One of the gifts I received from my husband Kev for Christmas was a Canon G16; he included a 32GB SanDisk Extreme SD Card and a spare battery — totally sweet, right? Around the same time, a 64GB Leef PRO SD Card showed up for review; comparisons were begging to be made, and I couldn’t help but make them …
We started CES 2014 by meeting with Seagate and LaCie and looking at some of their new and upcoming products. Among them are a new wireless drive, a 4TB portable drive (a first), and a gorgeous silver hard drive that looks more like a work of art than a drive. Here are a few pictures of the products.
I’m taking my first trip with the Lenovo Yoga I recently reviewed. The Yoga’s only caveat is that it has just 128GB of storage. Fortunately SanDisk’s Cruzer Fit, which Dan recently wrote about, is a perfect solution; it packs 64GB inside its tiny body, while SanDisk’s Cruzer Force also holds 64GB. Guess which one is now installed inside my Yoga?
My MacBook Pro has 512GB of flash storage. That may sound like a lot, but once you begin editing videos and loading up essential files the space gets consumed rather quickly. SanDisks new Cruzer Fit and Cruzer Force are a great way to add up to 64GB of storage on the go. Capacities top out at 64GB!
A new, stylish external storage solution from Brinell GmbH recently surfaced, revealing seven beautiful SSD form factor styles to choose from. Sporting USB 3.0 specs, the Brinell external SSDs offer zippy read/write speeds in UAS Turbo mode of 420/330 MB/s respectively, with prices starting from about $216 for the 120GB version to $768 USD for 500GB capacity. High-end performance meets high-end materials, with Brinell’s SSD external drives featuring components such as Makassar ebony, Nappa leather, carbon fiber, or stainless steel in various stylings. The externals are lightweight too, weighing in at around 4.2 ounces. Plus, in addition to their zippy,…
With each passing year, flash storage is cheaper and more plentiful, but the options for using storage have become fewer. Apple has few options for storage expansion, and fewer Ultrabooks, tablets and smartphones allow expansion. But the HP Pocket Playlist offers 32GB of wireless storage for use even when you are offline, and does it in a stylish $99 package. Description: •Engineered to entertain: Hey, parents! The HP Pocket Playlist puts you in control of managing your mobile entertainment. No matter where you go— car, train, restaurant, mall— your kids sit still, not fight and stay happy watching their own…
How much storage is enough? More! More than whatever number you were thinking – which is an order of magnitude more than what was possible a few years ago. I take a look back at the Iomega Zip Drive, the popular cheap and reliable storage device that bridged the time between floppy disks and USB flash storage. The Iomega Zip Drive was originally introduced in 1994, started shipping in 1995, and died out about a decade ago — though I can’t find an exact termination date. I remember the release well, and I was right on board when it arrived….
As we move to a virtually paperless society, sharing digital files becomes an issue. While there are many avenues to exchange files in a large setting, many businesses do not prefer to email or share the files over servers for fear of being stolen or damaged. Giving the files on a flash drive insures control until it reaches the end-user. Startech.com has introduced a device to make duplicating flash drives or erasing them a snap, which means no more watching files copy from a computer over and over. I once wondered how companies that pass out large numbers of flash…
Like you, much of my life is digital. That includes documents, pictures, music and video. Those files are precious… and increasingly larger and larger. Seriously, one video for a Gear Diary post can be a gigabyte and a half before I even begin to process it. It adds up … quickly. In addition, protecting that data is more important than ever, so having the ability to move files from one location to another is too. And when your files are huge and your file transfer rate is slow, it means only one thing — wasted time. G-Technology is looking to…
Judie and I were on the phone together while ordering our 15″ MacBook pro with Retina display laptops, so we could discuss the specific specs we wanted. At the end of the day we both went for the fastest processor (Core i7) and most RAM (16GB) we could get. Judie had just about convinced me to go for the largest amount of storage (768GB) despite the huge up-charge to move from 512GB, when we realized that the storage upgrade would delay the laptops for weeks. We both settled for 512GB laptops, and we have been quite happy with the machines….
