The Register - On-Prem: Storage

Microsoft raises UK Surface prices as RAM crisis reaches the checkout

2026-04-14T10:31:14.00Z

Entry-level models jump by up to £220, mirroring steeper hikes in US

Microsoft's memory squeeze has reached the shop floor, and Surface prices have been jacked up to match.…

IT manager approved downtime over lunch, but made a meal of it

2026-04-13T07:00:06.00Z

Optimism is always risky, and defective hardware makes it indigestible

Who, Me? The best part of the working day is lunchtime, but The Register tries to start Mondays in a pleasant fashion by bringing you a new installment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your mistakes and detail your escapes.…

Amazon put a filesystem on S3; I showed up with a test suite and bad intentions

2026-04-09T11:52:19.00Z

The core product is solid and priced fairly

I've spent over a decade telling anyone who'd listen that S3 is not a filesystem, which in retrospect was a really weird way to start some conversations. So when AWS launched S3 Files on Tuesday – which lets you mount an S3 bucket as an NFS share – I did what any reasonable person would do: I spun up an EC2 instance and started trying to break it.…

How to navigate the storage crunch in the AI era

2026-04-08T08:00:12.00Z

Watch this webinar and stop playing guessing games with your AI storage

Webinar Promo For most of the last two decades, storage procurement followed a rhythm nobody questioned much. Estimate your growth over three to five years, size the purchase accordingly, negotiate a deal, rack the hardware, and start the clock again. It worked when data demands grew in predictable increments.…

Microslop stuffs AI photo restyling powers into OneDrive

2026-03-24T13:05:49.00Z

Microslop? Sorry, we meant Microsoft

Microsoft is rolling out technology to transform OneDrive photos into AI-infused masterpieces. Or top up the bucket of slop, depending on your perspective.…

Storage vendors orbit the Nvidia sun at GTC

2026-03-18T18:14:06.00Z

Hitachi Vantara, IBM, Nutanix, and Seagate all had something to say

GTC Hitachi Vantara and Nutanix announced support for Nvidia’s new GPUs and software at GTC 2026, much like every other storage system vendor, while IBM integrated Watsonx and other offerings more tightly with GPUzilla's offerings. Seagate demonstrated a two-tier hybrid external KV Cache composed of SSDs and disk drives, as it did last year.…

Samsung folds the Galaxy Z TriFold after just a few months

2026-03-18T11:02:53.00Z

Analysts say three-screen smartphone successful as a proof of concept, memory crunch potentially made it unsustainable

Samsung is killing the Galaxy Z TriFold smartphone after just three months on the market.…

Big moves in Linux filesystems as new bcachefs lands and KDE adds support for Apple's APFS

2026-03-17T10:06:06.00Z

Linux still can't mount or read APFS volumes by default ... but that's about to change

Linux 7.0 is approaching and there's a new version of bcachefs to go with it… as well as green shoots of support for Apple's new disk format.…

AWS S3 turns 20 and reaches ‘hundreds of exabytes’

2026-03-16T06:24:04.00Z

Cloudy storage service's scale gave it a hefty cultural footprint

Amazon Web Services on Saturday celebrated the 20th birthday of its Simple Storage Service (S3) and revealed a few little secrets about the service.…

RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it

2026-03-13T13:02:49.00Z

Zram versus zswap – two ways to get a quart into a pint pot

Linux has two ways to do memory compression – zram and zswap – but you rarely hear about the second. The Register compares and contrasts them.…

Sorry, kids. Memory crunch threatens to kneecap Chromebook shipments

2026-03-10T14:23:11.00Z

Low-cost computers bashed by billion-dollar investment in AI infrastructure

Chromebooks, the low-cost computing option popular with education buyers, will be squeezed hardest this year as memory prices spiral out of control.…

Retro tech fan views LaserDisc movie data with a budget microscope

2026-03-10T11:00:15.00Z

Analog video spied by looking really, really closely at tracks

A retro tech enthusiast has demonstrated that it is possible to view media on LaserDisc using a relatively inexpensive digital microscope.…

