Back in August, I reviewed the HP MediaSmart Server LX195. I, the resident Linux Geek here at Gear Diary, was pleasantly surprised by how useful the little server was. Even so, I still thought there was a little something missing from that great device. HP has addressed a lot of this with the HP MediaSmart Server EX495.
More and more of our digital lives is left sitting on our computers. As a result we need a better way to access it. Seagate has that covered with a system that is not only simple to use but simple to set up as well. It consists of three parts. The first is Seagate’s FreeAgent Go portable hard drive. (You can use any USB hard drive but the system is designed for the FreeAgent Go). The second is the FreeAgent DockStar that incorporates a PogoPlug for anywhere access to your data. The third, if you are an iPhone or iPod…
A-DATA recently announced the release of a waterproof and shock resistant hard drive. The sh93 Incorporates rubber and plastic along with special cushion materials that allow it to withstand a 1M waterproof test for 30 minutes and military standard MIL-STD-810F drop test. The SH93 comes in two colors : racing car yellow and chili pepper red. With capacity up to 640GB, it is designed for users to conveniently carry around massive documents without the fear of damaging files stored in the drive in the incident of accidental drop or water spills. I’m quite familiar putting hard drives to the “test”…
Seagate was kind enough to send me both the FreeAgent Go and the FreeAgent DockStar to review and the continue using. I’m quite impressed with the combination which now allows me to access over 600GB of content from anywhere in the world. Here is a quick unboxing video…
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…
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
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Here’s a doo-dad that James Bond might appreciate and use: the LaCie iamaKey. Available in 4 or 8GB sizes, this tiny flash memory drive is neatly camouflaged as a key. To further the illusion, the iamaKey comes complete with a weighty slipring and fob.
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…
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…
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.
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, this rectangular black box is not the monolith from 2001; it’s the LaCie Little Disk, and it’s the latest addition to my gear bag.
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. …
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…
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…
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.