Event Coverage

HardwareZone's 10th Anniversary: The Y2K Era

Events from the Storage World in Y2K

Events from the Storage World in Y2K

 

  • The first USB flash drive was made commercially available. The name "ThumbDrive" that we are so familiar with today came from Trek, a Singapore company, whose USB flash drive was about the size of your thumb and was hence aptly named "Trek ThumbDrive". Somehow, the name stuck, and today USB flash drives are known worldwide simply as thumbdrives.

We reviewed Trek's thumbdrive back in 2000 and were impressed by its size and ease of use. We also noted in the review that what users really wanted was a storage device that can be used across a multitude of systems, and the thumbdrive provided just that.

 Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting the original 'Thumbdrive'!

  • Thanks to the proliferation of recordable optical media and USB flash drives, zip disks and drives are now rendered completely obsolete.
  • This year we tested a very interesting and innovative gadget, probably the first of its kind - Romtec's Trios Multi-IDE Selector (RX-910T3) . The idea behind this gadget is that it'll allow you to boot from the hard drive of your choice. What use is this you might ask? With this, you can install different operating systems on different hard drives, and then later choose which hard drive to boot from just a button push. Of course there's always the BIOS equivalent for such adjustments, but it's just cumbersome. Being such a nifty device, it got the full 5 stars from us.

 The ROMTEC Multi-IDE selector is a god-send for those whose work requires them to work with multiple operating systems.

  • Hitachi, in partnership with LG, formed the data storage company, Hitachi-LG Data Storage. The company was formed with the specific purpose of manufacturing optical data storage devices such as CD and DVD drives for desktops and notebook OEMs. As of July 2006, they started developing Blu-ray drives.


 

 

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