Tag: Data Storage

Tom’s Hardware reports that Maxtor will be releasing a 160gb external Firewire hard drive for $400. Excellent.

Maxtor recently announced a 100 gigabyte ATA drive that will initially retail for $300. Maxtor spokesman Martin Parry summed up what I think is the correct view about hard drive sizes, “As long as there is capacity, people will always find a way to fill it.”

Apparently some bored ZDNet reporter felt the need to slam IBM’s newly announced hard drive advance, and so went out and found one John Moen, who is the owner of a digital mapping company, to give a negative quote. IBM is saying its new technology could deliver 400 gig hard drives, so Moen supplies the quote the reporter was clearly fishing for, “I can’t imagine needing more than 20, 30, 40 gigs — that’s a lot of stuff. I can see where 80 would be attractive [to others].” ZDNet also quotes Rob Endrle, an analyst with Giga Information Group as saying the importance of IBM’s announcement may actually be with handheld devices.

Give me a break. My MP3 collection alone currently takes up more than 40 gigs. I’ve got another 30 or 40 gigs worth of high resolution photo scans. On my home network I’ve only got about 130 gigs of storage total, and that’s starting to feel very cramped.

Don’t these folks ever visit a consumer electronics store? I’m probably a bit ahead of the curve, but no by very much — people are increasingly seeing their PCs as multimedia devices that allow them to manipulate and manage photo stills, audio, and video. All of which, require a great deal of storage.

Personally, I’m kind of disappointed that for the moment hard drive sizes for off-the-shelf ATA drives seem to have stalled at 80 gigabytes. I’d really like to buy a 100+ gig hard drive.

Something I’ve been seriously considering buying over the past 6 to 8 months is a portable hard drive. I tend to do a lot of work at a number of different computers, and have typically used ZIP or floppy drives to take files with me, but that gets old quickly.

There are a number of portable hard drive solutions that use USB or Firewire interfaces, but they all tend to have serious drawbacks for my intended use. Almost all such drives require external power supplies, for example, and I’m really not excited about having to carry around a power cable. There are a few portables that use batteries, but then you’re limited to three or four hours at most before recharging (plus the available battery driven drives haven’t received very good reviews).

That’s why I’m very excited about the Pockey Drive. This is basically a 2.5″ hard drive in an case that’s almost as small as my Palm, so it’s very portable. It uses a USB interface so it’s going to be slow, but given how common USB ports are these days, the tradeoff in compatibility is worth it to me.

More importantly, though, the Pockey Drive is engineered to take all the power it needs directly from the computer to which it is connected — no power cables needed, thank you very much (does the Fire Wire standard support this sort of feature?)

The price is right, too, ranging from $250 for a 6 gigabyte version to $400 for a 20 gigabyte version. Sure, paying $400 for a 20 gigabyte drive is not cheap compared to the 80 gigabyte drive you can pick up for under $300 these days, but I’m thinking more along the lines that I once paid $500 for two 250 megabyte drives and thought I had a killer system. $400 for 20 gigabytes the size of my Palm? Bargain-o-rama.

Although the drive has been available in Korea for awhile, it’s just hitting the U.S. so there aren’t any reviews I could find that are in English (and my Korean is not very good). PCWorld does give the Pockey drive high marks in passing as part of a larger article on portable storage, saying that the drive “installs like a charm…Our test Pockey seemed sturdy, but all hard drives should be handled with care.”

Speaking of mass storage, Maxtor now has an 80 gig IDE drive available for about $300. Consumers shouldn’t have to wait too long now for the release of a 100 gig hard drive.