ClickFree Claims Real One-Click Backup
Story posted on: February 18, 2008
You’ve heard it for years: “one-click backup”. Clickfree points out that many competing offering ask users to do complex setups and software installation. That is somewhat true, although I would argue that the complex setup is mainly aimed at saving storage space.
Clickfree doesn’t require any software installation, and will start saving files as soon as it is connected. It on Windows at the moment and the only obvious downside that I can see is its storage capacity: 120GB. That sounds certainly low for a backup device. If you want to “save everything”, take a look at Acronis Trueimage.
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January 06, 2008
Seagate DAVE Applications Showing Up
Story posted on: January 06, 2008
Remember Seagate’s DAVE? It stands for Digital Audio Video Experience and it’s a platform that connects a hard drive to other devices, wirelessly (via Bluetooth or WiFi). It was announced and demoed last year, but not, it seems that third party partners are building applications around it. Just to name a few: HarmanBecker is working automotive storage based on DAVE. Sanyo is going to use the platform to transfer data from its Xacti Digital Movie Camera.
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Maxtor Black Armor
Story posted on: January 06, 2008
[CES 2008] Maxtor, the enterprise side of Seagate, is releasing the Maxtor Black Armor, an external 2.5” drive that supports security features like full-disk encryption, which is quite reassuring if the drive is lost. It can take years, decades or even more to crack a strongly encrypted drive (my advice: don’t forget the password).
The maximum capacity of the Maxtor Black Armor is 160GB. It costs $150 and comes with a bundle of backup-related Maxtor software. Seagate home page
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January 02, 2008
Sandisk Cruzer Titanium USB Drive with Automatic Online Backup
Story posted on: January 02, 2008
[CES 2008] Sandisk’s Cruzer Titanium is a USB flash drive that has an integrated automatic online backup (powered by BeInSync, using the Amazon S3 infrastructure), in case the drive is lost or has simply been forgotten. Additionally, the Cruzer Titanium features a solid shell and AES encryption, which is an encryption method used for financial transactions.
The drive itself costs $60 and the online backup service will cost $30 per year. This device will be shown at CES, Booth #30768, South Hall 3. (Press Release)
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December 28, 2007
Apricron DriveWire – Quick HDD cloning via USB
Story posted on: December 28, 2007
The DriveWire is a box that converts any bare hard drive (SATA, PATA) to a USB drive. It’s quick: you just need to plug your drive in the connector and voila.
It ships with “EZ Gig II”, a (HDD) backup software that can clone a drive (practical for an upgrade) or clone only a partition. If you are using an exotic operating system, you can also boot from a CD and clone your drive from there. I have not tested it, but I assume that it is possible to restore a drive on a larger (and newer) HDD. There are alternatives out there, like the excellent Acronis True Image. Product page, $51 on Amazon
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December 27, 2007
Panasonic Blu-ray drive slims down
Story posted on: December 27, 2007
Panasonic has started to ship samples of what it claims to be the thinnest Blu-ray drive in the world. This was made possible thanks to advanced optics, reducing the drive height to a mere 9.5mm from its previous height of 12.7mm - that's a massive 25% reduction, making it slim enough to fit in light notebooks that previous did not have the chassis to support the HD disc format. Being small in size does not mean that it is equal in stature where performance is concerned. This Panasonic Blu-ray drive can write BD-R or BD-RE (rewritable) discs at 2X, support dual-layer, 50GB discs and upcoming low-cost, organic dye discs. Heck, it even does single-layer DVDs at 8X for those who have yet to make the HD jump.
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December 26, 2007
Small, Portable CD/DVD duplicator
Story posted on: December 26, 2007
I don’t know if there warez parties these days, but if there were, this EZ Dupe duplicator would be very popular there. The device must be slightly bigger than four CD boxes stacked on top of each other. It copies DVDs at 8x speeds and CDs at 16x speeds, which is decent. As you have guessed, it can copy discs without being connected to a PC, but if you do connect it, I can also uses Lightscribe to engrave an image on the disc.
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Netgear Announces New ReadyNAS Devices
Story posted on: December 26, 2007
Netgear’s new line-up of network attached storage (NAS) devices have capacities ranging from 1.5TB to 4TB of data, depending on the drive capacity and RAID configuration that you opt for. As their name indicates, they are accessible from an Ethernet network and can be used to share or backup data. This new series will feature a better user interface. Windows, Mac and Linux clients are supported and the devices have a 5-year warranty. New line-up listing in the full post.
Continue Reading"Netgear Announces New ReadyNAS Devices"
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Zyrus Bandi USB Drive is Flashy, Fat
Story posted on: December 26, 2007
It is really hard to get noticed in the USB Flash Drive space, so just like any other commodity, manufacturers resort to design to differentiate their products. For one, it is really sad that design comes in only as a last resort. Secondly, although this design is quite interesting and colorful, I would be worried by the “fatness” of the drive. USB ports usually are near one another and the Zyrus Bandi drive *might* partially block the second port.
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Rotary USB Card Reader
Story posted on: December 26, 2007
Hong Kong based Earth Tek makes this USB card reader that can rotate to provide an easy access to the user, regardless of where the reader is connected. It is most useful on laptops, where USB ports can be in a corner, facing the “wrong way”, leaving the card slots facing away from you.
The reader supports SD, MicroSD, MemoryStick and has a small power plug to charge an external device.
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December 19, 2007
Buffalo 100GB External SSD
Story posted on: December 19, 2007
Buffalo has a new line of USB 2.0 external solid state drives (SDD) (product page – in Japanese). Given their low power consumption, they can be powered by the USB port, which is always practical. From a storage point of view, SSDs are more expensive than their disk counterparts, but they are also arguably more resistant to shocks (although disk drives aren’t that bad these days). The price is steep:
- SHD-UHR32GS: 32GB, $310
- SHD-UHR64GS: 64GB, $660
- SHD-UHR100GS: 100GB, $950
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December 17, 2007
Intel Z-P140 PATA penny-sized 4GB SSD
Story posted on: December 17, 2007
Solid State Drives are well known for their smaller size and smaller power requirements, but when you can cram 4GB on a surface that is equivalent to a penny, this is pretty impressive, although not surprising given current advances in semi-conductor manufacturing. Today, many music players use 1.8” drives that have a much larger capacity (60GB), but the Z-P140 has very interesting qualities:
- 400x smaller for 15x less capacity
- 75 times lighter
- More shock resistant
Quick specs
- Parallel ATA interface (PATA)
- 2GB and 4GB capacity
- 40Mbytes/sec (read), 30Mbytes/sec (write)
- 300mW (1.1mW in sleep mode)
Storage is where Intel’s manufacturing capability can really shine, so expect them to give Samsung and Micron a run for their money (more SSD stories).
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December 12, 2007
Chocolate Portable HDD
Story posted on: December 12, 2007
This modular USB device concept has a very interesting design. It is meant to be a USB drive, but one that can receive multiple modules, each of which would be a flash drive. Now you could imagine all kind of crazy RAID 8 configurations, but that seems a little overkill.
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December 10, 2007
128GB SSD Drive from Toshiba
Story posted on: December 10, 2007
Toshiba is introducing a new line of SSD drives, coming in 3 capacities: 32GB, 64GB and 128GB. The drives will ship in volumes in March 2008, according to Toshiba. Here are the specifications:
- SATA2 interface
- 100MB/s peak read speed
- 40MB/s peak write speed
- Average time before failure: 1,000,000 hours
SSD drives usually have better seek-time compared to disk-drives because they don’t have mechanical parts. For the same reason, they also consume less power. However, real-world reading speed might not be superior to a fast disk-drive.
