Are “enterprise” drives worth the extra cost in a RAID enclosure? The reason I ask is I’ve had 2 of 4 Seagate ‘consumer’ (7200.12) drives fail in my (Other World Qx2) enclosure. The two drives that failed were maybe a year old, well short of any ‘MBTF’ expectation. Enterprise drives cost nearly twice that of consumer drives.
Iomega’s ix4-200d: A Killer Desktop Storage Array
August 27, 2009 By 50 Comments
Iomega is well into its second coming as EMC’s entry-level storage division. First, they applied EMC’s compact and full-featured LifeLine home storage software to existing gear, giving birth to the Home Media Network Hard Drive, StorCenter ix2, and StorCenter Pro ix4-100. Then they wooed the small-business community with the rack-mount StorCenter ix4-200r, adding iSCSI target [...]
Does Hitachi+SimpleTech = EMC+Iomega?
February 24, 2009 By 5 Comments
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) just bought Fabrik (SimpleTech and G-Technology). So is Hitachi’s combination with SimpleTech a response or challenge to EMC’s acquisition of Iomega? In a word, no.
EMC Makes Iomega Relevant Again
January 7, 2009 By 4 Comments
Pity poor old Iomega. The company responsible for hot products like the Zip drive and coulda-beens like the Clik drive was stumbling in the early part of this decade, unable to distinguish itself from all of the other providers of commodity external storage devices for consumers. Although the company had built the Zip into a [...]
Western Digital + Fujitsu = More Competition for Seagate and Hitachi
October 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Western Digital may purchase Fujitsu’s hard disk drive development and manufacturing assets, getting closer to market-leader, Seagate, with greater manufacturing capacity and access to the laptop OEM market
Yes, FireWire is Faster Than USB
July 30, 2008 By 1 Comment
This should not come as a shock to anyone, as it has been proven before, but let me take this moment to say that, yes, despite their rated speeds, 400-megabit FireWire S400 (aka IEEE 1394) is faster than 480-megabit USB 2.0. While swapping out disk drives (first to upgrade the internal drive in my MacBook [...]
How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk
July 26, 2008 By 31 Comments
It turns out that you can move Time Machine backups easily, with included OS X tools, and without breaking anything. My old backups are still visible, and I have another 40 GB to work with. Read on for the details!
Upgraded! 320 GB in a MacBook Pro!
June 25, 2008 By 10 Comments
Terabytes on the Cheap
November 29, 2007 By 2 Comments
Meet the Maxtor Personal Storage 3200. It’s a cheap, quick, and dirty way to add storage to your PC, and it’s ilk is becoming the surprise hit of the holiday season, lifting the stock of Seagate and Western Digital, and making Hitachi, LaCie and others fight for a piece of the market. I’ve bought two [...]
Specialized Server/Enterprise Hard Drives
August 7, 2007 By 3 Comments
Continuing my overview of the specialized hard drive market, we move on to the world of enterprise hard disk drives. These are performance monsters, with nearly all falling above the 10,000 RPM line that defines “exotic” in the desktop space. They also have a wide variety of interfaces, including parallel and serial SCSI, Fibre Channel, [...]
