Tag Archives | storage

ioSafe’s Solo SSD Survives One Disaster After Another

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 9, 2010 at 7:41 am

The most spectacular demo I’ve attended at CES this year–or, maybe, any year–didn’t involve 3D glasses or showgirls or a guest celeb such as Lady Gaga (who showed up at both the Monster Cable and Polaroid booths on Thursday). Actually, it was held in the chilly early evening at the parking lot of a sports bar off the strip, by ioSafe, a maker of rugged disk drives designed to protect essential data from fire, floods, and other disasters.

The product being demoed: The company’s new Solo SSD, its first drive incorporating a solid-state disk rather than a traditional rotating one. To show how disaster-proof it is, ioSafe subjected it to an extended physical assault that might have freaked out even David Blaine.

After the jump, the demo in photos. Warning: It isn’t pretty….

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Norton Online Backup Gets a Meaty Upgrade, Mac Support

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 9, 2009 at 12:01 am

Symantec, which rolled out Norton Online Backup as a standalone service earlier this year, is giving it a major overhaul that adds a bunch of attractive features and fixes some limitations of the original version.

The new version supports Macs as well as PCs for the first time. It can back up files even when they’re open and in use (a pretty basic feature that the previous iteration lacked) and it now keeps 90 days’ worth of old files so that you can roll back to a previous version if need be. You can now search for those old files as well as browse for them, can restore them to the original computer or any other system, and send them by e-mail.

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Google’s New Online Storage Deal: Much Cheaper, But Not a Game Changer

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 11, 2009 at 10:56 am

Google LogoGoogle is so synonymous with free stuff that it’s easy to forget that it does indeed offer some for-pay services–such as additional online storage space for Gmail messages and Picasa photos. Yesterday, it announced that it’s slashing the fees it charges for extra elbow room.

The new pricing starts at $5 a year for 20GB of space, and go up to $4,096 (!) for 16TB (!!). These fees only matter after you’ve used up all the service’s free space–7GB+ for Gmail, and 1GB for Picasa–and there’s no discount as you buy more capacity. No matter which plan you get, you’re paying a quarter a gigabyte. Until yesterday, the company was charging $20 a year for 10GB, or $2 a gigabyte, or eight times as much.

Google had maintained the old price for two years, during which the cost of hard disks has nosedived, so to some extent the new pricing is just catching up with economic reality. The company says that the new cost is similar to what you’d pay per gigabyte for an external drive. But while it’s true that you’ll pay around a quarter a gig for something like a Seagate FreeAgent drive, you’re buying the drive and renting your Google space. Over three years, the FreeAgent’s total cost per gig remains a quarter, while you’ll have paid 75 cents a gig to Google.

(Not that I’m complaining: I remember paying $250 for a 500MB hard drive–or $500 a gigabyte–in the mid 1990s.)

How do the new prices compare with competitive Web services? It’s kind of hard to do the math. Yahoo, for instance, says that Yahoo Mail offers unlimited storage for free; unlimited free storage for Flickr is $25 a year. Online storage services such as Box.net and  SugarSync charge way more than Google does, but let you use their space for files of all sorts, and offer lots more features.

Ultimately, the target audience for Google online storage in its current form isn’t gigantic. You gotta think that the percentage of Gmail users who need more than 7GB of space is tiny, and that most Picasa users can make do with 1GB. (Picasa continues to feel like it’s aimed at newbies–the most hardcore photo shares I know tend to use Flickr or SmugMug.) What would really change everything would be Google rolling out the mythical Gdrive–a true hard drive in the sky–at the prices it’s charging for Gmail and Picasa. I’m guessing we will see Gdrive someday, but I don’t have a clue when it’ll show up or how much storage you’ll get, at what price.

(And sorry, but I’m still sitting here slackjawed at Google’s 16TB-for-$4,096 pricing plan. Wonder how big the market is for that?)

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Iomega’s StorCenter IX2-200: A Lot of NAS in a Little Space

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 13, 2009 at 4:14 am

Storage stalwart Iomega is carving out a niche for itself by releasing networked storage products with unexpectedly generous amounts of high-end features. Back in August, it announced the StorCenter IX4-200, a four-bay device. And now it’s been joined by the two-bay StorCenter ix2-200, available in 1TB ($269.99), 2TB ($369.99), and 4TB ($699.99) versions.

The ix2 packs Gigabit Ethernet and 3 USB ports; a feature called QuikTransfer lets you copy files from the device to an external drive by pressing a button–no PC required. It provides remote access to its contents from any Internet-connected computer, and can talk directly to up to five Axis surveillance cameras. It provides support for RAID 1 data redundancy, supports the iSCSI storage network standard, and is certified by VMware for virtualization applications.

As the above specs suggest, the device is primarily aimed at small and medium-sized business users. But it also has a bunch of features aimed at home users: It supports DLNA and iTunes for streaming of media around a home, can be used with Apple’s Time Machine feature for networked Mac backups, and can download torrents directly from the Internet. Oh, and it also has an optional Bluetooth feature that lets you wirelessly back up photos, contacts, and other information from your phone.

