There are also 1.8-inch products available in 200 GB and 400 GB storage capacities used in more space constrained blade server and micro-servers.

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The LaCie Blade Runner is equipped with 10GB of complimentary Wuala Secure Cloud Storage and user-friendly backup software.

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IBM's "brick" initiative which creates data storage farms out of cheap blocks of hard discs and the broader push for "blade" servers that make adding computer power easy to add were evidence of this move to commoditisation, said Mr Findlay.

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