An interesting open source property based store.

Interesting storage solution. drobo can take any number of drives and store your data across them redundantly - so any single drive failure will loose no data.

You can hot swap the drives and insert new ones at any time. drobo automatically formats the new drive and copies your files to it.

They claim more efficient than Raid - and they don't require all the drives to be identical.

It supports USB 2.0 and Firewire - a NAS "converter" is sold separately (drobo share).

Questions:

- Might it accidentally erase data if I put a non-empty drive into it?

Seems cool and is getting good 3rd party reviews.

Amazon just shipped their new attachable volume service for EC2. Now you can mount a persistent store to your instances, and not worry about them disappearing if your instance crashes or is de-commissioned.

Pricing is $0.10 per GB per month plus $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests. Back-of-the-napkin estimate for a 100GB volume used for a high volume web site would cost $36 per month.

Facebook data storage

Sprout Core Javascript library data storage interfaces.

Google Gadgets offer a simple persistence mechanism - setprefs. You can store simple properties (up to 2K) in a user-specific store that the gadget can reload later.

var prefs = new gadgets.Prefs();
var count = prefs.getInt("counter");
prefs.set("counter", count + 1);

10GB of storage and 5TB of free streaming per month is offered for free for Silverlight Streaming content.

Quoted: Windows Live Developer: Platform and Services for Web Mashups

Is S3 a single point of failure for Web 2.0 companies? One of the 3 S-3 data centers went down for 2 hours on Friday morning. Given that people noticed a complete outage - requests seem NOT to have failed over to the other centers.

Amazon seems serious about responding to this - but seems like they have a fundamental system problem.

Quoted: Bits is a blog about technology, innovation and society from The New York Times.

This could be a really good solution for home backup and shared storage. For $600 you get 500GB of storage, with room to expand to 2TB via the 4 hot-swappable SATA drive bays -> total cost about $900. Compares favorably to a Buffalo TeraStation - and probably much faster as the TeraStation is known to have performance problems due to a slow processor.

Quoted: Amazon.com: HP EX470 MediaSmart Home Server (AMD Live/ 64 Bit Sempron Processor, 500 GB Hard Drive): Computers & PC Hardware