Toshiba has colour-coded its hard drives to help buyers pick the right kind of drive for their storage needs. Western Digital has been doing this for years, but perhaps an industry-wide standard would help everyone
Online storage is cheap. But you can build your own cloud even cheaper using Backblaze's open source design for the new Storage Pod 6.0, which can hold from 180TB to almost half a petabyte.
Backblaze, a cloud storage company, records the reliability of different hard drives from different suppliers. The 2015 numbers reveal the success of the 4TB Seagate ST4000DM000, of which Backblaze now owns almost 30,000.
If you're pushing the 15GB limit for Gmail and Google Drive, you can save space by using FindBigMail's service, or by running some simple searches - though you still can't delete attachments without deleting the emails as well.
3TB hard drives aren't quite as reliable as some of us thought, according to new Backblaze numbers based on a 100 petabyte cloud service using 34,881 consumer-grade disks.
Optical discs have been left behind by the rapid growth in storage requirements, but Archival Discs may get Sony and Panasonic back in the game with 300GB discs next year and 1TB on the way.
Western Digital has announced a $299 hybrid drive that combines a 120GB SSD and a 1TB HD in a single drive slot, plus My Cloud NAS storage systems with one or four drives
