Portable hard drive can solve your digital problems in Bali
Travelers often grapple with the digital storage problem, of where to put photos. You know the story, you get all excited, buy a camera with 10 mega pixels, take off to Bali, and find out you can’t email them, can’t store them anywhere, except a stack of CD’s, and you want to clear your camera. A Jakarta Post article offers a solution.
In the past I have suggested a portable storage device (Iomega) that can accommodate 250 Gbs of data. A new firm, Maxtor has some whoppers that make 250Gb look like nothing. Here’s what Zatni Arbi of the Jakarta Post says.
There are some interesting products that have been sitting on my shelves to be reviewed. This time it is two external hard disks from Maxtor, a familiar name that we all associate with hard disks. The bigger of the two was a 500 GB Maxtor OneTouch III.
Yes, that’s right. Five hundred gigabytes of storage capacity in one package!
And that is not the biggest of the hard drives Maxtor launched in Indonesia last February. The largest capacity that they currently have is one terabyte (TB), which is equivalent to a thousand megabytes. The smallest — and it comes in a smaller package, too — is a 100 GB container that is not much bigger than a Walkman cassette player.
It is a bigger capacity than the total amount of storage that my PC has, despite the fact that I have three 3.5-inch hard disks spinning inside the casing.
Why such a huge storage capacity? It is not difficult to find the answer. Today we keep all those video clips and images that we took during the last vacation, and we refuse to delete any from the previous trip.
Graphics designers, Web developers, even movie directors keep tons of multimedia material digitally. Pretty soon they will reach the terabyte mark.
What is special about these products? We can easily build our own storage behemoth using components bought from a Mangga Dua computer store. We can expand the storage capacity further by adding more hard disks as we wish and as our budget allows.
However, there is the problem of integration and the software application needed to manage the backup and restore process. With products such as Maxtor OneTouch III the hardware comes with software that allows automatic backup, for example.
In the 100 GB OneTouch III Mini Edition, which is the smallest in the family, the software is included in the hard disk.
There is no installation CD. The moment the device is connected to the computer, the software uploads itself and we can install it on our PC. One OneTouch III can be used to backup data from multiple computers — PCs as well as Macs.
One interesting thing about the Mini Edition, which contains a 2.5-inch hard disk, is that we may need to connect it to two USB ports as one port may not supply enough power to spin the hard disk. Maxtor throws in the Y USB cable into the box. The use of the Y cable is common in USB-based small external hard disks.
Pressing the illuminated button will immediately launch the Maxtor OneTouch Manager. Clicking any of the buttons on the icon bar on the left will let us adjust the setting, create a backup of our hard disks, restore, synchronize the contents of several different hard disks and even rollback our system after a virus attack.
Under Setting, we can choose the amount of inactive time before the hard disk goes to its power-saving mode, activate the password protection so that people will not be able to access our data if the device ever gets stolen, and even change the function of the button on the device.
If necessary, we can also backup every historical version of a file — for example, a Word document. This option will fill up the hard disk quickly, but we can go back to any previous version based on the date it was backed up. The sync function is particularly useful, too, as it synchronizes the files based on the latest version so we will only have one uniform version on the computer and on the Mini.
Connect the Mini to a second computer, and it can also update the file with the same name that exists on that computer. The sync function is great for people who work in different places at different times, as they only have to carry the Mini.
Practical Solutions
The OneTouch III Mini Edition certainly provides practical external storage. With a 100 GB hard disk, it has enough space to hold more MP3 song files that you can listen to in ten years.
The other OneTouch III hard disk that I got for the review is bigger and heavier, of course, as it uses a 3.5-inch hard disk. It has a sturdy enclosure. Providing 500 GB of storage space, it is wrapped in plastic padding that will protect it from bumps (I did not torture test it, though).
Unlike the Mini Edition, this one comes with a power adaptor. It also has a power switch on the back panel. If you need high speed link to your computer, there are two FireWire 400 ports in addition to a USB 2.0 port.
As you can guess, FireWire 400 will give us a data transfer rate of 400 megabit per second (Mbps). A higher specification is the FireWire 800, which will provide 800 Mbps data rate.
If we need more reliable backup system, Maxtor also has the Turbo Edition. It has two hard disks instead of one, and they are configured either as Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) 0 or RAID 1 system. In RAID 0, data will be broken down into blocks and each block will be written to a different hard disk.
The benefit is faster input/output, but the downside is that there is no redundancy. RAID 1 offers more protection because the two hard disks contain exactly the same data.
Each time data is written into one of them, it will automatically mirrored in the other. So, if one of the two hard disks is corrupted or dies completely, we still have the data on the other.
Like Sanyo’s Xacti HD-1 that I reviewed last week, the OneTouch III family of external hard disks also received award during the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in February for technical design.
My wish is for the option to use the FireWire 400 editions as a Network Attached Storage. All that is still missing is a fast Ethernet port. Of course, if a higher speed is required, we can use the FireWire 400.
I like the software that Maxtor has included in the OneTouch III units. It is so easy to use, yet it provides a lot of useful information that we can access with a single click. If you are looking for a hassle-free storage device for creating backup or for transporting large files, the OneTouch III products will meet your requirements.
The larger hard drive is obviously for people not moving around so much, but would be ideal for Bali expats, who use video, TIFF photos, or other large files.