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A Look at Excessive Portable Storage
Tom's Hardware has an interesting look at portable storage devices that fall a little outside of the normal bell curve. The reviewed items include Buffalo's all-flash portable storage drive, Chaintech's flash SSD w/ an additional USB port, and LaCie's state-of-the-art RAID drive based on two 2.5" drives. LaCie's drive seemed to come out on top for usability and performance with the main downside being the $600 pricetag and lack of adequate backup software, but all had interesting advantages.
Sure they do. You've got to strike the flash drive exactly three times with a nine pound hammer. I assure you, nobody will able to write to it again.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
This is a wet dream for photographers and film makers!
Bell curve, eh. So what attribute are we plotting the distribution of? Oh that's right, it's a load of crap.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
itâ(TM)s not possible to make incremental backups, nor to schedule them.
Yes, I want to buy a 1 TB drive, which cannot make incremental backups. That is quite a ways outside of the "bell curve" as long as by "bell curve" you mean "it has standard features that virtually any useful external storage solution provides".
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I've been using a G-RAID mini for a year or so. The drive I have is only 500GB, but it's fast (for a portable drive) because of the RAID.
There's a 1TB drive coming out soon - see the 'mini-2', which looks to be $699 before any discount (I got ~25% on the mini IIRC).
G-Raid is also a *lot* more reliable than Lacie, in my experience but I guess YMMV, one view is not statistically relevant etc. etc.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Do you mean USB sticks with little write-protect tabs like floppies? They do exist, you know - I have one somewhere. Admittedly it's a bit old and thus only 128MB, but the functionality is there nonetheless.
A quick bit of Googling reveals that PQI still makes them in more useful capacities, and that they retain the write-protect tab. They're even still the same colour!
Doh...
That's not write protected, that's read-protected!!!
This is excessive. At home I have my two 160GB Seagate hard drives and an 8GB flash drive which I use when I'm on the go. What tom's has here is extremely overdone. This is just waste.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
I lug an Acer netbook around - the files I am most likely to need are on it, and ALL my files are accessible from it as I use online backup (Jungledisk). I keep a USB key to get files between systems in a hurry. Why copy everything in a world where in the circles people like us inhabit, connectivity is almost-ubiquitous?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I think every single SD and SDHC card I have, has a little lock tab on the side you can flip to make it read-only.
Morphing Software
I don't think software requirements are keeping up with the newer hardware. True, I am writing this from FireFox installed on my flash drive but there is often very little consideration by many software developers for the needs of the portable software market. So much of it expects data on c: or writes to the registry. Since flash memory quality benchmarks are based on number of read/writes before failure it will be interesting to see how the newer USB hardware will stand up particularly with applications such as browsers and email that do extensive read/write operations.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I think every single SD and SDHC card I have, has a little lock tab on the side you can flip to make it read-only.
Don't rely on it. It doesn't affect any circuits inside the card, it just allows the card reader to detect that you have flipped the switch. Want to wager on what fraction of the readers in the marketplace actually do that?
IIRC, the write protect tab is actually obeyed in software on the client, not in hardware on the device, so it is more for convenience than anything.
You can get serious hardware write blockers, for forensic applications and the like; but they are priced like Real Serious Kit.
http://www.digitalintelligence.com/products/usb_write_blocker/
There's no such thing.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
the normal bell curve
As opposed to the abnormal bell curve?
You're right. Ok, to get write-protection, you've got to strike any user attempting to write to your drive exactly three times with a nine pound hammer. I assure you, nobody will want to write to it again.
You say that and I think of a C-5A Galaxy full of 2TB drives...
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Drink it down, let it circulate, comes back out none too different. Guess I'll be using budweiser as the base then.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The real excessive part is another million-page billion-ad Tom's Hardware article, where "Printable View" requires registration. Fantastic.
You mean the new distribution recently discovered by the department of redundancy department?
Considering how much flash memory costs both in its usb-key version and the various cards, the only real reason I can see for considering the devices mentioned here would be transfer speed. If all you have to work with is USB2, I'd just "break it up" into 2 cards/keys (which, in the case of 64Gb or less, you can do).