Rethinking storage for the AI era

2026-03-06T09:00:07.00Z

Huawei outlines how telecom operators may need to redesign data infrastructure as AI workloads grow

Sponsored Post At MWC Barcelona 2026, Huawei used the stage to argue that the next phase of AI adoption will hinge less on models and more on the infrastructure that feeds them.…

One vendor doesn't mind high RAM prices: VMware

2026-03-04T06:45:24.00Z

Memory tiering and pooled memory are having a moment because they offer the chance to use less RAM

The high price of memory and solid-state storage has almost everyone worried – but not VMware, because the most innovative new feature in the Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9) private cloud suite it launched last year is memory tiering tech that allows offload of data from RAM to NVMe drives.…

SAP writes $480M check to finally end IP legal spat with Teradata

2026-03-02T14:15:10.00Z

A joint venture from 2008 led to years of claims and counter-claims between the data whizzkids

Data warehousing and analytics biz Teradata and SAP have ended their long-running legal dispute after the German ERP vendor agreed to cough up $480 million to bring the fighting to a close.…

Microsoft's Project Silica promises eternal storage. It can't get there from here

2026-03-02T10:13:06.00Z

Soon turned out, we had a heart of glass

Opinion There is more joy in heaven over a single report of genuinely new technology than in a thousand desperate AI marketing pitches. What the angels will make of Microsoft's Project Silica, a mixture of the two, is less clear.…

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

2026-02-26T11:25:27.00Z

Analyst warns soaring DRAM and NAND costs could push entry-level devices out of reach

Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year - and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones.…

Euro hosting giant hiking prices by up to 50% from April Fool's Day

2026-02-24T14:02:40.00Z

No, customers aren't laughing either as pressure from memory shortages bites

Hosting biz Hetzner, one of Europe's largest datacenter operators, is warning customers that prices are scheduled to jump by as much as 50 percent from April 1.…

Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame

2026-02-20T14:00:19.00Z

Oh snap! The hyperscalers bought all the HDDs

Hard drive manufacturers have already sold all the units they will make this year, and it looks like the AI infrastructure boom is to blame, with hyperscalers soaking up all the high-capacity storage.…

How AI Is forcing storage back into the enterprise conversation

2026-02-19T17:53:50.00Z

HPE designs storage with AI realities in mind

Partner Content Artificial intelligence has a habit of simplifying narratives. Models get bigger. GPUs get faster. Everything else fades into the background.…

Microsoft boffins cook up archival storage using Pyrex glass they say can last over 10,000 years

2026-02-19T00:28:38.00Z

It may have half the capacity of fused silica glass, but is faster and much cheaper

Microsoft this week detailed new research aimed at preserving data in borosilicate glass plates for thousands of years longer than conventional media like hard drives or magnetic tape, without needing to worry about bit rot.…

AI gets all the good stuff, including Micron's speedy 28 GB/s PCIe 6.0 SSD

2026-02-17T19:55:13.00Z

Consumers have a long wait ahead of them before they can bring that kind of performance home

It's time for a new generation of faster flash storage, but not on your laptop or desktop. Micron's first PCIe 6.0 SSDs have entered mass production and promise eye-watering transfer rates of up to 28 GB/s. However, unless you're building flash storage arrays for AI, you won't have a use for them.…

Secondhand laptop market goes 'mainstream' amid memory crunch

2026-02-16T14:29:07.00Z

Budget-conscious buyers in Europe voting with their wallet

Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive.…

Broadband rollouts feel the burn from AI memory frenzy

2026-02-13T15:03:06.00Z

Prices for router and set-top boxes up nearly sevenfold, squeezing telcos and raising deployment costs

Prices for memory used in routers and set-top boxes are surging nearly sevenfold thanks to AI, raising fresh fears that the industry's silicon binge could leave telcos scrambling to get customers online.…

