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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."
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.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
I just use the internet, it's great.
I'd say it's more like "amasing"... really, typos are not that "amuzing".
My website
We have used some of the 250GB Western Digitals here and a known fault is that, if you remove the drive improperly, it will corrupt the entire drive. Rendering useless all 200+ gigs of info on there. But yeah, other than that, they work great! So be careful how you unplug and always use the "Remove Drive" feature.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
With the ability to push to my house from work at over 8 Mbps, I rarely worry about this
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
"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.
Slashdotted already. Maybe they can put the article on one of these devices and send one to each of us?
Bradley Holt
I just VPN into my work PC and use mapped drived to move data. No need to move data and risk losing it because of some bump on the road.
I used to. It worked well. But after having a thumb drive for a month I wouldn't switch back. I have my entire "my documents" and development tree stored on my thumb drive. It is always the latest and most updated version. When I arrive at work, I copy it over. When I leave work, i copy from the computer to the thumb drive. Same as home. The internet worked ... unless internet was out at home. Or if internet was out at work. And the data was too preicous not to have even for a few hours. And when you are in an environment where internet traffic is heavily monitored (and pushing upwards of 100M) the thumb drive reigns supreme.
-everphilski-
I swear.. we're all guilty here. Please stop lying. We all use the floppy disk. I don't care who you are (but more likely so if you're a government employee), you have a green floppy disk in your briefcase that has a masking-tape label on it written with pencil..
I see this all the time.. people thinking they're cool on campus with their laptop and 1GB USB thumb drive.. plugging in a floppy to get at the 1.44mb of data they really need.
LONG LIVE THE FLOPPY! *salute*
--- We need more Ron Paul!
I was going to suggest the iPod Nano as a good portable storage device, but now I am having second thoughts. Better scratch that idea!
Not saying Poster is security risk. But as someone who does security audits for banks, "taking data home" ie becoming more and more of a Security risk. It is easy for an employee to copy, burn, etc information with customer data with it. Another issue is smaller banks don't have the dedicated resources to devote to proper DRM and OEMS like Dell often include CD-Rs and make USB flash drives so cheap that it gets more and more troublesom to block it.
I use a 1GB PQI Stick, I don't think there's a smaller, cheaper, and more reliable option for the same capacity.
If you're like me, you are always transporting data from home to work, and back.
And if you're a cheap, lazy bastard like me, you just email everything back and forth. (I mean, sure I can use my 512MB MuVo TX FM as a flash drive, but that's so much effort...)
Things to do today: See list of things to do yesterday
I see they missed the most important device of all, the mega-uber-1337-6.7GHz, eleventy-billion TB laptop
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Very useful. Have it in my wallet. Anybody have any problems with premature removal? Hope it doesn't blow out all the rest of my data if I have to run quick and disconnect while ul/dl.
So when your iPod nano is so scratched you can't read the screen, treat it as a 2 or 4GB flash drive with integrated iPod Shuffle functionality!
In fact for a 2 or 4 GB flash drive it isn't a bad price really, although most sensible people would jump up to a portable 2.5" Firewire drive at about the same price and not worry about the extra size.
Coralized
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
For Windows, the best option is TrueCrypt.
I've got a review of it here, if you're interested, as well as some other portable security tools. I've a bigger list portable software tools as well. (shameless link, but on topic)
Best Windows Freeware
http://www.sandisk.com/pressrelease/20050219a.htm
It's a 1G SD card.. an SD card you say.. what's so special.. OK
1. is x66 speed - great for video/continuous frames on a camera
2. compatible with my Canon compact and TREO 650
3. It has a built-in USB connector!!!!! No need for extra adaptors!!
A great idea.. as a SD card dual use it with an MP3 palyer, camera or phone etc.. plug it in to your USB at work or home!!
For those of you who have USB flash drives or just about any other type of portable media, check out http://www.no-install.com/ Tons of applications that you can run from your portable media and not have to worry about losing your settings betweeb different machines.
It seems they only tested the hardware on Windows; there is no info on Linux or OS X support/testing. I'm not sure if all drives mentioned can even be used on other OSes, or if there still are driver issues. This is especially bothersome as they seem to install any software provided by the respective manufacturers before benchmarking the drives; but they don't mention if this includes installing custom drivers, or if the software in each case consists simply of data management tools.
What is the point of this article? To lists ways you can carry data? That is news?
What about books(printed material), CDs, tatoos, etc?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Do I still have to format the 400gb drive as Fat32 to get both my Mac and Windows XP box to read it? Why hasn't anybody come up with a file system that supports large capacity portable drives on every OS?
Comment of the year
Moving data around and backing it up are two different things. Oh, and so is 'high availability" which is what RAID does. RAID is NOT a backup solution, it just allows you to keep working when 1 disk, and one disk only, and nothing else, fails. If your house / PSU / controller burns, if you get burglarized... you STILL loose everything. RAID IS NOT BACKUP.
;-)
Plus, in my experience, RAID doesn't work very well, because data gets corrupted, the controller fails, your PSU fries and all the disks go... Don't trust raid.
So:
- for backups, have en extra USB or FW disk 3"1/2, that you connect from time to time to do backups of everything (hopefully several if you have enough room on it, that depends on which files you work on, count $150 for 200gigs+enclosure).
Also burn a weekly DVD with your most important files (mail, photos, work documents, anything you CANNOT replace, NOT your porn+MP3 stash), and spread them around offsite (family, friends...). Maybe your ISP gives you some space for personal pages, which you can use for a second backup instead.
- for mobility, use email, FTP, USB sticks, a 2"1/2 external PSU-less HD, whichever suit your needs / capacity requirements.
There are quite a few solutions for quickly synching 2 drives, I use xxcopy (www.xxcopy.com) because I'm old school, MS has a new Synctool that I haven't tested, there are a lot more, those are free. Linux has a nifty rsynch command, but I don't know Linux.
And then you need the discipline to actually DO those backups
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.