By day, the Airstash is a common, ordinary USB card reader. But by night, it dons the mantle of wireless connectivity, taking to the streets and sharing pictures an images in an ad-hoc, daredevil manner.

The Airstash looks much like a regular card reader, with a USB plug on one end and an SD card-shaped hole in the other. In between you can find a tiny, battery powered 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi router. Slot in a card and it can be reached wirelessly through the web browser of any Wi-Fi enabled computer or phone.

The design is simple, but the uses are manifold. You could use this to wirelessly copy photos from card to computer, but that, apart from saving you a USB port, is a little boring. What about carrying an extra 32GB of movies and music that can be streamed from the built-in server direct to your iPhone? Or creating a fully functional wireless network for sharing, well, anything? Because it uses vanilla Wi-Fi, it works with anything. And because it uses USB, it charges when you plug it into a spare port.

The product was shown last week at CES, and right now has neither a price or a shipping date (”available soon” is the only hint on the product page). If it is cheap, and if the battery in such a tiny case can last long enough to be useful, then this could be a very useful toy. And if it is given away at next
year’s CES in the same fashion as pen drives were at this year’s show, we’ll be very happy indeed.

Airstash product page [Airstash via Oh Gizmo!]

Like the Buffalo hard drive I bought in Japan to replace one that died, Buffalo’s generically named Portable HD is actually Samsung inside, but in this case, the same kind used in the MacBook Air, so it’s incredibly slim and totally pocketable, about the size of a biz card holder. The convenience makes for a low bytes to dollars ratio, though, at $120 for 30GB and $170 for 60GB. Still, I love the design.

Buffalo has come up a new network accessible storage system which not only hangs onto up to 4TB of your files but is also Time Machine and iPhone compatible. OK, so this last bit is over a dedicated web access system and the phone can’t save the files, but it can view the contents of music, photo and video files. The LS-QL/R5’s 5.1 x 7.1 x 8.7-inch box can fit in up to four 3.5-inch drives, has a RAID-5 option, Gigabit Ethernet, a DLNA server and is due in late September for $560 for a 1TB version, around $710 for 2TB and $1,300 for 4TB. [PCWatch]

Paul Duncan announced today the release of PersistJS, a client-side JavaScript persistent storage library.

Currently the only reliable cross-platform and cross-browser mechanism for storing data on the client side are cookies. Unfortunately, using cookies to store persistent data has several problems:

* Size: Cookies are limited to about 4 kilobytes in size.
* Bandwidth: Cookies are sent along with every HTTP transaction.
* Complexity: Cookies are difficult to manipulate correctly.

Modern web browsers have addressed these issues by adding non-Cookie mechanisms for saving client-side persistent data. Each of these solutions are simpler to use than cookies, can store far more data, and are not transmitted along with HTTP requests. Unfortunately, each browser has addressed the problem in a different and incompatible way.

Trying to address the need for client-side storage sans browser-specific techniques or browser plugins, Paul has created an abstraction layer that allows developers to use most of the most common client-side storage mechanisms via a common interface. It currently supports persistent client-side storage through the following backends:

• flash: Flash 8 persistent storage.
• gears: Google Gears-based persistent storage.
• localstorage: HTML5 draft storage.
• whatwg_db: HTML5 draft database storage.
• globalstorage: HTML5 draft storage (old spec).
• ie: Internet Explorer userdata behaviors.
• cookie: Cookie-based persistent storage.

Other notables features include:

• Small (9.3k minified, 3k gzipped)
• Standalone: Does not need any additional browser plugins or
  JavaScript libraries to work on the vast majority of current
  browsers.
• Consistent: Provides a consistent, opaque API, regardless of
  the browser.
• Extensible: Custom backends can be added easily.
• Backwards Compatible: Can fall back to flash or cookies if no
  client-side storage solution for the given browser is available.
• Forwards Compatible: Supports the upcoming versions of Internet
  Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (Opera too, if you have Flash).
• Unobtrusive: Capability testing rather than browser detection, so
  newer standards-compliant browsers will automatically be supported.

Fitting a 1TB into a box measuring 5.31 x 3.22 x 1.57 inches isn’t all that easy (most NAS boxes we’ve seen would crush a squirrel easily) but Buffalo seems to have not only accomplished this but shoved in a whole bunch of other features as well. The Mini’s got a Gigabit Ethernet port, support for RAID 0 and 1, Active Directory Support, UPS support (to shut down in case of power failure), and best of all, runs an on-board TwonkyVision DLNA server.

PlayStation 3 owners who want to shove a bunch of DivX/XviD movies onto a server to stream to their consoles for HD movie action will be thrilled. Less thrilling is the price: $699 in May. Those features aren’t cheap, nor are the smaller laptop drives they use to power it. Then again, for about $699 you could also get a Windows Home Server, which is quite full-featured but isn’t nearly as compact. On the third hand, we’re not sure why you would need a NAS to be all that compact unless you were living in a tiny apartment or wanted to sneak it through customs. [Buffalo]

The FLX USB drive prototype, designed by Jacek Ryn, while convenient, is not actually flexible. It’s got an accordion-like sheath covering it that pushes back to reveal the plug when you shove it into the USB port, and snaps back when you pull it out. Kind of like an uncircumcised, um, you know. And that cuts down on plastic materials, so it takes up less space in your pocket. Yep. [core77]

Corsair, the memory manufacturer which sounds like a 1970s airline, claims that its new Mac-tuned RAM will make the MacBook and MacBook Pro run up to 28% faster. How does it perform this seemingly impossible trick? Low latency, the explanation for which is so dense we find it easier to just think of it as magical fairy dust:

Corsair’s Mac Memory features special Serial Presence Detect (SPD) profile characteristics, so that Macs can self-configure for optimal performance for critical applications.

The graphs look impressive. According to the one above, Corsair’s memory shaves almost 30 seconds from a fairly demanding Photoshop task (it’s also one of the only times you will read the words “shorter is better”). You can see the rest of the tests in the linked PDF below. Four gigs (2×2GB) will cost you around $160. Not crazy expensive, but more than the competition. Maybe Corsair is relying on the Mac owner’s reputation as a hardware spendthrift?

Press release [PR Newswire]
Low Latency Memory Performance on Apple MacBook Pro [PDF – Corsair]

Samsung’s A1 drives, the 1.3-inch platter models that fit 30-40GB inside, are being shoved into these little LaCie portables, the new Little Disk and in the updated USB Key Max. With this kind of bit density and 2MB buffers, the drives should be somewhat quick despite the 3600rpm spindle speed, and 40GB is no joke, especially in these shock-resistant drives that look imminently pocketable. [TechOn via Engadget]

Lucas123 writes “IDC just released its predictions for 2008 with regards to data storage trends. Its research shows, among other things, a greater adoption of online backup and archiving services, the ‘prevalent’ use of full-disk encryption in the data center, and mainstream adoption of solid-state disk drives due to falling prices. From the story: ‘There are very simple situations and application scenarios where solid-state disks will be worth the risk. It does promise some great potential benefit in terms of I/O … [and] solid state will make a significant impact on reducing heat from spindle usage in server blade deployments and to boost functionality in mobile devices.’ According to IDC, storage capacity is exploding at a rate of almost 60% per year.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How times change, eh? Clicky for bigger. [Best Pic Ever via Spluch]