Hard Drives and SSDs

Brinell Purestorage Hard Drives for the Ferrari Set

If you wear Zegna suits, have a home in the Hamptons, and if your other car is a Ferrari, then a plastic casing on your portable hard drive would be nothing short of gauche. It’s for you that the brinell purestorage line was created… With the brinell purestorage product series, brinell, the Karlsruhe-based creative designer, has put portable hard drives on the market, setting new standards in the area of IT peripherals. Not only do these units rank among the most compact USB hard drives in cheque card and pocket format with a capacity of up to 500 GB, they…


USB 2GB Flash drive comb proves there’s almost nothing that won’t be turned into a USB gizmo

For $36 you get not only a comb but a 2GB USB storage drive. Who’d want one of these – and more important why? Which brings me to my main question about this item. Is there any good reason for turning a comb into a combination USB drive and hair care tool? Now if you could plug the comb into the USB port, have it heat, and then use it as a pseudo curling iron. Then you’d have something. 2GB USB Comb via Raw Feed


When “Backup” Is a Relative Term…

I recently posted about my love/hate relationship with the Nokia E71x. It’s gotten a bit more contentious lately, due to various and mysterious software issues. Calendar entries that refuse to accept date changes, programs that freeze repeatedly, games that malfunction…it has been frustrating to say the least. Cue Nokia PC Suite and their backup suite. My first thought was that perhaps a backup and then full restore might smooth out the quirks, plus it would provide an excellent test of the backup system. If that did not fix my issues, I could reset the phone, rebuild it, and then back…


Seagate FreeAgent XTreme External Drive Review

I continue to be amazed by how much storage hard drive manufacturers cram into an extremely small space.  Not long ago, I looked at the MoreSpace drive, and was blown away by its full terabyte of storage.  So, you can imagine my delight when only a few months later, I was offered the chance to review a drive which uses half the space on my desk, but features double the storage…and it comes from Seagate, whom I already love.  The Seagate Freeagent Xtreme features a massive 2 terabytes of storage.  I think we are going to need a closer look…


Could your hard drive survive this? If it’s an ioSafe, yep.

As a firefighter I guess I was the obvious choice to review the ioSafe hard drive which sells itself as the first and only external hard drive that is both water and fire proof. The company includes a one time, no questions asked recovery process.  If you are unable to recover the data off the drive after a disaster you send it back to them.  If their experts are not able to recover the data they send it out to a third party recover service.  Finally, if that service is unable to recover your data ioSafe will spend up to $1000…


Swapping the Drive On A 13″ MacBook Pro

Yesterday Mitchell posted a first look at his new 13″ MacBook Pro. In his terrific overview he showed a few pictures of his swapping out the installed drive for a mammoth 500GB drive. As luck would have it the 120GB Solid State Drive I ordered from NewEgg earlier in the week arrived while I was reading it. As a result, the iPhone 3G S that is “Out for Delivery” isn’t the only piece of “zipper” Apple Hardware I’ll be enjoying. Instead of taking some shots of the install I figured I would grab my Flip UltraHD and film it. So…


Seagate Replica Complete PC Backup Solution Review

Wow!  Where was this when I was in high school?  One of the cool things about being so involved with computers and technology is watching the pace of change.  Dan mentioned that the other day with his look at an old 32 MB card vs his 32 GB iPhone. This change is most apparent in how we keep finding new and improved solutions for old problems.  And the oldest, biggest problem for me is losing data. Almost as long as I have had a computer, I have managed to find new and creative ways to lose my data.  As a…



Take Control of Time Machine

I’m a Apple fanboy through and through.  This I admit freely.  But I’m also man enough to admit that not everything Apple does is perfect. Time Machine, Apple’s default back up program, is one of those not so perfect things. My biggest problem with Time Machine is the inability to customize just when Time Machine backs up.  The only time management setting offered by Time Machine is on or off.  When it’s on it backs up everything on your Mac, every hour.  I find this to be a major nuisance as it seems my iMac is always backing itself up and it’s…


Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 Storage Array Review

If your drive goes south, without backup storage and some type of backup strategy, you could be in a world of hurt.  Everyone here at Gear Diary knows what that means… We’ve had a couple of server issues over the past few years that have caused all of us some major pain. Enter the Elite-AL Pro Qz2.  It’s a RAID drive system and backup device that will accommodate up to 8TB (yes… that’s 8 TERABYTES) of data in a single drive array. Let’s take a look and see how it does with both Windows and Mac systems. The Elite-AL Pro…


Memopal Online Backup and Storage Review

I reviewed Diino last week and while I thought that it had potential, I couldn’t really recommend using it as a primary online backup solution. I was trying out two other services at the same time, so here’s Part II of the trilogy. Memopal is a year-old start up based in Italy, providing online backup and storage services. They have two plans for consumers: a $49 plan with 150 GBs of combined space for backups and file storage, and a $99 plan with 250 GBs.


