The WD consumer NAS offering takes to the cloud with My Cloud-- an update on the My Book Live NAS portfolio promising a "complete" personal cloud solution within upgraded internals and externals.

My Cloud drives feature ethernet connections, USB 3.0 ports and dual-core ARM processors, allowing transfer files between PCs and various online storage services, including Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive and WD's own My Cloud service.

In addition customers get iOS and Android mobile device apps (existing WD2Go apps as renamed to My Cloud), as well as a Windows/OSX desktop app for further file management and SmartWave Pro PC backup software (Mac users get Time Machine support).

In a bid to protect the HDD industry from the flash-based storage Western Digital, HGST, Seagate and Toshiba join forces in the Storage Products Association (SPA).

"HDDs are a crucial technology for storing the ever expanding data that humans and our machines are generating," Coughlin Associates says. "HDDs combined with flash memory can provide users the speed they need while providing affordable mass storage. With continued development of advanced storage technology and storage architectures these amazing storage devices will provide a home for the world's accessible data and serve every type of content users for many years to come."

Crossbar emerges from "stealth-mode" and announces its take on high density non-volatile memory-- Resistive RAM (RRAM), a technology promising up to 1 terabyte of storage on a single 200mm-square die.

The company claims RRAM offers X20 faster write speed, X20 lower power consumption and X10 the endurance at half the die size compared to best-in-class NAND flash, with a simple three-layer structure allowing the "stacking" of multiple terabytes of storage on a single chip.

The technology is also CMOS compatible, allowing the easy integration of logic and memory into a single chip.

In a few words, RRAM consists of 3 layers-- a metallic top electrode, a switching medium and a bottom non-metallic electrode, with ions passing between the top and bottom electrodes creating the 1s and 0s of digital storage. Thus it is different from NAND (since it uses no transistors) or memristor memory (consists of two electrodes on either side of a chalcogenide).

Samsung claims it "breaks through the current scaling limit for existing NAND flash technology" as it kicks off mass production of the first 3D Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory.

According to the company V-NAND offers 128Gb density in a single chip through the use of a proprietary vertical cell structure based on 3D Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology and the vertical interconnect process.

The combination provides twice the scaling of 20nm-class planar NAND flash, beating the scaling limits of traditional NAND flash products caused by cell-to-cell interference. The "3D" structure stacks cell layers vertically, using an etching technology (aka the "vertical interconnect process") to connect layers electronically by punching holes from highest to bottom layers.

Sony and Panasonic kick off joint development on the next generation of optical storage standard-- with hopes of creating an optical disc with "recording capacity of at least 300GB" by end 2015.

The two companies already have experience working together, having both developed products based on the Blu-ray format.

The team-up currently aims at professional applications (chiefly archiving), but the technology might trickle into consumer space further in the future.

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SanDisk launches Connect, a wireless flash memory storage line with a pair of devices-- the Connect Wireless Flash Drive and the Connect Wireless Media Drive, both designed for use with multiple mobile devices.

The Connect Wireless Flash Drive is a wireless pocket-sized means of storing, sharing and streaming content across PCs and mobile devices. It offers up to 32GB of storage and up to 4 hours of continuous streaming on a single charge, without need for internet connections or cables.

Specially arranged sheets of nano-structured glass might make the storage material of the future, University of Southampton researchers say-- creating storage with a shelf life of over 1 million years and thermal stability of up to 1000°C.

As you might now, modern storage technologies (from magnetic tape and Blu-ray discs to HDDs and SSDs) can only hold data for a few decades or so.

“This is the first time real data has been recorded and retrieved using this technique,” lead researcher Jingyu Zhang says. “We successfully designed a new system and recorded a PDF file inside of the glass.”

A paper titled "5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Nanostructuring in Glass" explains the novel-sounding technology. It uses the 5 dimensions of glass-- the traditional 3 (length, width, height) plus axis orientation and "birefringence," meaning the way the material refracts light.

Micron Technology starts sampling 128Gb multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory made using 16nm process technology, an industry first allowing for increasingly smaller memory devices.

The 16nm technology is also "the most advanced processing node for any sampling semiconductor device" the company claims.

"Our customers continually ask for higher capacities in smaller form factors, and this next-generation process node allows Micron to lead the market in meeting those demands," Micron says.