Iomega is also pitching the ix2-200 as an eco-friendly storage product: It’s got an Energy Star-certified power supply and automatically spins down its drives when not in use.

Unlike its predecessor, the plain old StorCenter ix2, the ix2-200 has user-replaceable hard drives, but there’s no empty bay, and the drives aren’t hot-swappable. Iomega says that the 1TB and 2TB versions are available now, and the 4TB one will show up later this month.

Iomega StorCenter IX2

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Netgear’s Stora: A Terabyte for Your Network and the Web

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 21, 2009 at 11:31 pm

StoraIt’s been a busy few days for the whole idea of networked hard drives that provide direct Internet connections so you can get to them from everywhere. Last week, Seagate introduced DockStar, a $99 add-on for its FreeAgent Go drives that provides browser-based access to their contents. And today Netgear launched Stora, an all-in-one network drive with Web access.

It’s not a new idea–Western Digital is one of several companies that offer boxes with at least generally similar capabilities–but Stora looks like its specs and features should be appealing for the $229 price. It contains one hot-swappable 1TB drive with room for another (some competitors have no available expansion), has gigabit Ethernet, reads at 280Mbps and writes at 240Mbps, does RAID 1 disk mirroring, and comes with a three-year warranty (one year is more common). It also supports the DLNA and UPnP standards for streaming media around your network to various devices (including game consoles and phones). And Netgear says it’s particularly proud of the Web-based interface for getting at your music, photos, videos, and other files. (I got only a glimpse and haven’t done any hands-on tests, but at first blush it looks slick.)

Stora isn’t as fancy as a true home server like HP’s MediaSmart (which can, among other things, slice-and-dice digital video files for various devices in the background). But the price looks right for the capabilities–your $229 will get you more storage and more features (albeit in a larger, less portable package) than if you spend the same amount on a FreeAgent Go and a DockStar.

Geez, was it less than five years ago that a 1TB network device that had a lot fewer features and sold for $999 felt like a low-cost breakthrough?

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Iomega’s New StorCenter: A Whole Lotta Storage for Your Network

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 27, 2009 at 12:55 am

Interested in a couple of terabytes of networked storage? How about 4TB, or 8TB? Iomega has announced the StorCenter ix4-200D, its newest NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. It’s packed with features and aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, but I think it’ll find its way into some home-based businesses as well.

The StorCenter contains four SATA hard drives and sports two Gigabit Ethernet ports. It’s got three USB 2.0 ports for adding external drives and/or a printer, all of which are then available from the network; a feature called QuikTransfer lets you use an LCD to move files back and forth between the NAS and external drives without using a PC.

It works with Windows, OS X, and Linux PCs, comes with Retrospect backup software from parent company EMC, and is Iomega’s first business-oriented network storage device to support Apple’s Time Machine backups. It can even talk to Axis network cameras and record video from them without a PC in the equation. There are also some industrial-strength features that smallish companies are less likely to care about, including iSCSCI support and certification by VMWare for virtualization use. And even though it’s aimed at businessy use, it supports DLNA for streaming of video and audio across a network directly from its drives.

The 2TB version of the StorCenter is competitively priced at $699.99; the 4TB provides double the disk space for $899.99; the 8TB uses still-costly 2TB drives and is $1899.99. (Unlike some storage products with multiple bays, it doesn’t offer any free bays in any of its configurations.) All three versions come with a three-year warranty, and Iomega says they’re shipping now.

Iomega

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Where Do You Keep Your Gigabytes?

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 10, 2009 at 11:02 am

Drive In the CloudI’ve contributed another guest post over at WePC.com–this one’s on the question of backup and storage, and whether you want to keep your data in your home or on a remote server. (Actually, I think the answer is clearly “both, for at least your most important stuff,” but I’d be skirting the truth if I told you I’m doing a very good job of backing up files to the cloud, where they’ll be safe and sound even earthquake, mudslide, wildfire, or attacks by rabid OS/2 holdouts put my local backups at risk.)

Anyhow, I called my post “PC Storage: Your Desk vs. the Cloud.” Check it out, and lemme know what your personal desk/cloud storage strategy is…especially if you’ve found a remote backup service you love.

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Pogoplug: Put Your USB Drives on the Web

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 14, 2009 at 12:45 pm

PogoPlugExternal USB hard drives and thumb drives are so cheap and useful that they pop up everywhere–except, for the most part, on the Internet. Enter Pogoplug, a new $99 gadget that lets you attach drives to your home network, then get access to them from any computer with a Web browser, and (soon) from iPhones and iPods Touch.

The Pogoplug itself looks like a slightly bulky AC adapter with Ethernet and USB ports. Here it is (it thoughtfully lets you remove the plug and attach a power cord if you like, so it doesn’t block access to your power strip or wall outlet–much like Apple’s laptop power adapters):

PogoPlug

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