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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.
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!!!
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?
Some of us have relatives that live in the countryside (no starbucks wireless access points) and who have locked down wired internet connections (only their company PC can get access to the internet). :-(
There's no such thing.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
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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It's also an excellent form of one-way encryption.
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?
So they could not store documents in plain text?
You haven't lived until a user emails you a Word document with an embedded screen capture of a pdf viewer viewing a document that once existed as a Word document.
More Twoson than Cupertino
tar, cpio, and dump do incremental backups... and they're easily scheduled with cron jobs...
Just saying...
-=JML=-
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.
Obviously, you have not been collecting porn long enough. Especially HD porn.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Welcome to the IT industry as a whole for the last 5 years or so. Rather then devote even once moment of mental energy into deciding what to keep and what will never be needed again, or if {insert} is really the most efficent algorithm we just throw hardware at it.
IT is no fun any more it used to be about finding good solutions to problems; now its just about waste because you can also buy faster/denser hardware cheaper then you can pay someone to use their head.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html