The King of Pop Michael Jackson may have left this earthly realm, but that's not to say we can't have a string of baffling Jackson branded products to remember him by does it?

Take for instance this Samsung Michael Jackson branded 500GB external hard drive. I don't quite remember Jackson being a familiar face down in Silicon Valley, but I suppose even from beyond the grave you've got bills to pay. They really would slap his face on just about anything though, wouldn't they? Or in this case, his silhouette.

The hard drive, available from February 22nd, comes pre-loaded with the "This Is It" tour documentary, chronicling the last rehearsals before Jackson's untimely death.

Excuse the pun, but I can't help thinking this is a "Bad" idea.

That said, I bet this lot below have pre-ordered about 12 of the things.

Storage giants Buffalo have today unveiled the latest version of their TeraStation III iSCSI product range.

The Buffalo TeraStation III iSCSI Desktop and 1U Rackmount units offer data transfer speeds of up to 92MB/s, allowing critical business data to be managed, stored and backed up quickly, efficiently and securely. The desktop unit is available in capacities of 2TB and 4TB, whilst the 1U Rackmount unit is available in 2TB, 4TB, 6THB and 8TB.

Paul Hudson, Northern European Sales Director, Buffalo Technology, said: "The potential for iSCSI within small and medium sized business environments is enormous. The TeraStation III iSCSI will allow organisations to back up all their data and make it appear as just another drive on the server. The beauty of iSCSI is that you can aggregate a lot of different devices into one logical volume and for IT managers this makes life infinitely easier and cheaper than backing up to the primary storage tier.

The Buffalo TeraStation III iSCSI for Desktop or 1U Rackmount features include:

* Fully populated, 4 bay, 4 drive device
* Up to 92MByte/s iSCSI high speed data transfer
* Supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10 and Standard
* Advanced RAID system to continually check hard drive performance
* Resilient - Replace faulty hard drives with the Hot Swap functionality without interruption of work
* Hot Spare feature automatically switches failed drive to spare drive to ensure redundancy
* Dual Ethernet connectivity for port trunking
* 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet port and Jumbo Frame capability for higher transfer speeds
* LCD Status Display, easy setup wizard management through intuitive web interface
* Supports UPS connectivity via USB port
* Supported OS: Windows Server 2003/2008, Windows®7(64/32bit), Windows® Vista™, Windows® XP, Windows® 2000 (32bit), Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004/2005
* Available as Desktop or 1U 19" Rackmount
* Warranty 3 Years
* Available as 2TB, 4TB, (Desktop), 2TB, 4TB 6TB and 8TB capacities (Rackmount)

For availability and pricing information, visit www.buffalo-technology.com.

Computers get smaller, file sizes get bigger. Fact. But where to store all of our fancy new HD media and lossless sound files? Acer's Aspire easyStore H340 is one way to keep all your files safely stored away.

The Aspire easyStore H340 is home media server perfect for organising all your video, photo and music files. Totally DLNA compliant, the server can stream files to games consoles and PCs all around the house.

Best of all, the server has four hot-swappable hard disks, allowing for a massive 6TB of storage. That's more than enough space for the Atom powered kit to automatically backup your entire computer, automatically duplicating data to a number of devices.

Your data can also be accessed remotely thanks to a secure personal web address on the Windows Home Server website.

The Aspire easyStore H340 is available now, with prices starting from £329.99 going up to £429.99.

LaCie are set to launch the LaCinema Classic HD media player and server.

Acting as a DLNA server to sync up all your media collections from PCs and games consoles, the LaCinema Classic HD lets you hook up your media content to any HD ready TV around the house via HDMI.

Boasting a 2TB hard-drive, the LaCinema HD has plenty of storage available to house 1080p video content, which is fully compatible with the player. USB support makes shifting content from one device to another simple too.

If you're looking to use the LaCinema Classic predominately for video, LaCie have you covered. All the most popular file formats and plug-ins will be supported, from DivX to high-quality MKV H.264.

Salem Tirane, Digital Home Product Manager said of the product, "LaCinema Classic HD is all you need to store, play and share your movies, music and photos at home. We believe organising and playing should be simple for everyone, without concern for media compatibility or how to access media, no matter where it's stored in your home".

The LaCinema Classic HD is set to feature some pretty attractive functions by the looks of things. Giving change back out of £200, it's not too badly priced either.

For more information, visit www.lacie.com/uk

We told you last year about LaCie's LaCinema - a rugged, portable multimedia hard-drive designed to host all of your multimedia content. Well, as the name suggests, this is the HD upgrade to that device.

As well as playing all the formats you'd expect of a multimedia player - it now plays all of the popular HD variations too, such as H.264, MKV, WMV9 and MPEG-4.

It's got 500GB of storage and offers full HD, 1080p resolution via HDMI. It's designed to be carried around - it has a unique varnished, scratch-protected aluminium shell and shock-resistant rubber sleeve that make it resistant to a bit of rough and tumble.

