Day: January 7, 2005

Seagate 100gb 2.5″ External Drive

I had all but given up on buying anymore 2.5″ external hard drives because it looked like the 100gb editions were going to be too expensive (Lacie, for example, is selling its 100gb 2.5″ external for $319).

But Seagate is selling a 2.5″ external hard drive under its own brand name, that has a couple advantages that have me rethinking whether to buy another one.

First, the price — the 100gb drive is going for $229 at NewEgg. It might be available for slightly less at other outlets, but that’s a pretty good deal considering the size. Unlike the Lacie drive, this one’s strictly USB 2.0, however. Firewire doesn’t mean a whole lot to me for these portable drives, but it might be an issue to some.

Second, this is a 5400 RPM drive. Excellent. The 4,200 RPM drive in my 80gb Firelite is more than adequate for most tasks, but it does have its shortcomings when I need to do intensive tasks like index 20gb worth of PDFs with DTSearch. Bumping up to a 5400 RPM would be very nice.

Ignore the Obvious

There’s something I’m missing in this Boing! Boing! post by Cory Doctorow,

Bram: BitTorrent use up, it’s not all warez

Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, notes, “I’d like to point out that although a number of very large BitTorrent-based web sites have been taken down recently, downloads of BitTorrent have only gone down slightly. There’s a widespread belief that BitTorrent is used almost exclusively for warez, probably a perception of people who themselves use it almost exclusively for warez, but that impression is simply untrue.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not sure how “downloads . . . have . . . gone down slightly” leads Cory to conclude that “BitTorrent use [is] up.”

On the other hand, the overall point is absolutely correct — there are a ton of completely legal things to download via BitTorrent. I used it the other day to download ISOs of the CDs that Baen packed in some of their books, which the company allows to be freely distributed.