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After unveiling its Live Mesh cloud computing service back in April, Microsoft on Wednesday opened up the software's preview version to a larger number of early users in the United States. "This week we did two things," wrote the Live Mesh Team on its official blog. "[We] doubled the maximum number of users we'll allow to access the Live Mesh Technology Preview," and "[we] simplified the Tech Preview sign-up process." Previously, Live Mesh was available only to a closed testing group.

HP and Sony have collaborated on the creation of a next-generation digital audio tape format, the two companies announced Tuesday. Aimed at small and medium-sized businesses as well as enterprises with remote locations, the upcoming DAT 320 format provides improved performance and capacity over existing DAT drives, including the current generation DAT 160. While the two tech firms are jointly developing the new version, both companies will separately offer their own DAT 320 tape drives and cartridges. The storage hardware is expected to hit the market during the first half of 2009.

Pioneer unveiled a new optical disc Monday that could theoretically hold the entire contents of the average consumer's hard drive plus some -- if it were rewritable. The Japanese electronics manufacturer has created the world's first 16-layer disc that squeezes 25GB on each level. The disc, however, is read-only, meaning the information on it cannot be modified. Still, at 400 GB, the discs offer more than 16 times the storage space of a typical Blu-ray disc.

Samsung unveiled a new, high-capacity solid state drive Monday at the fifth annual Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei. The 2.5-inch, 256 gigabyte, multi-level cell-based SSD uses a SATA II interface, and it's the world's fastest SSD, according to the company. In addition, Samsung said its new SSD is the thinnest drive with the largest capacity offering a SATA II interface. Samsung expects to begin production of the 2.5-inch SSD by the end of 2008 but will make customer samples available in September.

EMC announced a new line of deduplicating backup storage products this week at its annual EMC World conference held in Las Vegas. In addition to deduplication, the new offerings include disk drive spin down and low-power disk drive technologies, all of which are meant to lower the cost for businesses to use disk-based backups rather than tape. "The announcement is pretty significant because data in companies of all sizes is growing unabated," said Lauren Whitehouse, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

HP announced on Tuesday a new, highly scalable storage system meant to address the needs of online and digital media businesses. The HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System is designed to simplify the management of multiple petabytes of data with an eye to affordability. New Web 2.0-centric businesses and digital media companies like photo-sharing, streaming video, video-on-demand and social networking operations produce an enormous quantity of file-based data they need to store, manage and retrieve on the fly.

Rebellious rocker Neil Young hates the sound of compact discs. So he waited 15 years for a different technology, which he says will allow him to share his life's work the way he wants his fans to enjoy it. Starting this fall, Young plans to release a comprehensive archive of music, videos and other material dating back to 1963 on a series of interactive Blu-ray discs, which he demonstrated Tuesday for several thousand software developers and tech enthusiasts at Sun Microsystems' JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

One of the best ways to speed up any computer is to add more memory to it. As the old joke goes, you can't be too rich, too thin or have too much RAM. There are two places data live in a computer: in memory and in storage -- either a hard drive or an optical disk, such as a CD or DVD. Working with information in storage is always slower than working with it in memory. Chances are, if you have a Windows or Macintosh computer, at some point you've filled your available memory with programs and data, and your system must spend more time reading from the hard drive.

Western Digital is now shipping the next generation of its 10,000 RPM "Raptor" series drives. The new drive doubles the previous capacity to 300 GB and picks up a 35 percent performance increase. Aimed at PC and Mac enthusiasts as well as users of professional-grade workstations that can benefit from high-performance drives, the new WD VelociRaptor is a SATA hard drive built in a 2.5-inch form factor that's encased in a special built-in "IcePack" heat sink. The IcePack keeps the little drive extra cool, WD said.

Unlike in the digital audio player market, the fight between NAND flash and hard-disk drive on the personal media player platform is far from over. The 1.8-inch HDD still has a firm grip on the PMP category that requires storage capacity of 20 GB or higher due to the cost per byte advantage over NAND flash. Our consumer survey indicated that among PMP owners, hard drive-powered devices still account for a slight majority of the ownership. On the other hand, the micro-drive segment, which features a capacity ranging between 4 to 12 GB, has been hit hard by the NAND flash.