It's £289.99 and it's available now direct from LaCie.

This guide outlines the main differences between solid state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs).

There are two major types of SSD in current production -- NAND and DRAM. This guide focuses on the more common one: NAND.

It's worth noting that advances are being made all the time on both types of drive and that these differences are generalisations. Individual performance will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.

1. Speed

Most solid state drives, except ones made using cheaper components, are significantly faster at reading data than a hard drive.

This is because there are no moving mechanical parts on a SSD and so the "seek time" is significantly reduced. Incidentally, DRAM drives are faster still.

Writing large files is also generally quicker on a SSD, though at present there are often performance problems when trying to write a lot of small files to a SSD. It's possible to overcome this through improved system design.

In general, though, SSDs are faster than HDDs.

(PS: SSDs are generally quieter than HDDs because they don't have any moving parts and are usually fanless)

Although solid state drives deliver incredible performance compared to their creaky, mechanical brethren, one area that SSDs have difficulty competing on is price. Opting for an SSD on a laptop, rather than a normal drive, can add hundreds of pounds to its cost, and you'll likely end up with a smaller capacity too.

Flash marketing manager for Samsung, Brian Beard, says: "Flash memory in the last five years has come down 40, 50, 60 percent per year. Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years."

The cost gap exists, Beard explains, because the two drives are built differently. In a traditional hard drive, the spindle, motors, PCB and cables all have a fixed price. Upgrading one of them - the motor, for example, so it spins faster - doesn't add a massive incremental cost to the unit.

An SSD on the other hand, has a very small fixed cost - just the PCB and the enclosure. If you upgrade the memory units, increasing the speed or the capacity, the price increases linearly. A doubling of capacity will nearly double the price.

There's plenty of pressure on SSD manufacturers to make their drives conform to the industry standard set up HDDs, but the flash memory market is notoriously unpredictable, so it could be some time things settle down. For the consumer, 256GB solid state drives are only now rolling out into mass production.

(via Cnet)

I'm not sure why I get excited about external storage solutions. I think it's the computer equivalent of shelving and anyone out there can understand people getting pleasure out of talking about that, right?

So, that given, you can basically double my levels of manly excitement when I see that these things look as good as the latest range of external drives from Toshiba. If you like them gloss, then go for the Toshiba Store Art which come in 1.8", 2.5" and 3.5" depending upon how large your collection of illegal downloads is - 160GB, 500GB or a whole fat 1TB.

The only sad part is that they're HDDs and not SSDs, so, despite the promise of low power consumption, expect a degree of whirring. Still it does mean that prices start at a wallet friendly £64.99 when they hit the shelves from April.

Most people know that the hard drive is one of the slowest bits in most modern computers, and we're all eagerly anticipating the arrival of affordable, capacious SSD drives, but I hadn't quite realized how fast these things were until I saw this video, from Samsung's marketing team. Watch it above.

A set of 24 SSDs in RAID can open the entirety of Microsoft Office in half a second, the entire start menu (53 programs!) in 18 seconds, and can copy a DVD from place to place in less time than it takes to throw the aforementioned DVD out of the window. Best of all, the system can defrag in just three seconds. Impressive!

(via Gizmodo)

The Mac Pro is all about power and today Apple has laid down two models, one with a quad-core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processor and the other with two of them.

Both come with a 640GB HDD as standard with 3GB of RAM on one and 6GB on the other. Each also features the 18x double-layer SuperDrive and a 512MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 graphics unit.

Inspired no doubt by recent mentions of the GDrive in various bits of code, aspiring hackers are now trawling through Google's entire codebase looking for references to the mythical cloud storage service. As a result, more nuggets of info are surfacing, including this description of the service:

"GDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents. GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, anytime, and from any device - be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone."

Interesting bits: "All your files" and "music" are mentioned. Maybe they're not bothered about intellectual property issues after all. Still no mention of the originally rumoured "unlimited", though.

(via Google Operating System)

Related posts: GDrive rumours solidify - code spotted in Google Apps | Rumours of Google planning an incredible unlimited cloud storage service

Not only has the newest Western Digital Caviar drive got more storage capacity than a dog's brain, the 2TB hard drive has also been designed to be environmentally sound, with WD suggesting it consumes 4-5 watts less energy than competing HDs.

Coming with a 32MB cache and a SATA-II interface for hooking it into your PC, the drive's appearing for pre-order right now. One bewilderingly in-depth and unnecessarily lengthy six page review can be summarised as follows: 8/10. Very good. Well worth it if money's no object and your PC's only got one HD bay.

The price? As low as a relatively decent £206, if you shop about a bit. Bloody good for a gadget that only existed in geek storage fantasy world six months ago.

(Via TR.com)

Related posts: Google's "GDrive" virtual HD | Seagate firmware shame

The rumours around Google's GDrive, which we reported on the other day, look to be gaining steam. First, there was a mysterious menu option appearing in Picasa for Mac, and now code's been added to Google Apps that references a 'webdrive'. There's even a little icon for it.