Memory price explosion triggers PC buying spree

2026-02-12T13:31:13.00Z

DRAM doubles, NAND jumps 70% as corporate buyers race the clock

Exploding memory prices are pushing corporate buyers to fast-track PC purchases before costs climb further.…

Microsoft sets Copilot agents loose on your OneDrive files

2026-02-05T14:15:53.00Z

AI helpers can now rummage through multiple documents

Microsoft has made OneDrive agents generally available, allowing users to query multiple documents simultaneously through Copilot instead of just one at a time.…

Curse of AI to push up PC prices as memory and CPU shortages bite

2026-02-05T13:14:52.00Z

Component supply is being diverted toward datacenters, squeezing the consumer market

PC buyers can expect price hikes as chipmakers continue to prioritize AI production over all else, restricting the supply of key components across the tech industry.…

Microsoft finally sends TLS 1.0 and 1.1 to the cloud retirement home

2026-02-03T12:59:03.00Z

Azure Storage now requires version 1.2 or newer for encrypted connections

Today is the day Azure Storage stops supporting versions 1.0 and 1.1 of Transport Layer Security (TLS). TLS 1.2 is the new minimum.…

DRAM prices expected to double in Q1 as AI ambitions push memory fabs to their limit

2026-02-02T19:32:59.00Z

NAND flash now expected to surge 55–60% compared to Q4

The memory shortage is worse than most of us first thought. Prices on DRAM and NAND flash memory are expected to surge in the first quarter of 2026 as AI-driven hyperscalers and cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to strain supply chains.…

How agentic AI can strain modern memory hierarchies

2026-01-28T12:00:13.00Z

You can’t cheaply recompute without re-running the whole model – so KV cache starts piling up

Feature Large language model inference is often stateless, with each query handled independently and no carryover from previous interactions. A request arrives, the model generates a response, and the computational state gets discarded. In such AI systems, memory grows linearly with sequence length and can become a bottleneck for long contexts. …

Microsoft rushes out another fix for cloud storage after January update

2026-01-26T11:00:13.00Z

2026 is shaping up to be a bumper year for patch management

Microsoft dropped a weekend treat for administrators with yet another out-of-band update to deal with Outlook freezes and broken cloud storage.…

Microsoft admits Outlook might freeze when saving files to OneDrive

2026-01-21T12:33:43.00Z

January update is the gift that keeps on giving

Microsoft's January Windows update has delivered another blow for unsuspecting users – apps including Outlook might freeze when saving files to cloud storage services such as OneDrive or Dropbox.…

Micron breaks ground on humungous NY DRAM fab after beating bats and tree huggers

2026-01-16T21:11:39.00Z

Chipmaker claims the four-fab site could expand US-based DRAM production by a factor of 12

Micron broke snowy winter ground in New York on Friday to begin building a chip fab that promises to bring up to 50,000 jobs and much-needed computer memory production to US shores, as the AI boom continues to push memory prices up.…

Budget smartphones will be hit hardest as memory prices rise

2026-01-15T14:38:58.00Z

When margins are this tight, mergers might follow

The memory shortage is forecast to push smartphone prices higher in 2026, triggering a market decline and forcing budget phone makers to merge or disappear.…

Buy servers now or cry later: DRAM price spike threatens infrastructure budgets

2026-01-14T11:00:06.00Z

Component up 63% since September, more pricey memory coming to a supply chain near you

Enterprise IT infrastructure buyers are bracing for hefty price hikes across servers, storage systems, and networking kit, driven by steep inflation in memory component costs that industry analysts warn will soon cascade through the supply chain.…

SK Hynix's $13B packaging facility promises more HBM for the AI bubble

2026-01-13T19:22:09.00Z

Great news for AMD and Nvidia, less so for cash-strapped consumers

Memory makers just can't churn out their DRAM fast enough. On the heels of an AI-driven shortage, SK Hynix on Tuesday announced a new 19 trillion Korean won (about $13 billion) advanced packaging and test facility in South Korea that could offer some relief - just not for consumer products like laptops and phones.…

