Portable Storage Guide

Elite 4CE writes "If you're like me, you are always transporting data from home to work, and back. I was surprized at how many options there were to facilitate this. Hardcoreware.net have posted their Portable Storage Guide for 2005, covering everything from flash based devices that fit into your pocket, to huge FireWire drives with a capacity of 400GB."

Comments

New Category

[geomon]

How long until there is a category for embedded DRM as described in this article?

It will probably start out with a few devices with DRM, but slowly everyone of the storage vendors will have a DRM solution. It will only be a matter of time, really.

That said, the Seagate 100GB unit looks sweet.

Re:New Category

[cgreuter]

It will only be a matter of time, really.

No it won't. This is one of those situations where market forces will do the right thing. DRM makes storage devices less useful. Most people who buy removable storage already know this. The ones that don't will find out as soon as they buy their DRM-encumbered device.

The basic principal of economics--sell people stuff they want--won't go away just because Hollywood has hyped up DRM. We--not the entertainment industry--are the customers. We pay their revenues and we'll stop doing that if they start making crappy (i.e. DRM'd) products. Given the sheer number of storage makers out there right now, it's not going to be difficult to switch to some else.

um... I have a life away from work

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you're like me, you are always transporting data from home to work, and back."

No, I'm not like you. I like to keep work at work, and out of my home, where I have better things to do than work.

Re:Why carry something?

[Surt]

I think the main reason is this:

You have 400 megabyte of data. You want to take it with you to work on (or maybe listen to) at another computer. You can:

Flash drive: Copy to flash drive at 10megabytes/sec. Call that a minute with overhead. Requires the destination computer have USB.

Internet: Email it through google mail, using googlefs at the speed of your internet connection. Typically, most people today are living with 5 megabit per second or less. Call that 15 minutes, more if you can't max out your connection, or are living with a slower connection. Requires destination computer have (fast!) internet service. 15 minutes or more likely to extract your data at the other end. This is all assuming there is no overhead for google mail. If you have static ip, maybe you are hosting this data directly, still requires a typical 15 minute one way trip, but how many people have a static ip for their home machine?

Portable hard drive: Copy to portable hard drive at 20 megabytes/sec. Call that 30 seconds, but costs more than the flash option.

I'll take either of the carry it with me options over the internet most days. Even more so on days when my data set that needs to travel is 30 gigabyte.