Tag Archives | storage

When Will They Ever Learn (to Back Up)?

Posted by Lincoln Spector on September 13, 2010 at 9:15 am

Someone stole John Boldt’s laptop out of the trunk of his car. Nothing really newsworthy about that. But according to a CTV Calgary article, that laptop contained the University of Calgary grad student’s nearly-completed master’s thesis, as well as his research and notes.

“It’s so many years of my life just thrown away,” Boldt told CTV. “The computer can be replaced. It’s what’s on it that can’t.” Unless an honest thief returns the precious files, Boldt figures that he can’t return to the University. His academic life and future career, judging from the article, are pretty much over.

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Iomega Portable Hard Drives Hit the Big USB 3.0

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 24, 2010 at 5:00 am

Do you own a computer with USB 3.0 ports? Probably not. You will, though–and when you do, you’ll want USB 3.0 devices so you can take advantage of the sizable speed boost.

USB 3.0-equipped peripherals, like USB 3.0 PCs, remain somewhat exotic. But here’s some good news: Iomega is announcing that it’s going to replace all its current USB 2.1 portable hard drives with USB 3.0 models. The transition starts with new versions of the company’s 500GB and 1TB eGo drives, due in October. It says its other models will follow suit, starting in the first quarter of next year.

Iomega isn’t announcing how much the USB 3.0 drives will cost, because it’s not sure what the going rate for portable drives will be in October. But it is saying that you won’t pay a premium for the USB 3.0 models over 2.0 versions. (It currently charges $114.99 for a 500GB eGo and $189.99 for a 1TB one.) The new versions will come with AES 256 hardware encryption standard, and are rated to survive a seven-foot drop–twice the industry average, Iomega says,

USB 3.0 drives work fine with USB 2.1 ports–at 2.1 speeds–so there’s no reason not to buy a USB 3.0 drive, even if you can’t take advantage of its speed just yet.

USB 3.0 portable drives aren’t new, but they’ve been nichey products at a premium price; Iomega’s move to replace 2.1 models with 3.0 ones at similar price points is a welcome development. If Iomega can afford to make USB 3.0 standard, it seems like a good bet that Seagate (which currently sells USB 2.1 drives that can be upgraded to 3.0) and Western Digital will do the same before too many months pass.

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Your Chance at a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Drive

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 6, 2010 at 8:17 am

On Tuesday evening in San Francisco, we threw a party we called SpringThing at a cool art gallery called 12 Gallagher Lane. Our cohost/sponsor was Seagate, which gave demos of its just-announced line of FreeAgent GoFlex external hard drives. The folks in the photo above (by Ken Yeung) all look so attentive because they’re watching the giveaway drawing we did for five GoFlex drives. We can’t recreate the whole nifty SpringThing experience online, but here’s the next best thing: we’re replicate the giveaway drawing.

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Seagate's FreeAgent GoFlex Drives: The News is in the Cable

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 4, 2010 at 5:00 pm

(Full disclosure: As I blogged last week, Technologizer is throwing a party called SpringThing tonight in San Francisco. Our sponsor is Seagate, who will be demoing the products I discuss here.)

External hard disks are one of the most universally useful gadgets known to techkind. And they’re all pretty similar: For the most part, differences involve the quantity of gigabytes you get for your money, the industrial design of the case, and maybe the software the manufacturer bundles.  But Seagate has come up with an interesting twist for FreeAgent GoFlex, a new update to all the products in its FreeAgent Go line of portable external drives–it’s making the interface part of the cable, rather than part of the drive.

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Iomega Network Storage Goes Way High End

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 4, 2010 at 1:22 am

Back in 2008, enterprise storage titan EMC bought Iomega, the venerable consumer/small-business storage provider best known for the once-ubiquitous Zip drive. Iomega still makes plenty of low-priced consumery products, but it’s been interesting to watch the EMC-owned Iomega emphasize more business-oriented network products. And never more than today: The company is announcing the StorCenter ix12-300r, a rack-mounted network storage unit with twelve bays, giving it the ability to hold up to 24TB of storage.

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SanDisk Takes MicroSD to 32GB

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 22, 2010 at 11:13 am

More CTIA news: SanDisk has announced that it’s shipping the world’s highest capacity MicroSDHC card. It’s a 32GB model, big enough to let any phone with an SDHC slot match the memory of the highest-capacity iPhone 3GS. As usual for a new high-end memory card, it’s pricey in terms of the cost per gigabyte: SanDisk is offering it for $199.99, but the company will also sell you four 8GB  MicroSD cards for a total of $120. If history is any indication–and it is–the 32GB cards will get cheaper, especially once 64GB models (which require slots compatible with the newer MicroSDXC standard) arrive and claim the maximum-capacity bragging rights.

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A Little Closer to Gdrive: Google Docs Stores Files of All Sorts

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 12, 2010 at 9:31 am

People have been talking about Gdrive–a theoretical online storage service from Google–for eons. It still isn’t here, but Google keeps tippy-toeing towards offering the functionality we all assumed it would have. Back in November, the company started offering additional storage for Gmail and Picasa at dirt-cheap prices. And now it’s announcing that it’s letting users of its Google Docs online productivity suite store any sort of file in their Google Docs Web-based repository, not just ones that work with the service’s applications. That makes Google Docs into a virtual hard drive/backup solution of sorts, for the first time ever. The new feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

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USB Drives in Disguise

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 9, 2010 at 2:21 pm

I’m usually immune to the charms of novelty USB drives, but I really like these Transformers ones being shown at CES–the result of an entertaining partnership between Toshiba and Hasbro…

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