Comments on: Mini back-up hard drive

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 04:26:55 +0000

That may have been a typo, and yet ……

http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/29/buslinks-64gb-usb-2-0-flash-drive-pro-2-series/

64gb keychain by BUSLink.

The PRICE ain’t quite right yet but …..

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 09:59:37 +0000

100 gig flash memory? Right!! What the hell are you smoking??

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 06:14:50 +0000

The problem with drives in enclosures is that while they’re on they never spin the disks down. This is bad because one it means they use more power over a whole day, and two because the drives will simply wear out a lot faster than if they got some regular downtime.

Sure if you want to carry your drives around, go the enclosure, but if you want to add some drives to a lan for backup purposes, find an old pc and put some drives in it. The pc can be as slow as all heck, it doesn’t matter, the speed of the lan itself is the major bottleneck. Gigabit may sound fast, but in reality it’s only 120 megabytes per second of raw data, less than 100 megabytes per second of usable data. Assuming nothing else is also on the same lan chewing up the available bandwidth.

Basically as long as the pc has 100meg network adaptor and enough grunt to run the os of choice, it’s a good way to recycle an old pc and some older drives you might otherwise throw out. Even if you never turn that pc off, you can always tell the os installed on it to spin the drives down after a preset period of inactivity and so extend the drives lifespan.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 17:40:47 +0000

Items such as the ScanDisk 100-gig key-chains are quite handy too ; )

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 17:32:55 +0000

Unless they try to file a lawsuit stopping this technology.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 17:28:42 +0000

But a 2.5″ drive in a USB enclosure can be had for about $150 for 80GB. These make great ways of carrying your entire music collection and sucking up that of your friends.

With tools like these, file sharing is unstoppable. This isn’t copying the odd CD for your friends. It’s about aggregating the collections of all your friends. And it’s all completely under the radar.