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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.

15 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday! by palegray.net · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  2. G-raid mini by Space+cowboy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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!
  3. Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday! by MoonBuggy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!

  4. Flash Memory Software Requirements by LowlyWorm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  5. "Excessive" Storage? by blcamp · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's no such thing.

    --
    The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
    1. Re:"Excessive" Storage? by lofoforabr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There's no such thing.

      That's something I learned during my years with computers. Everytime I get my hands on storage I'll "never be able to fill", I usually find that my definition of "never" is not what we see in dictionaries :)

    2. Re:"Excessive" Storage? by Lord+Ender · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, "hours of uncompressed 1080p video" really is the most important storage metric now, and there are no products which provide enough of that for any conceivable scenario.

      --
      A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
  6. Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  7. Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday! by TwistedSymmetry · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's also an excellent form of one-way encryption.

  8. Now that's excessive! by dazedNconfuzed · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    The plane travels 518 MPH. That's NY to LA in 5.4 hours ... or about 2Pbits/sec.
    Now THAT'S bandwidth!

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    Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
    1. Re:Now that's excessive! by gregorio · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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. The plane travels 518 MPH. That's NY to LA in 5.4 hours ... or about 2Pbits/sec. Now THAT'S bandwidth!

      The bandwidth will never be larger than half the rated speed of a single drive * the number of drives being read in parallel. Why? Because you have to write TO the drives before departure and read FROM the drives after arrival.

  9. Re:wither plain text? by Applekid · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  10. Re:Lacie - No Incrimental Backup? Seriously? by theJML · · Score: 3, Informative

    tar, cpio, and dump do incremental backups... and they're easily scheduled with cron jobs...

    Just saying...

    --
    -=JML=-
  11. Re:The title is right. by Red+Flayer · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    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
  12. Re:The title is right. by DarkOx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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