Give me more storage!
Western Digital is upping the ante. Their new WD Caviar Green 2TB (that’s 2 terabytes!) drive is out and retailing for $299. That’s a bit more expensive than two 1TB drives, but prices should drop soon.
WD is touting them as “Green” drives because they supposedly “use less power and support quieter, cooler-running desktop PCs and external storage devices.” Well, I’ll wait until the reviews come in before I totally believe that. Still, these drive would allow me to have less external HDs on my desk (for the time being) and I suppose that’s a good thing.
Now remember, this could lead to the old “all the eggs in one basket” situation. If you buy one of these drives, how are you going to back it up unless you buy a second one. And let’s hope that these Western Digital drives don’t suffer from an issue like the Seagate 1TB drives.
Oh, and for those old fogies who remember Zip® Disks, just one of these new 2TB drives is the equivalent of, oh, just about 20,000 (!) Zip® Disks. Zips® used to cost about $10 per disk when they first came out, so that’s about $200k worth of Zips®.
Now, remember floppy disks….?
Large amount of Seagate 1TB hard drives dying
If you own any Seagate 1 terabyte hard drives, your data may be living on borrowed time.
Since the beginning of the year, a number of Seagate customers have been reporting that their drives are failing, leaving them with no access to their data. The data is not destroyed, but retrieving it is impossible for the user and the drive needs to be sent back to Seagate for recovery.
Fixing this yourself is something that I don’t recommend unless you have an Intel Mac and some technical cojones. Me? I’d rather have someone else do it, or even get Seagate to exchange what I have for new ones. If you try the firmware update yourself and fail, then your data is at risk of being lost.
Of course, this is going to affect those of you who are using these drives as backups and/or RAIDs. My only suggestion at this point is to find out whether you have drives that could be affected and contact Seagate at 1-800-732-4283.
I’m thinking that I may physically trash the affected drives after backing them up on a different brand HD. I’ll probably do this to the drives that contain my archive as I cannot risk them at all. Also, this is going to make me think twice about Seagate drives. I guess other companies could run across the same problem, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. For now, Seagate is the problem and they don’t even support PowerPC Macs with their firmware update. How shitty is that? Just what we need now in this stupid economy.
Click on to see my instructions as to how to determine if you have an affected drive (Mac users only). … Continue Reading
Newertech brings out quad interface drive dock
Newertech has introduced their new Voyager Q, a quad-interface hard drive dock. This will connect using USB2, Firewire 400/800 and eSATA. It’ll retail for just under $100 and it’s available now for order.
This thing is great for all those storage mongers amongst you. C’mon, you know who you are!
Click “more” for the specs.
… Continue Reading