While at Mobile World Congress, we had a meeting with SanDisk. Going in, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen: would they pull out a bunch of thumb-drives and mini memory cards to show us their latest consumer designs as they had done several years ago? Or would we find something completely new to discuss? As it turned out, my meeting was with Yoram Zybergerg, the Senior Director of Embedded Business with SanDisk, so a good part of our meeting focused on the OEM side. Yoram’s excitement about the limitless possibilities of flash memory — now and in the future…
From now until 2013, we’re taking a look at some New Year’s Resolutions and Gear Diary ways to help keep them. New Year Resolution: Protect Your Data in 2013 This is one of those lessons you learn, forget, and then learn again once a data-loss disaster strikes. Here’s my story, and why DropBox’s PackRat feature is my new best friend. I have spent the last year on and off creating an interactive iBook that can be used by all my Bar Mitzvah students to help them study toward becoming a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. The iBook has the prayers the…
We’ve long been fans of ioSafe. We’ve spent time with them as they burnt, crushed and soaked hard drives. We’ve seen the drives abused with shocking results. We also taken shotgun shots as their drives. Now ioSafe has taken things even further. They’s turned to Indiegogo to help fund their newest endeavor, the ioSafe N2. Before we dig into this more deeply take a minute and watch the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1LdY2Fe6IUM The company describes the ioSafe N2 as “Disaster-Proof Private Cloud – like an aircraft black box for personal or business data”. I think that is a pretty apt description. Whereas…
Anyone who knows me expects to see me sporting my backpack gear bag hanging on my right shoulder. I carry tons of tech in that bag whether I need it on a daily basis or not. The backbone of that backpack has been my 13″ MacBook Pro. The laptop was my dream computer, and it was basically an extension of myself. Making movies, editing photos, and writing posts; all flowed from my laptop like a master magician wowing a captivated crowd. In fact, that MacBook even made trips with me to the farm and hunting. That magic came to a…
I am always on the lookout for simple and secure backup solutions and good methods for syncing personal files across multiple devices. I use Dropbox and Google Drive, but have always liked the idea of my own personal cloud solution for more confidential information. I have been using The free Tonido program on my home Mac, iPad, iPhone and Google Nexus 7 for a few months, and it has worked quite well. I have not purchased the Tonido Plug, but had been considering it for a few weeks until Pogoplug announced a great deal on the Pogoplug Classic device and storage….
I started using Dropbox several years ago at Thomas’ recommendation. At the time, I didn’t think I’d be using it for that much, so the 500MB that came in the free account seemed just right. I even managed to pick up some additional free storage space, because I did things like tweet about it, connect it to my Facebook account, and upload some photos. And then one day, I realized that I was using my Dropbox account in new ways I had never expected to: I was sharing folders with collaborators, uploading all of my family pictures and genealogy files,…
The great site iFixit has done the tear down of the new MacBook Pro with a Retina Display that was announced at the 2012 WWDC, and we find that it has more in common with the MacBook Air and iPad than any MacBook Pro before it; in other words, the RAM is SOLDERED in place. This means that you had better order as much as you will ever need now, as you will be stuck with what you have installed. Furthermore, the SSD is yet another proprietary format. So upgrading it in the future is going to require someone to…
When MobileMe turned into iCloud, those of us who had dumped hundreds of dollars into the service hoped that Apple would ‘throw us a bone’ for the years of loyalty. And they did – we got the 20GB storage level for free until June 2012. Here is the section from the FAQ: MobileMe members with 20GB of purchased storage receive a complimentary iCloud storage upgrade of 20GB, and accounts with additional purchased storage (40GB to 60GB) receive a complimentary upgrade of 50GB after moving to iCloud. These free upgrades are good through September 30th, 2012. After that date, you can…
If you build computers or do any maintenance on computers or just want a quick way to offload the data off of an old hard drive, then StarTech.com has a new solution for you. Their new HDD docking station supports 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch SATA or IDE hard disks and connects to your computer with the faster USB 3.0 standard. It’s supported on pretty much every OS out there as well. The dock will allow you to: Connect a SATA and IDE hard drive at the same time or separately, through a single USB 3.0 connection at up to…
Image courtesy of StarTech Those of us in the IT business know that you simply can’t have enough tools to get the job done. Anything to make life easier, and give you more time to for other things is usually worth it’s weight in gold. StarTech makes some of the coolest and hard to find computing equipment on the market. Almost everything I have used from them works exactly as they said it would and stands up to the harshness of the IT worker lifestyle. Today we are taking a look at one of my favorite products from StarTech,…
There are some smartphone accessories that make you go “huh? Who would buy this?” And then sometimes there are ideas so smart you think, “Wow! Why didn’t anyone do this sooner?” Finally, there’s the “GREAT idea, poor execution” accessory. The Kingston Wi-Drive fits into one of these categories, but you will have to read to the end to find out which one!