Practical Technology

Over the last few years, the Universal Serial Bus (USB) has become the universal interface. Starting in 1995, when USB 1.0 could only transfer 12 Mbps (Megabits per second), the standard started up slowly. But when USB 2.0 came along in 2000, with its 480 Mbps, the days were numbered for PS/2, serial, parallel, and [...]

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It used to be so easy. They’d ask you, “Where’s my data?” And, you could point to the servers. Then along came multiple storage virtual storage layers, then Storage Area Networks (SAN)s and Network Attached Storage (NAS) and more recently the cloud. What’s a network administrator to do? Likewise Software has a plan. Likewise, which [...]

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Dropbox is one of the most popular cloud services that lets you store, sync, and share files over the Internet. Google Docs is one of the most popular cloud services that lets you create and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations on the Internet. For years, people have thought that these are two good services that [...]

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It’s not especially easy to deploy, but Windows 7 supports simple software RAID. Here’s how to do it, using low-cost storage you already own: a bunch of USB flash drives. (I’d say I created a RAID array of USB drives simply to demonstrate the technique, but really… one reason to do this is because, well, [...]

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Many people use Linux every day in their homes and offices and never realize it. That’s because they’re using NAS (network attached storage) devices, like the D-Link DNS-323, and almost these drives run Linux and Samba. Now, HP has partnered with Likewise to bring plug-and-play Linux file servers to mid-size and enterprise businesses These HP [...]

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