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

2026-01-12T07:31:12.00Z

UPSes don’t work without power, or well-designed electricals

Who, Me? Welcome to Monday morning and another instalment of “Who, Me?” - the weekly reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of what not to do at work, and how to get away with it.…

While you pay through the nose for memory, Samsung expects to triple its profits in Q4

2026-01-08T23:56:35.00Z

Memory pricing expected to surge another 60% in Q1 with relief years away

While end customers grapple with crushing memory prices, we imagine Samsung execs are breaking out the Champagne. This week the memory titan forecast fourth-quarter operating profit would roughly triple as the South Korean electronics cabal rides the AI wave into the New Year.…

SanDisk heals WD Black and Blues, rebrands beloved client SSDs

2026-01-07T19:45:47.00Z

NVMe drives to live on under the Optimus banner

WD Black and Blue SSDs are some of the most widely recognized client drives on the market, but their branding is about to disappear. Following Western Digital's flash-business spinoff, SanDisk announced it was retiring the beloved names and rebranding its NVMe lineup under the SANDISK Optimus banner.…

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

2025-12-23T12:08:09.00Z

Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works

Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.…

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

2025-12-20T11:01:14.00Z

We haven't even hit the peak, TechInsights tells El Reg

If you were hoping for some relief from stratospheric memory pricing, don't hold your breath. DRAM prices aren't expected to peak until at least 2026, TechInsights analyst James Sanders tells El Reg.…

Smartphones face a memory cost crunch – and buyers aren't in the mood

2025-12-16T13:45:22.00Z

Rising DRAM and NAND prices are squeezing handset makers and threatening a fragile market recovery

AI-nflation The smartphone industry's brief bounce back now looks set to run straight into a wall, with analysts warning that rising memory costs are about to test buyers' patience.…

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

2025-12-14T10:00:15.00Z

SPhotoix moves its 5D Memory Crystal cold storage tech closer to deployment in data centers

After decades of research and development, humanity finally has a data storage medium that will outlast us.…

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

2025-12-12T07:30:07.00Z

Getting that confession took hours, during which L1 and L2 support gave up

On Call Welcome once more to On Call, the Friday column in which we share stories of tech support incidents that went pear-shaped until cunning Reg readers stepped in to save the day.…

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

2025-12-05T07:30:15.00Z

Medical software maker also had a vastly unhealthy approach to security

On Call Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday column that tries to improve the health of the tech support ecosystem by sharing readers' sickening stories of bringing broken tech back from the brink.…

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

2025-12-03T23:16:49.00Z

First AI came for our jobs. Now, our memory?

The lure of AI spending was too much for Micron to ignore. On Wednesday, the US chipmaker announced it's abandoning its Crucial memory and storage lineup to bolster its supply of enterprise-focused chips, including those used in AI systems.…

Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roof

2025-12-01T12:49:00.00Z

Budget model slips in at $45 while other boards climb amid AI-driven component crunch

Raspberry Pi has raised prices across much of its latest lineup while launching a new $45 Raspberry Pi 5 with 1GB of RAM, it's first sub-$50 model in the series.…

Canadian data order risks blowing a hole in EU sovereignty

2025-11-27T12:30:06.00Z

OVH stuck between a rock and a hard place as investigators demand access

Updated A Canadian court has ordered French cloud provider OVHcloud to hand over customer data stored in Europe, potentially undermining the provider's claims about digital sovereignty protections.…

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

2025-11-21T22:09:07.00Z

Catch: you have to plug it into a computer first

If you’ve ever watched Mission Impossible, where Jim Phelps gets instructions from an audio tape that catches fire after five seconds, TeamGroup has an external SSD with your name on it. The T-Create Expert P35S is a portable USB-powered SSD that comes with a self-destruct button, which wipes all your data and physically renders the device useless.…

Veeam bets on more VMware alternatives, including Red Hat and China’s Sangfor

2025-11-21T02:38:58.00Z

Plans a universal API to back up all hypervisors, too

Backup software vendor Veeam has thrown its weight behind more alternatives to VMware.…