Diino Online Backup and Storage Review

Over a year ago, whilst working feverishly on an overdue college paper, I spilled a large glass of water over my laptop. Cue panic attack as the MacBook Pro sizzled. I had a backup of that document on my Fujitsu tablet, but it was several days old, and so was the previous SuperDuper backup of the MacBook. Fortunately, the MacBook was fine after several hours by a heater (with the battery out, of course). I got round to looking at online backup services after that. I evaluated SugarSync (pricey), Diino (no Mac client) and settled on Mozy. After the initial…



No More Excuses! Back Up Your Data the Easy Way with the Clickfree Transformer

Sure, we say we’re going to diligently backup our data.  Heck, sometimes we even actually do it. It starts out with the very best of intentions.  You backup all those files daily.  Then weekly.  Then, monthly. Soon enough, though, you’ve fallen off the cart.  You’re going to softball games, soccer games, working on…One.  Last.  Deadline. Then two, maybe three months go by since your last backup.  We are all guilty of neglecting our poor data.  Usually around that time is when — gasp! — everything is lost.  We become victims a file corruption.  A dead hard drive spun into oblivion. …


Norton Ghost Review

My entire philosophy when it comes to computers pretty much revolves around a single incident which occurred when I was in ninth grade.  We were studying Romeo and Juliet in English class, my first exposure to Shakespeare.  At the beginning of the unit, we were given a worksheet with dozens of short essay questions.  The idea was, as we read the play, we completed the essays relating to the portion we studied in class.  Being the diligent student that I was back then, I worked on that worksheet every day, sitting in the basement tapping away with Bank Street Writer…


The NewerTech Voyager Q Review

Not long after Kevin and I began dating, his ancient Dell started wheezing. Rather quickly, he realized that his desktop was about to give up the ghost, and our main concern became getting data off the hard drives. Because neither of us had an easy way to access the information on those two internal 80GB drives, we ended up taking his box to a computer tech in San Angelo. We brought along an external hard drive (my Seagate 400GB), and instructed the tech to transfer the data to it if the computer could not be saved. Two weeks later, we…


Hammer Storage Morespace Portable Drive Review

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to review the Hammer Storage Morespace external hard drive.  That was an incredible drive, with just an amazing amount of storage.  My one complaint about that fantastic drive, however, was the size of the drive.  I mean, really, it takes up a sizeable chunk of my desk.  So, you can imagine my excitement when Hammer Storage recently announced the new Morespace Portable Drive.  All of the storage at a fraction of the space.


Tricking Out The MSI WindOSX – Adding an SSD

A little over a week ago I installed Mac OS Leopard on the MSI Wind I had picked up at Best Buy. I’m pleased to report that after a week of use, it is still going strong. I’m amazed at how well the Mac OS runs on the device; I am grateful to everyone who figured out how to get Mac OS X running perfectly on a Wind and were then kind enough to share their work. Well, I couldn’t leave well enough alone, and so I decided that I need to trick out the diminutive Mac just a bit….


SuperTalent Mini PCIe SSD Drives Review

I am a huge fan of netbooks.  The very first netbook, the Eee PC 701 started a frenzy of designs that even brought Dell and Lenovo into the netbook fold. One minor problem with the SSD based netbooks like the original Eee PC 701/702 and the 900/901 is that you may not have as much on-board storage as you might like.  The 702 tops out at 8 GB, and that’s the model I have.  While I didn’t necessarily want a lot more space, it did change how I used the little netbook; I basically dedicated the on-board storage only for…


Super Talent Pico Gold Thumb Drive (8GB) Review

They say good things come in small packages.  Well, after checking out the Super Talent Pico Thumb Drive, I am here to tell you that it is not so much good things, but great things that come in small packages.  As in great big things.  Like the 8GB of storage found in this tiny, 31.3 mm (yes that is millimeter) drive.  How can this be?  Read on to find out!


Review: Digital Foci Photo Safe II

It’s becoming more and more rare as the price of flash memory has come down, but it’s still possible to fill your flash cards when on vacation taking pictures.  A lot of people, including myself, have taken to carrying a laptop with them on vacation.  I am currently typing this on said laptop.  But what if you fill your available cards and you’re not near your laptop? Then you’re out of luck.  Enter the Digital Foci Photo Safe II.