I'll reiterate my comment from the other post - this isn't likely to be 'unlimited' storage. People have too much crap for Google to allow that, and most of that crap is dubiously-acquired intellectual property like movies, games and music. Google's had problems with that with YouTube, so I find it unlikely that they won't put restrictions on the service.

More likely, we'll see a limited storage, limited file upload service that doesn't do very much more than what you can already do with Google Docs and Google Mail. When will we see it? My money's on 'fairly soon'.

(via Google Operating System)

Related posts: Rumours of Google planning an incredible unlimited cloud storage service | Google adds tube map to Google Maps

Poor Seagate. Late last week, the news broke that their Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drives were failing en masse. Admirably, the company's already published a firmware fix, but maybe they pushed it out a little too fast because it's causing 500GB drive owners' discs to fail en masse.

The update has been taken offline for the moment, and users of 1TB and 750GB drives are reporting successful updates, but if you're on a 500GB drive and you've downloaded but not installed the update, then I certainly don't recommend doing so just yet.

Seagate Forum (via Tom's Hardware)

Related posts: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives: Epic Fail | If it's not working, don't smash it!

Whispers around the intertubes would have you believe that Google has something very special planned for this year - unlimited cloud storage. It would mean that if you've got a fast enough broadband connection, then you'd no longer need more than a tiny hard drive - everything else could be stored online.

For the record, I don't think Google's quite there yet. Even their email product is officially limited, when its competitors' products aren't. There's every chance that we'll see some sort of limited storage product released by the Goog in 2009 but, well, the 'unlimited' label - I just don't think it can happen yet.

(via ShinyShiny)

Related posts: Google adds tube map to Google Maps | Google pilots artwork in minute detail in Google Earth

Hard drives crash from time to time, that's a fact, but it seems that one particular type of Seagate drive is failing en masse, according to online accounts from annoyed customers.

The Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drive fails at boot time with a firmware error that locks the drive and makes it inoperable. Laughably, when the unit is returned, Seagate replaces it with the same model. The Register also suggests that you could pay Seagate twice by using its i365 company to recover the data before replacing the unit.

It would be an understatement to say that I wasn't a big fan of Which?'s suggestion that you safeguard your personal data by hitting it with a big hammer, and it turns out that Computer Aid agrees. Computer Aid is a charity which refurbishes old and unwanted computer equipment for the third world.

Instead, the charity wants you to opt for safe, environmentally-friendly alternatives when disposing of IT equipment. They also recommend a data erasing program over total destruction, though it's the paid-for Blancco.

Of course, what they really want you to do is give the old equipment to them, promising that any data you leave will be wiped clean before it's reused. A much better solution than a claw hammer, I'm sure you'll agree.

Computer Aid

Related posts: Which? magazine's solution to data privacy - a big hammer | Security watchdog the ICO is currently looking at 277 "data breaches" in the UK

Most people, when selling on a computer second-hand, wipe the data by just deleting it. That's not quite enough. A simple delete just removes the references to the data on the disk - rather than wiping it clean. Software available free on the net can recover it relatively easily, as long as it hasn't been overwritten.

Which? bought eight computers on eBay and recovered 22,000 'deleted' files from them in this way. Some of those files contained personal data, which could be used by identity thieves to steal your... etc etc. Yawn. You know all this.

Of course, there's programs that'll hard-delete data, too, but Which? prefers another solution. A big hammer. They recommend pulling it out of the PC and whacking it very very hard, until the thing's in pieces. While I don't doubt the effectiveness of that method, it's a lot easier to use a program like SuperShredder to accomplish the same thing. Plus you won't get bits of disk platter in your eye. Bonus.

Which? (via BBC)

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If you needed any more evidence that solid-state-drives (SSDs) will be taking over from traditional hard drives pretty damn soon, then here it is. Toshiba's developed an SSD that's 512GB - twice the size of their recently launched 256GB model.

SSDs use fast flash memory for storage, rather than the traditional mechanical magnetic platter which is slower and more prone to failure. This particular drive uses 43-nanometer Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash technology to cram those gigabytes into a 2.5" enclosure.

Tosh will also be offering 256GB, 128GB and 64GB drives, each in a choice of 1.8" or 2.5" enclosures.They'll be available sometime between April and June, but they'll be shown off at CES in January. No pricing info yet.

Toshiba (via Cnet)

Related posts: Micron Technology promises 1GB/s+ SSD drive within a year | Toshiba makes small thing bigger on the inside - 250GB SSD on the way this year

Buffalo has really pushed the boat out with its latest high capacity hard drive. The LinkStation Quad can store up to four terabytes of data, be that multimedia, backup, or other data, and allows web access to those files plus media streaming to an iPhone.

As if that wasn't enough, there's a built-in BitTorrent client which allows files to be downloaded directly to the device, after configuring from a PC control panel, without the need for other computers to remain powered up. How quickly can you fill up four terabytes?