BinarySense HDDlife drive management system
BinarySense announced the availability of HDDlife Pro and HDDlife for Notebooks, an early-warning system that helps users anticipate hardware failures before they happen and cause data loss. It monitors many parameters of the drive’s performance. Based on this information, HDDlife determines if a disk is behaving normally or not.
HDDLife features BinarySense’s JustNow, which provides information on the health and performance rate of drives. AnywhereView allows the user to analyze drive state from any application. The icon that shows the drive health is displayed over an icon of a hard drive in all programs on the computer.
HDDlife can run in the background, providing real-time information on the condition of the hard disk drives. It has a small memory footprint and does not interrupt or slow down the performance of other applications. Additionally, you can use HDDlife to find out how long a hard drive has been in use (time displayed in years, months and hours).
HDDlife runs under Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server. A bundle (HDDlife Pro plus HDDlife for Notebooks) costs US$59. Registered customers are entitled to priority technical support, free minor updates and major updates with a discount.
PowerFile introduces Active Archive Appliance
PowerFile announced the introduction of its Active Archive Appliance (A3), an archival data storage solution.
While presenting itself to the network as a standard network volume, the PowerFile A3 commits permanent data to a virtualized array of DVD optical media. The system leaves a copy of frequently accessed data in primary cache for fast retrieval. By pooling the DVD subsystem storage, A3 creates highly reliable volumes of storage up to 30.6TB. By using a standard DVD underpinning, the system protects important archived information from accidental erasure, unauthorized modification, data corruption, or viruses, for 50 years or more. Since the system was designed and tuned for long-term online archive, power usage is a fraction of that of typical spinning disk.
PowerFile’s browser-based file management software enables an initial commissioning time of under 30 minutes for the average environment. Using NFS or CIFS file sharing protocol, the A3 is compatible with most third-party data management tools, enabling customers to integrate the A3 platform into their existing storage infrastructure.
The Active Archive Appliance Starter Kit provides 3.4TB of usable archive capacity at an MSRP of US$15,900, with 1.7TB Expansion Kits available at an MSRP of US$5,900.
Actual Tools introduces Actual Transparent Window 4.1
Actual Tools announced the release of version 4.1 of Actual Transparent Window, a system add-on that delivers the transparency effect to Windows OS. Once installed, the program enables users to apply various see-through effects to windows and desktop elements like the taskbar or the “Start” menu. When a user clicks on a button located on the window’s titlebar, the window becomes semi-transparent. It returns to full opacity and normal behavior with another click on the same button.
Users can configure individual transparency settings for different states of a window (e.g. when it is opened, inactive, being dragged or resized or when a mouse cursor is floating over it) and different actions (e.g. a click on a titlebar button, a double-click on a titlebar, etc). The program also offers the ghost window mode, a setting whereby a window becomes transparent to mouse clicks (the clicks pass through to whatever is underneath). However a ghosted window continues to respond to keystrokes. A combination of transparency and ghost effects is ideal for monitoring windows, contact-lists in messengers, such as ICQ, MSN, AIM, and Yahoo.
The transparency effect is one of the many features in much-anticipated Windows Vista, which is scheduled for release in 2007.
