So, if you can’t tell from the pictures, this is one of those nifty gadgets that allows you to connect your old hard drives, optical drives, or anything else that uses an IDE, Laptop IDE, or SATA interface. It’s great for when your laptop or desktop goes kaput and you need the data off of the drive but don’t have time to rebuild or repair the other components.
Data backup falls resolutely at the dreary end of the tech-task scale; periodically market researchers release stats showing how few people take the time to safely copy their accumulated files, usually prompting a guilty DVD burning session which never gets repeated. Apple’s Time Capsule, then, was welcomed with excited upon its announcement; with the slick, careful design Apple are renowned for, could they manage to make even backup sexy? To be fair, it’s a pretty huge challenge. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a nicer looking network hard-drive, or one so straightforward to set up, but Time Capsule undoubtedly has its caveats.
So I’ve had the 32GB Corsair Flash Survivor for a few days now which has been time enough for me to run some benchmarks on it and see how practical it is for every day use. I must say, I love it, I was copying some files to it for a friend, and I came to the realization that for once I didn’t have to worry about copying too much and filling up the flash drive mid copy as there is almost nothing I could copy to this drive that would fill it up.
So I met with Buffalo at CES, and then shortly after they were kind enough to send me their LinkStation Pro Duo for review. I must say I am impressed, it is quite squarely aimed at business users, but for home users, it has some fairly useful features as well.
Earlier this month Samsung sent over their new 64GB solid-state drive for us to play with, and Vincent promptly slapped it into his MacBook Pro to see whether it made much of a difference in access speed. Well, we’ve finally dragged it away from him, extracted the SSD and put it through some benchmark testing.
As a test machine we used Alienware’s m9750 laptop running Windows Vista 32-bit (as we reviewed here), comparing the Samsung 64GB SSD with Sandisk’s 32GB SSD in both single and dual-drive RAID-0 configurations. After each hardware change we reinstalled the laptop’s OS using Alienware’s supplied restore disk, then ran HD-Tach and HD-Tune to test burst and transfer rates.
I ran a quick compatibility test of the SanDisk 8GB MicroSDHC with five relatively new phones. Three of the five phones are capable of taking advantage of the full 8GB storage while the other two maxed out at 4GB.
The Nokia N95-3, HTC Touch from Sprint and the Blackberry 8310 from at&t passed the compatibility test with flying colors.
I’m obsessed with data backups and willing to scarify my sleeping time just to get my crucial data backed up. Even with this kind of mentality, I still worry about data-loss due to backup corruption caused by backup drive failure. Data redundancy has been my main priority aside from doing the actual backup itself, and I’ve been using RAID technology for that.
However, RAID requires me to have drives with the same capacities and I don’t think drive manufacturers will continue to produce the same capacity models for the next four to seven years. It looked like I would end up buying a brace of new drives every few years; then came my saviour named Drobo, the data robot from Data Robotics.
Backup is boring, let’s admit it, but a shiny chunk of Network Attached Storage can lend a little of its new-toy glee to the procedure. My time with LaCie’s Ethernet Disk mini might not exactly be the stuff of fairy-tales – boy meets NAS, boy falls in love with NAS, boy takes NAS home – but despite mixed first-impressions you’ll be pleased to hear there’s a happy ending.
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