That 64GB SDXC card is yesterday's news (figuratively and literally). The new CompactFlash 5.0 standard promises a ridiculous 144-petabyte theoretical maximum storage capacity for newer CF cards. Finally, you'll be able to store your media library and the libraries of your closest 70,000 friends in your pocket!

As a new decade opens, more and more data centre operators find themselves struggling with an enterprise bottleneck not of their own making.

Slots that support faster SDXC flash storage cards are reaching consumer electronics devices, which could boost the performance of devices like camcorders and digital cameras, multiple companies said on Tuesday.

Flash-based storage will quickly become one of the most important technologies in the data center, according to Gartner.

Flash storage vendor OCZ Technology Group Inc. this week announced that it plans to use controllers from SandForce Inc. in its next generation of consumer and enterprise-class solid state drives (SSDs).

The rise of flash memory in the enterprise data center will help eliminate a fundamental imbalance between the performance of servers and storage, Sun storage chief John Fowler told attendees at Storage Networking World.

IBM will add support for SSDs to version 5.0 of its SAN Volume Controller and is promising a big boost in performance with or without flash storage.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center has built a high-performance computer with solid-state drives, which the center says could help solve science problems faster than systems with traditional hard drives.

Lost a thumb drive with important data on it? Check with your dry cleaner. A survey by a U.K.-based company shows that in the last year, 4,500 USB flash drives were forgotten in pockets of clothes left at the dry cleaners, and thousands more handheld devices were left in the backseats of taxis.

The more digital content that we create (music, photos, movies, etc.) and the more we want to share it with others, the more likely it is we'll need some place to store it. You might be looking at digital cameras or music players on your holiday list, but just as important is storage that helps you keep the content stored or created with those gadgets safe and sound. Here are some storage products and concepts we liked:

Cloud computing and flash-based storage, two fast-emerging IT technologies, are driving each other forward as users of Internet-based services like social networks demand near-real-time access to ever-growing amounts of data.