CES 2013: 9 New Ways To Look At Storage

Storage Shows The Business Side, Not The Sexy Side, Of CES

While much of the electronics industry attending this week's International Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2013) in Las Vegas was focused on who has the biggest or most Internet-capable flat screen TV or on the latest gimmicks for mobile devices, B2B companies looking to expand their storage offerings could find many potential partners at the show.

SSDs, flash storage, cloud storage and home networked storage were found throughout the halls of CES from vendors supporting both business and home users.

Didn't get to Las Vegas this week? Not an issue. Just turn the page for a look at some of the storage hardware, software and services exhibited in Sin City.

Buffalo Tech: New NAS With Free Remote Access, Content Management Service

Buffalo Technology used CES to introduce its new LinkStation 400 Series of network storage devices, which are slated to replace the current LinkStation Pro lineup sometime this quarter.

The LinkStation 400 series are the Austin, Texas-based company's first NAS systems to feature its new BuffaloLink remote access and content management service free for the life of the product. They also feature transfer speeds of up to 80 MB per second and come in a black matte-finish chassis.

Included in the series are single- and two-drive models as well as dual-bay diskless enclosures, with list prices ranging from $229 for a single 2-TB hard drive to $719 for 8-TB capacity.

HGST: New Portable Hard Drive Lineup

HGST, a Western Digital Company, unveiled three new portable hard drives at CES. New from the San Jose, Calif.-based company is the G-Technology G-Drive mini, a compact, all-aluminum enclosure containing a 1-TB HGST Travelstar 7,200-rpm hard drive. The device offers both USB 3.0 and FireWire 800 connectivity, and it delivers up to 136 MB per second performance. It lists for $199.95.

Also new is the G-Technology G-RAID mini, which is similar to the G-Drive mini but comes with two 7,200-rpm drives that can be configured for RAID 0 for high-performance applications. It also supports simultaneous playback of multiple layers of HDV, DVCPRO HD, XDCAM HD and ProRes 422 HQ with leading video editing applications and has a 2-TB capacity. It lists for $449.95.

Pictured is the Touro Mobile Pro, a portable external drive with a USB 3.0 interface, a 1-TB hard drive and a black textured enclosure. List price is $109.99, which includes 3 GB of free cloud storage.

Kingston: A Lot Of Data In A Tiny Package

Fountain Valley, Calif.-based Kingston Technology unveiled the DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0, which when it starts shipping later this quarter will be the world's largest-capacity USB 3.0 flash drive. It is currently available in a 512-GB capacity.

The DT HyperX Predator 3.0, which comes in an enclosure made of zinc alloy metal, is also fast, with up to 240 MB per second read and 160 MB per second write performance.

Kingston is targeting the DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 at users working with large video or graphics files, or at gamers or other users who travel with a full library of games or contents.

LaCie: Hybrid NAS/Cloud Storage

LaCie, which last year was acquired by Seagate, used CES to introduce new NAS and external storage devices.

The company showed off its new LaCie 5big NAS Pro (pictured), a NAS solution based on Intel's dual-core 2.13GHz processor and LaCie's NAS OS 3, which includes RAID capabilities. It features hybrid cloud technology that provides small business storage users with a single interface for both network and cloud storage and remote access. It lists starting at $549.00.

Also new is the LaCie 5big Thunderbolt Series, a five-disk device providing up to 20 TB of raw capacity and throughput speeds of up to 785 MB per second starting at $1,199.00. The company also unveiled the $299 LaCie Blade Runner limited edition hard drive with a custom-designed enclosure, a 4-TB drive and a USB 3.0 interface.

Mushkin: SSD Capacity King

Austin, Texas-based Mushkin launched what is likely the world's highest-capacity SSD. The company's new 960-GB Chronos SSD, which is slated to start shipping this month, is based on MLC NAND flash storage technology, primarily from memory vendor Micron, and is targeted at very high-performance applications such as multimedia professionals.

OCZ: New PCIe SSDs

SSD manufacturer OCZ Technology Group demonstrated a pre-production version of its new flagship PCIe Vector SSD series at CES.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company's PCIe Vector SSDs are based on the high-performance Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller. The SSDs, when plugged into a PCIe bus in high-performance Windows-based laptops, desktops and workstations provide low-latency access and high-speed file transfers.

A suite of flash storage management tools targeting drive endurance and data reliability supports 100 GB of host writes per day for five years, OCZ said.

Seagate: Wireless And Mobile Storage

Storage vendor Seagate Technology showed several new wireless and mobile storage devices at CES, including the Wireless Plus (pictured), a new mobile storage device that can be accessed without wires or the Web. It can carry over 500 movies or thousands of songs, photos and documents, and it offers up to three simultaneous video streams and eight Wi-Fi connections to work with multiple devices.

Also new is Seagate Central, a portable storage device for organizing and backing up to 4 TB of data that can then be accessed remotely from a Web browser or via a free app for tablets and smart phones.

Toshiba: New Enterprise-grade Secure HDs, SSDs

The Toshiba Storage Products Business Unit showed four new enterprise-grade, 2.5-inch SATA hard drives and SSDs supporting a variety of security features.

They include the PX02AMU line of SATA eSSD models and PX03ANU read-intensive line of SATA SSD models featuring cryptographic-erase and the PX02SMQ/U high-performance SAS SSD series with Trusted Computing Group (TCG) enterprise protocol self-encryption and cryptographic-erase support.

Also new at CES are the MQ01ABU***W series enterprise hard drives with self-encryption, cryptographic-erase and TCG-Opal protocol support in a 7mm height with up to 500 GB of storage capacity for mobile applications. These drives also support Toshiba's wipe technology, which allows systems designers to automatically cryptographic-erase data if an unexpected host attempts to access the data.

SurDoc: Cloud Storage Security

SurDoc, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based provider of cloud-based storage and document technology, used CES to demonstrate new capabilities including TruPrivacy, a technology the company said provides privacy protection for users while keeping cloud storage provider costs low. SurDoc said TruPrivacy prevents hackers or other unauthorized third-parties, such as the government, industry associations or even employees within a cloud service provider, from accessing files and documents in the cloud.