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By Evan Ackerman

If you work for a company that makes USB 3.5″ floppy disk drives, like Daniel Olson does, you probably find yourself with a lot of down time. In an effort to make 3.5″ floppies relevant again, Daniel made himself a RAID array out of 5 drives and a USB hub. The array has a usable capacity of about 4 mb, and is able to fill itself in just over 30 seconds. That’s like, uh, 0.13 mbps! Wow!

For his next project, Daniel plans to make a 125 disk array with a capacity of something like 256 mb. I guess he’s keeping ‘em out of a landfill, so that’s a good thing.

VIA [ Every Joe ]

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Still haven’t found a USB drive small enough for your needs? Then you might want to consider EagleTec’s new Nano flash drive now available from the ever dependable folks at Brando, which measures an impossibly tiny 19 x 15 x 6 mm and weighs in at a mere three grams. Despite that size, however, you’ll still get a fairly generous 4GB or 8GB of storage ($22 and $33, respectively), and an included lanyard that’ll let you attach it to something you’re less likely to misplace, though you’re on your own keeping the drive’s cap from wandering off.

[Via OhGizmo]


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Technically, OCZ outed this here PCI-Express SSD way back at CeBIT in March, but it’s just now making things super official. Now available with a fresh face and hard specifications, the Z-Drive is aiming to take on wares by firms like Fusion-io and provide blistering transfer rates to anyone who buys in. Essentially, this device removes the SATA bottleneck by employing the PCIe architecture and four Vertex controllers configured in four-way RAID 0 array. Curious about performance? Read speeds can hit upwards of 510MB/sec, while write speeds top out at 480MB/sec — plenty respectable in our eyes. OCZ’s planning to push these out in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities, and while final pricing is still being kept under wraps, we’re told that it’ll be kept “competitive.”
Gallery: OCZ gets official with Z-Drive PCI-Express SSD
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While the gang at Toshiba are still trying to bring FeRAM to the masses, a team of researchers at Cornell University have devised a new ferroelectric material composed of silicon and strontium titanate that they say can be used (someday!) to build “instant on” transistors. And you know what that means — instant on computers for students, and instant on death rays for future robot armies. To coax the generally mild-mannered strontium titanate into acting “ferro-electrified” (not an actual scientific term), researchers grew it onto a silicon substrate using a process known as epitaxy. The material literally squeezed itself within the spaces of the silicon molecules, which gave it ferroelectric properties. As you may have guessed, this research was partially funded by the Office of Naval Research — so the “death ray” remark may not be so off base, after all. We’ll keep an eye out.

[Via Daily Tech]

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While we here at Engadget are doing everything in our power to get this philosophical “economy” back “on track,” it’s items like these that aren’t doing anything to help. No innovation. No stimulating capabilities. No utility at all, really. Just a webcam that scans business cards, an MP3 player shaped like a cow and a flash drive that’s absolutely not certified for circulation by the Democratic National Committee. Though, we must say that they’re all tailor made for Crapgadget, which is (just barely) good enough for us — drop your vote for the lamest below!

Read – CowCow MP3 player
Read – 4-Port Soccer Ball USB Hub
Read – MSI StarCam Flip Webcam
Read – USB Bird Fan
Read – Bling Bling USB Card Reader
Read – Obama Flash Drive

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What, you’re still looking for the perfect place to archive your photos between candid, booze-fueled wedding reception moments? If JOBO’s GIGA didn’t do it, nor Digital Foci’s Photo Safe, maybe Nexto’s half-terabyte NVS2500 is the one you’ve been waiting for. It packs a 2.5-inch drive that can be as small as 160GB if you’re so inclined, a 2.4-inch LCD, and of course integrated readers for just about every memory card format known to man. It can even write simultaneously to an external USB device, ensuring you never lose that precious photo of Uncle Saul scaring the flower girl with his dentures. No word on availability or price, but perhaps by the time the Smith-Fitzimmons party pays off its album you’ll be able to pick one up.
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This whole global economic crisis, and its resulting massive loss of jobs got us thinking. We here at Engadget didn’t want to stand helplessly by, announcing every new round of misery without giving anything back — so we decided to take the opportunity to spread a little positivity. We’ll be handing out a new gadget every day (except for weekends) to lucky readers until we run out of stuff or companies stop sending things. Today we’ve got an 500GB Toshiba USB 2.0 portable hard drive, complete with a swank black / white motif and a nearly unlimited amount of room for, um, whatever the heck you want. Read the rules below (no skimming — we’re omniscient and can tell when you’ve skimmed) and get commenting! Hooray for free stuff!

Huge thanks to Toshiba for providing the gear!

The rules:

Leave a comment below. Any comment will do, but if you want to share your proposal for “fixing” the world economy, that’d be sweet too.
You may only enter this specific giveaway once. If you enter this giveaway more than once you’ll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.)
If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you’ll be fine.

Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
Winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive one (1) 500GB Toshiba USB 2.0 portable HDD, model number HDDR500E03X. Approximate retail value is $139.99.
If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond within three days of the end of the contest. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.
Entries can be submitted until Friday, April 24th, at 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
Full rules can be found here.

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Ah, holographic storage — you’ve held so much promise for cheap optical media since you were first imagined in research papers published in the early 60s. Later today, GE will be trying to keep the dream alive when it announces a new technique that promises to take holographic storage mainstream. GE’s breakthrough in microholographics — which, as the name implies, uses smaller, less complex holograms to achieve three-dimensional digital storage — paves the way for players that can store about 500GB of data on standard-sized optical discs while still being able to read DVD and Blu-ray media. Better yet, researchers claim a price of about 10 cents per gigabyte compared to the nearly $1 per gigabyte paid when Blu-ray was introduced. The bad news? We’re talking 2011 or 2012 by the time microholographics devices and media are introduced and even then it’ll only be commercialized for use by film studios and medical institutions. In other words, you’ll likely be streaming high-def films to your OLED TV long before you have a microholographic player in the living room.