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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.
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!
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?
tar, cpio, and dump do incremental backups... and they're easily scheduled with cron jobs...
Just saying...
-=JML=-