Tag Archives : Computing components/Storage
Review: Buffalo Dualie 500GB
The Buffalo Dualie is a portable hard drive and a docking station for your iPhone or iPod.
It connects to your Mac via USB, enabling you to sync or otherwise manage either device while it’s in the dock. But as it’s also mains-powered, you can recharge your phone or audio player even when your computer’s switched off.
Behind the dock sits a 500GB HDD (supplied). Connecting through the rear dock’s USB outlet, the drive can be removed and carried around just like any other portable drive.
When used outside the dock, USB and FireWire 800 connections are available, with no power [...]
Filed in: Tech News
Review: LaCie Rikiki 250GB
The LaCie Rikiki (it’s French for ‘tiny’) is one of the smallest portable drives around, fitting snugly in your laptop bag or even your pocket.
Its knock-resistant brushed aluminium casing is ideal for transportation, and it’s available in 250GB, 500GB and 640GB capacities.
Rikiki comes with a few extras. The LaCie Setup Assistant makes formatting to suit your requirements a simple task, which is useful if you’re not used to formatting hard drives.
It also comes bundled with 10GB of online storage through Wuala for a year, and a copy of Intego Backup Assistant, which [...]
Filed in: Tech News
Review: iStorage DiskGenie
External USB hard drives provide a quick and easy way to add storage space to a computer without the need to ferret around in the case, with the added bonus that they’re easy to move from one computer to another.
But the inherent problem with removable storage is that it can be far more easily lost or stolen than an internal hard drive. Losing data is bad enough – especially if you’ve misplaced photos or precious documents – but its potential use if it fell into the wrong hands hardly bears thinking about.
At about the size of two packs of playing cards, the DiskGenie is a portable [...]
Filed in: Tech News
LaCie unveils Rugged eSATA mobile HDD
LaCie has released its latest mobile hard disk drive from tech slumber – the Rugged eSATA.
The drive has the enviable boast of being the only portable, bus-powered eSATA solution on the market – offering up fast data speeds and a chassis that’s more rugged than Gerard Butler with a week’s stubble.
Protect me not
The case protects the innards so much that you should be able to drop it from a height of 2.2 metres without your hokey collection of Entourage episodes becoming corrupted.
This is because the case has been constructed out of scratch-free aluminium wrapped in rubber. Transfer [...]
Filed in: Tech News
In Depth: 6 of the best portable hard drives for your Mac
The days when you could carry around all the data you needed on floppies are long gone.
Its successor, the Zip drive, has also had its day. And while USB flash drives are getting bigger and cheaper, for high-needs mobile storage, you still can’t beat a portable hard drive.
A portable hard drive is based around a 2.5-inch HDD to save on size, and requires no additional power supply, drawing its power from the USB port it connects to for data transfer. In case this is insufficient, many drives include a cable enabling extra power to be drawn from a second USB port.
If you need to power [...]
Filed in: Tech News
In Depth: How the humble hard drive is made
The fact that silicon chips start life as nothing more exotic than sand is amazing enough, but have you ever thought about that other important PC component, the hard disk?
Its origins couldn’t be more different. The heart of a hard disk – the rotating platter where your data is stored – is made out of an exotic mix of elements including ruthenium and platinum, two of the world’s rarest and most expensive metals.
Needless to say, this statement doesn’t even hint at the complexity involved in transforming rare ores into gigabytes of data storage. The hard disk’s high [...]
Filed in: Tech News
In Depth: Next-gen storage that makes SSD look slow
A quick look through the bus speeds and data rates available in a PC system soon tells you where there is a bottleneck: it’s your hard drive. All over the board data is being shifted in gigabytes per second, but the hard drive is still doing it in megabytes.
Theoretical speeds aside, what you’re probably getting is 50 to 70MB/s, tops, and you’ll have to wait while it finds the data in the first place.
Hard drives have been a fundamental part of the PC for yonks. The interface has changed and capacities and speeds have marched ever onwards, but essentially its pretty much the [...]
Filed in: Tech News