What I really see appealing about these, however, is the ability to install portable apps that actually take up significant amounts of space. If you're hooking it up using Firewire or SATA then you can move your "working area" around with you from one machine to another, and work at full speed. This is obviously great with any type of multimedia files, as was mentioned above, but also with large, multi-language development environments. You can carry a ton of compilers/frameworks/parsers, along with libraries (including their sources), and have your choice of IDEs and helper programs installed all in one place. Clearly you'll want to back this up as often as possible, but you can easily automate that.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
It's also an excellent form of one-way encryption.
If you want a 1TB external drive, you can get an external 3.5" drive @ $100 that is faster for about $500 less than the LaCie @$599 -- or you could get 6 of them for the same price.
They both require an external power-adapter and both are about the same size (LaCie has two 2.5" drives which ends up about the same size and weight as a single 3.5" drive).
1 WD Caviar 2TB internal hard drive: 0.389809 liters, or ~5TB/liter.
A C5 Galaxy cargo hold is 1,042,304.22 liters ... aka 813 petabytes. ... or about 2Pbits/sec.
The plane travels 518 MPH. That's NY to LA in 5.4 hours
Now THAT'S bandwidth!
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
OMG, I wish I had mod points. Mark that funny!
Oh, That's right. They don't exists!
Sure they exist, I own an 8 GB Imation Swivel with a switch that works very well. See http://gadgets.softpedia.com/gadgets/Computer-Peripherals/The-Imation-Swivel-Flash-Drive-Series-of-Portable-Storage-Solutions-2715.html
There are also some USB SD card adapters that respect the write protect switch of the SD card.
So they could not store documents in plain text?
how funny, I just bought http://www.addonics.com/products/enclosures/AE25RDESU.asp (build-in raid hardware support) and 2x 500gb seagate 5400.6 disk to make my own portable device for less than 400$ canadian, tax and shipping included, lot cheaper than the Lacie one! I will receive everything next Monday so I could do my own test and I will compare them. I never looked for pre-build one before doing my search.
Interesting, I didn't know that. I would guess the pricing on those things is partly due to the need for compatibility with multiple devices which weren't designed with it in mind and partly due to the niche market/'because we can' factor, right?
I'd be surprised if it were especially difficult to make a flash drive with hardware write-protection in mind, though. Considering what 4 or 8GB drives cost, even if you had to literally double up on every component in the drive and then physically switch between them for read only or read/write mode it should still come out on the slightly higher priced end of 'dirt cheap'. Whether there's sufficient demand to bother designing it, however, is probably another matter.
Who in the world is this LaCie external drive made for? It has 2 500GB drives included, which can be run as RAID 0 or RAID 1. For the $600 price tag, I could purchase 5-6 external 1TB drives.
These things are most likely being used to store music and videos. I almost feel bad for all the people who buy one of these, set it to RAID 0, and then cry in a year or two when one of the drives die and they lose their data. If they had used the money to purchase backup drives instead, they would be fine.
The only possible advantage is speed, but the speed just isn't needed except for special applications, in which case it would be better to simply build a computer.
Here's the craziest thing about the $600 price tag - I could build an entire new computer running Linux, with a software RAID setup and twice the storage, for less money.
I don't even understand why anyone bothers posting such nonsense. At least be funny if you are going to spam.
From recent playing with the CHDK software, I can assure you that my Canon SD-750 camera does not appear to respect the switch in terms of write protection. The switch merely enables it to pre-load a firmware flash before booting.
John
Come on, I can't be the only person who thought the image on the first page had a built in pencil sharpener.
Redirecting the FS calls to DEV NULL has the same effect, and is many orders of magnitude faster in terms of file IO.
2 years ago I bought a LaCie 1TB for $150, has a standard network connection and web page configuration for its SAMBA server that produces letter drives for Win. Sort of a NSLu2 on steroids. I plugged it into my wireless router and it streams burned DVDs and youtube videos.
With Leopard tweaks, it will work with TimeMachine. It's just a Linux box that's so simple even a schoolteacher could set it up.
Why they dropped this line I'll never know.
Will any of these drives run as network attached storage? If so can they run OpenBSD?