================================= This article has been sent to you by Shadab Husain ( [EMAIL PROTECTED] ) ============================================================= Source: The Hindu (http://www.hinduonnet.com/seta/2006/08/17/stories/2006081700591400.htm) Sci Tech
Digital storage comes of age ANAND PARTHASARATHY Lay users are offered cool tools to securely store and transport their digital data SNUG FIT: Pocket hard drive from Western Digital YOU HAD to be 21 years old, to `come of age'. But in `Internet time' everything shrinks — and a bouncing baby of two years, can be saluted for its maturity. Earlier this month, the global Storage Networking Industry Association, accorded full-self governing regional status to its unit here — SNIA-India — recognising that this is one of the fastest growing markets anywhere for the computer storage industry. A high-powered delegation from SNIA's San Francisco (U.S.) base was in Bangalore to make the recognition formal. "India has gained the confidence of the storage networking community," says Association President Wayne Adams. Established in May 2004, SNIA-India, today has 63 members covering almost all the storage `biggies' operating in India as well as academics and research institutions. Galloping growth Disk storage in this country which totalled just 4 peta bytes in 2003, is growing at a galloping 68.8 per cent and is expected to become 8 PB by 2008, says SNIA-India Chairman P.K. Gupta. (A peta byte is one quadrillion bytes or a million-billion bytes or chunks of data). The new requirements of video surveillance, as well as oil-and-gas, healthcare and e-governance are emerging as the most storage-hungry sectors in India. This sector is targeted by enterprise-level providers like EMC, NetApp, Hitachi and others. EMC, a member of SNIA-India created the world's largest and fastest single storage solution — the 1-petabyte Symmetrix DM-X3, earlier this year. The mammoth costs $ 4 million and as yet there are no takers in India (the entire storage of Google is estimated to be between 2 and 5 petabytes). Sometimes a long tail can wag the dog: Vincent Franceschini, Chairman of SNIA's Strategic Alliances group told this correspondent that while the association elsewhere tended to be dominated by the large enterprise players, it recognises the unique features of its Indian presence: a very large market at the consumer end, where individual users accounted for a few gigabytes per head. Tantalising choices In recent weeks lay users have been offered some tantalising choices to help store, backup or securely carry their digital data, pictures or other memorabilia with them. Seagate, a respected name in hard drives, has unveiled 10 new products for any-time, any-where storage from a pocketable gigabyte or two, all the way to the world's smallest 750 GB push-button back-up drive, in a 3.5 inch diameter hard disk. Last year Seagate had launched what was then the world's smallest pocket hard drive — 5 GB in a palm-sized disk with a clever retractable cable, where the actual hard drive was just over 3 cms in diameter. Now, the company has upped the storage in the same form factor to 8 GB and it is expected to sell in India, close to its international pricing of $ 150 — around Rs 7,000. The `hot pluggable' Universal Serial Bus (USB 2.0) interface allows protected data to be securely exchanged with a PC or laptop at 480 mega bits per second. Eight GB is roughly equivalent to 8 hours of video or 133 hours of music. Western Digital, one of the oldest hard disk players has brought some of its latest disk-based portable storage solutions to India. The ultra thin WD Passport Pocket Drive, fits snugly in a purse or shirt pocket, weighs just 50 gms and stores 6 GB. The flip-up USB plug sits inside a rubberised sleeve — just in case you drop it and the data transfer speeds are comparable to the Seagate pocket drive. For those who want to carry a copy of their entire PC or laptop disk storage with them, Western Digital has the WD Passport Portable USB drive which uses a rugged 2.5 inch hard drive to store 120 GB in a flat case that looks and feels like an over-sized cigarette case. It costs Rs 11,000. Free with both WD devices is one of the coolest pieces of software that comes within a whisker of satisfying every user's dream of actually carrying one's PC in the pocket. It is called WD Sync and it comes on a CD with the hard disk. It allows you to synchronise and carry all the files and utilities from your parent PC on the portable device. You access and work on them, even browsing securely, using the Advanced Encryption Standard 128-bit encryption, when the WD device is plugged into any other PC — say a machine in a cyber cafĂ©. It leaves no files behind on the system you are using and erases your history once you unplug the portable disk. The ultimate goal The ultimate goal of course, is to boot a public PC from one's own portable drive — that way you are using the same operating system as your home machine wherever you go. A few of the Flash-based pen drives made in Taiwan and Korea these days, come with software that makes the drive bootable. But we may soon see a more universal solution for booting all portable micro drives: The Ahmedabad-based eInfochips is known to have perfected a 1 GB bootable pen drive that can create either a Linux or a Windows environment of your choice and give you the exact look and feel or your parent PC. Flash based drives cannot yet match the storage capacity of a portable hard disk — so as of today only software geeks who are confident of doing their own tweaking are trying to boot from pocket hard drives. The rest of us can wait and watch till `my PC in my pocket — wherever I go' means just that. Copyright: 1995 - 2006 The Hindu Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the consent of The Hindu
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