Seagate’s BlackArmor PS110 USB3 drive kit brings USB3 to laptops without USB3. And your transfer speeds will be 3 times what they were through USB2. If you weren’t excited about USB3 before, you should be. The Price $180 The Verdict It’s three times faster than USB2, which is a pretty good jump this early on in the life of the standard. In theory, you can get somewhere around ten times as fast, but you’re then running into bottlenecks such as the actual drive itself and the computer you’re transferring data to. But our biggest complaint is it’s not OS X compatible

Intel and Micron’s IMFT joint venture’s just announced they’ve started producing NAND flash using 25nm transistors —they’re pushing 8GB on a single die—with products shipping sometime this year in fatter capacities (up to 600GB). In English: Using the smaller 25nm manufacturing process, they can get roughly twice as much storage in the same amount of space as the current 34nm flash manufacturing tech. More storage in the same amount of space, as we learned before , doesn’t just mean more storage, it means more storage for cheaper. [ Anandtech ]

British artist Nick Gentry ’s paintings give long-forgotten floppy disks a new lease on life. They’re still storage media, just in a much more literal sense. At some point recently, you’ve probably uncovered an old box of videos, cassettes, and floppies in the basement and thought to yourself, “what am I supposed to do with these?” It turns out you just weren’t thinking hard enough. Painting on canvases comprised of 3.5″ floppy disks and VHS tapes, Nick Gentry puts these bygone forms of storage to use in his art. To see more of his incredible work, check out the artist’s website . [ Nick Gentry ]

British artist Nick Gentry ’s paintings give long-forgotten floppy disks a new lease on life. They’re still storage media, just in a much more literal sense. At some point recently, you’ve probably uncovered an old box of videos, cassettes, and floppies in the basement and thought to yourself, “what am I supposed to do with these?” It turns out you just weren’t thinking hard enough. Painting on canvases comprised of 3.5″ floppy disks and VHS tapes, Nick Gentry puts these bygone forms of storage to use in his art. To see more of his incredible work, check out the artist’s website .

British artist Nick Gentry ’s paintings give long-forgotten floppy disks a new lease on life. They’re still storage media, just in a much more literal sense. At some point recently, you’ve probably uncovered an old box of videos, cassettes, and floppies in the basement and thought to yourself, “what am I supposed to do with these?” It turns out you just weren’t thinking hard enough. Painting on canvases comprised of 3.5″ floppy disks and VHS tapes, Nick Gentry puts these bygone forms of storage to use in his art. To see more of his incredible work, check out the artist’s website . [ Nick Gentry ]

LaCie dabbled in the CES extravaganza with a few minor offerings , but it decided to wait a few weeks for things to calm down before busting out a new range of wares. Today, the outfit is slinging out a trio of products in the freshly created Enterprise Class: the d2 Quadra Enterprise Class, 2big Quadra Enterprise Class and the 4big Quadra Enterprise Class. Obviously engineered for the more hardcore among us, these units pack enterprise-class SATA drives, a five-year warranty, 128-bit AES hardware encryption and hardware RAID with hot-swappable disks. Each HDD within spins at 7200RPM and boasts 32MB of cache, and 700MB/sec are promised when using a RAID 50 array with four 4big Quadra Enterprise Class units.

All we ever hear of that SandForce SF-1500 controller seems to be about how wickedly fast it is, so we’d be remiss not to inform you that it’s found another home — this time inside Super Talent ’s new enterprise-class SSD line. Branded as TeraDrive FT2, these drives will range from 50GB to 400GB on MLC NAND flash, or up to 200GB on the even nicer SLC-based stuff. The only hurdle in all this glory is that the hardware seems destined primarily for non-consumer markets, with OEMs getting samples now and expecting volume deliveries by the end of this quarter. Then again, if you really can’t wait for these to filter through in consumer machines, we’re sure OCZ and RunCore will be more than happy to sell you some of their own silly fast SandForce-infused gear. Super Talent adds SandForce controller to new TeraDrive SSDs originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 23 Jan 2010 13:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds .

SSDs may be what’s ” next ,” but seriously — magnetic tape storage is the real heat. This darn near antediluvian storage medium is amazingly still around and kicking, and what’s even more incredible is that real advancements are taking place. Just under four years ago, IBM and Fujifilm were doing the Cha Cha Slide Tango as they introduced 8TB cartridges ; today, the two are rolling out (quite literally, actually) a 35TB version into the wild, wild world that we call home. Nah, you won’t find these on any Best Buy shelves, but your great grandchild’s medical records may one day end up on something built in the year 2010.

IBM and Fujifilm have spent the last three years working to improve magnetic tape data density , and the result is a prototype with a density of 29.5 billion bits per square inch—enough to hold 35TB of data. That’s about 39 times the areal data density of today’s best products and 44 times the capacity of today’s IBM LTO Generation 4 cartridge. Plus, tape has cost advantage over flash and HDD, which makes it an attractive option for businesses that need to store large amounts of data. [ PR Newswire ]

Twelve South , makers of Mac accessories that are sometimes prettier than they are practical, have a new way for you to protect your MacBook or MacBook Pro: hardbound leather. Twelve South’s products always look nice, but sometimes they don’t make a whole lot of sense. BookArc? Sure. BassJump and BackPack? I’m not as convinced.