If you’re the kind of person who likes to say “pun intended” during random moments, you might actually like the latest batch of USB keys released by LaCie. Their basic models, called “iamakey” and “itsakey”, are USB 2.0 compatible and offer up to 8GB of storage. Meanwhile, a higher capacity model with an microSDHC card slot is also available in the LaCie Passkey. And as if that wasn’t enough, LaCie also offers what it called the “CurrenKey”, shaped in the form of a coin (as in currency). These USB keys start at £9 each.

Via RegHardware

A report has been released by DRAMeXchange which highlights the use of SSD memory, or rather the lack of. Since the beginning of the year, more and more netbooks have opted to use HDDs instead of SSDs when it comes to storage. The start of the year saw 70% of netbooks released coming equipped with SSD, with Q2 of 2008 lowering that percentage down to 66. At the end of Q3, this figure was more than halved and now sees 30% of netbooks using SSD.

It’s predicted that this trend will continue, with the end of Q4 estimated to see 20% of netbooks having SSDs while next year, it could be as low as just 8%. An analysis puts some facts on these statistics, and it’s largely to do with the price of SSDs over HDDs. Netbooks which include SSD tend to increase the price of the netbook as SSDs are more expensive to produce. The more expensive price tag also doesn’t give you more storage space, but rather decreases it.

via

According to this report in the Wall Street Journal, Asustek are planning to offer data storage for their customers which will be online storage and will be free of charge. Of course, Asus are the makes of the popular Eee PC so this news is bound to be welcomed by the Eee community. Asus are making determined effort to offer that little bit extra that their competitors (of which there are an increasing amount) don’t.

This is due to be a world wide service offering 20 gigabytes of free web storage and should be up and running by the end of the year, possibly early ‘09.

This is a nice move by Asustek, the Eee PC has been a huge success for them and it’s good to see the company keep pushing forward in a bid to satisfy it’s growing number of customers.