Tag: Disk

Remember the good old 3.5-inch floppy disk? Now remember how annoying it was when you had to install a program that spanned 4 or 5 disks? Well, imagine what life would be like if you had to install today’s bloatware on your computer using floppies.

For some strange reason, I never thought I’d write a story about floppy disk coasters twice. But these really floppy, floppy disk coasters I found over on Etsy today were just too good to be ignored. Modeled after the truly retro 5-1/4″ floppy disk, these soft coasters are handmade from colorful felt, and just like their real-life cousins, are guaranteed not to store any of your data reliably.

Man, 3.5-inch disks. I still can’t believe that just a decade after the demise of the floppy, a pocket-sized iPod Nano can hold than 11,378 times more data than a single 3.5-inch disk. How far we’ve come.

Designer Neil Poulton got the inspiration for the domed glowing light on the outside of his latest hard drive design from the red light on the face of HAL 9000, the infamous computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The new LaCie 5big Network storage array is designed for small and medium workgroups looking for a ton of storage at a reasonable price.

Hardware hacker Ian Matthew decided to see if he could turn a hard drive into a clock. But this isn’t one of those lazy designs where you just stick some clock hands through a hard drive platter.

In my travels, I’ve seen a few clocks made from old hard drives. They’re typically made by stripping out the guts of an old hard drive, slapping a cheap $2 clock mechanism through the platters, then call it a day.

While digital players have put a major dent in the CD business, there’s something about having your tunes stored on something a little more tangible. To shake the old CD up a bit, the designers of Poland’s Baba Akcja have taken the boring round disc and turned it into something far more visually interesting. The discs were designed to symbolize various computer viruses, but I’m just drawn to the bright colors and shapes.

Thanks to some images that were floating around on the FCC website, rumors have floating around for a while that Sony was working on an 80GB version of the PlayStation 3. Well, it turns out the 80GB model is real.

This week, Adtron announced the availability of a new solid state drive (SSD) that’s capable of storing a record-breaking 160GB in its flash memory. The drive will be available in IDE and Serial ATA version. As storage size is rapidly approaching that of decent-sized hard drives, it would seem that these drives are really the future of computer storage.