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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'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 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 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.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
Coralized
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
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.
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?
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