Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Seagate's objective in designing its Replica backup kit was to make a replica of Time Machine, but for Windows PCs. It works exactly as promised, and in similar fashion to Apple's no-brainer backup system. Plugged in, its setup process was numbingly simple: agree to the TOS and you're about done. It then records a complete backup of your system and begins keeping track of changes you make. By cleverly journaling and organizing each sequential backup, the archive is unlikely to get substantially larger than the system it's attached to. As a result, you can dip into your machine's history, recover files, and restore the system in the event of disaster. It comes with a special boot CD to help in the event of the latter."

Backups are so very important. I'm really surprised Microsoft has not made more of an effort to publicize the tools already available. I've been using Microsoft Sync Toy for a while and been very happy with it. I have an automated daily job that syncs all my data to a second physical drive in my desktop. I've also got two manual jobs that I run less regularly, one syncs to a network drive and the other to a portable drive which I keep off-site. If you are looking for a turnkey solution, with very little setup on your part, this looks like the way to go.

Four of these 1 Terrabyte Western Digital Caviar Green hard drives arrived for me yesterday - aren't they pretty? The key benefit these hard drives offer is power-related: they use only 6 watts when in use, 4 watts at idle, and only 0.8 watts at sleep or idle. They achieve this through a variety of technologies, including a variable RPM of 5400 to 7200. Clever stuff! Would anyone like to guess what I'm going to be using them for?

I don't know about where your computer is positioned, but one of mine (my media editing workstation) is on a shelf slightly above and about 18 inches in front of my head. So when the hard drives start grinding away, they're easy to hear. Windows Vista's indexing is great from a user perspective, but it does have to scan content on a regular basis so grind, grind, grind is what I hear. Also, working with photos and videos creates quite a bit of heavy hard drive usage. I usually have music playing, but music is less satisfying when there's a constant grinding going on in the background. But there's hope...

I have yet to purchase a solid state drive (SSD) but watching prices fall, and capacity/performance increase, I can comfortably say that 2009 will be the last year I'll be using hard drives as the primary drive in my two main daily-use computers - and I'm eargerly looking forward to the sound of silence that change will entail. The primary hard drives in my two main computers are 150 GB 10,000 RPM Western Digital RaptorX drives, so that's the performance and size benchmark that SSD drives have to beat. I keep my music collection, videos, and other big files on my Windows Home Server, so the only thing I need on my primary drive are my documents, pictures, and applications.

Looking at the SSD drives out there today, some have hit that mark, and the rest are moving toward it quite rapidly. I'm hoping that by the end of this year, I'll see high-performance 256 GB SSD drives for around the $250 USD mark. 128 GB SSD drives would be a little too tight on space (I'm outgrowing my 150 GB drives) so 256 GB would give me room to grow, and as long as the performance was quick, I don't think I'd miss my Raptor drives. I long for the sweet sound of silence...

"SanDisk Corporation today unveiled its third-generation family of solid-state drives (SSDs). Using multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory technology, SanDisk's G3 Series establishes new benchmarks in performance and price-performance leadership in the SSD industry. Designed as drop-in replacements for hard-disk drives (HDDs) in notebook PCs, the initial members in the SanDisk G3 family are SSD C25-G3 and SSD C18-G3 in the standard 2.5" and 1.8" form factors respectively, each available with a SATA-II interface. Available in capacities of 60, 120 and 240GB*, the unit MSRPs are $149, $249 and $499, respectively."

The press release goes on to say that the G3 series SSDs are more than five times faster than 7200rpm hard drives, and more than twice as fast as any of the SSDs that were shipping in 2008. What impresses me is the price: 60 GB for $149 USD is quite reasonable. No, you're not going to see these SSDs in any $599 notebooks this year, but SanDisk is offering a lot of performance for not too many dollars. I can't wait for this time next year when we'll likely see 500+ GB SSDs and, more importantly, average-priced computers start to ship with SSDs. I have yet to own a computer with an SSD in it, but I think that's going to happen in 2009...what about you?

"Many say that SSDs are the future of mobile computing and notebooks, but unfortunately they are still pretty expensive, so what about making one yourself? Many had the idea of doing so but too few were able to make it happen, until today. Thanks to Century and GeekStuff4U.com you will be now able to build up your very own SATA SSD thanks to 3 CF, the very same CF that can buy found in many DSLRs."

This isn't exactly my type of thing, but it's still pretty neat! Lots of pictures and a great video round out this tutorial. Anyone want to give it a go and report back?

That pile of junk above is what's left of the Maxtor OneTouch external hard drive once I removed the 750 GB hard drive from it. I hate destroying perfectly working hardware, but I didn't have much choice: Maxtor made the enclosure completely user-inaccessible, and they decided to bring this product to market without an eSATA port. I had a 400 GB drive in a drive enclosure with an eSATA port, but I wanted to use that big 750 GB drive in there instead...and so I had to get messy. My primary tool? The claws on the back of my hammer - I use them to crack, bend, and break the enclosure. It's quite ridiculous that Maxtor would made the drive so difficult to remove - what are they afraid of? That users might want to remove the drive and put them into their computers? Or move them to another, non-Maxtor enclosure? The new drive is purring along nicely in the eSATA enclosure, and average transfers speeds are slightly more than doubled over the original USB 2.0 connection. It's hard to say no to that, even if things had to get ugly...

Don't you just hate it how, over time, hard drives fill up? I'm pretty strict about my data, keeping a tight reign on it (I should sit down with John Dvorak and give him some tips, he needs them). On my workstation and media editing station, I have 150 GB Western Digital Raptor hard drives - very fast, but not especially spacious in comparison to the 500 GB drives that ship in even the most humble desktop PC sold today. Normally this isn't a problem, but this morning my workstation PC report that I only had 11 GB of storage space left. Normally I hover around 30 GB or so of free space, so this was rather surprising. I did a disk cleanup, after deleting everything in the Foldershare Trash folder, and got back up to 16 GB of free space. But where was the rest of it? Read more...

"Hitachi expects to offer a hard disk with five terabytes of storage by 2010, the company tells Japan's Nikkei BP (registration required). While some recent developments are nearing one terabit per inch, Hitachi says its CPP-GMR (Current Perpendicular to the Plane Giant Magnetoresistance) technology has improved to where the company will push past 1TB per inch in two years and allow a 5TB, 3.5-inch desktop hard drive in two years."


Even as solid state drives (SSD) based on Flash memory continue to grow in capacity, and drop in price, good ol' magnetic metal continues to drive ahead with increased capacity. 5 TB by 2010 is somewhat mind-boggling. I don't even own a terabyte drive today - the biggest single hard drive I have is a 750 GB Maxtor external hard drive, and that's used solely for backup. What's appealing about bigger drives is the ability to have more storage in a small physical footprint - I have a bit over 3 TB of storage on my Windows Home Server, but that comes from three internal drives and four external drives. Being able to simplify that down into a couple of internal drives would be fantastic. Keep at it Hitachi!