Tag: Data Storage

PCWorld reports that Iomega is now shipping an MP3 player that uses its Clik! disks which it’s apparently now renamed the PocketZip.

Whatever they call it, the darn thing is only 40 megabytes. At $300 for the player and $10 per disk, I can’t imagine there’s any market at all for this player. Sure the cost-per-megabyte is only 25 cents, but a) these disks have a horrible reputation as being flakey and prone to problem as it is, much less if you’re going to take them jogging and b) who wants to switch disks after every 40 megabytes of MP3s?

If it had two disk ports and the quality was much better, then it might be more interesting, but it’s this sort of 2-3 years behind the times thinking that has practically ruined Iomega.

Plus, this player also integrates some of the stupid new security measures, and the morons at PCWorld don’t even think about what they’re writing.

One of those measures allows PocketZip disks to be shared among different players but prevents you from copying music tracks from someone else’s PocketZip storage disk onto your computer’s hard drive.

Of course it also prevents me from copying my music onto my hard drive, if I happen to have more than one hard drive. Suppose you’ve got some songs on this player, and your HD gets fried, and you run to Best Buy and replace it. Don’t even think about copying that music onto the new hard drive — the player interprets that as a piracy attempt.

I always liked MaximumPC because, unlike a lot of computer magazines, it was
not into this touchy-feely dumbed down “home computer” nonsense — this was
power desktop computing. Now they seem to be whimping out on me. In a recent
review
of IBM’s 75 gig hard drive and Maxtor’s 60 gig hard drive, reviewer Sean Cleveland
actually dares to ponder that the size of hard drives might be reaching “ludicrous
proportions.”

Is he serious? Sixty gigabytes is a drop in the bucket. I want to get four
of these Maxtor drives, and put them in a RAID array using a Promise controller
to have 240 gigabytes of storage. I can already hear the John Dvorak’s of the
world chiming “what would any home user possibly do with that much space.” I
wonder sometimes if these folks actually use their computers rather than
just writing about them.

At the moment, for example, I have about 60 gigabytes of MP3s stored on CD-Rs
that I would much prefer to store locally. I have another 20-30 gigabytes of
scanned pictures that are scattered across many CDs, not to mention the hours
and hours of digitized Hi-8 videotapes.

Forget 60 gigabytes being ludicrous. I am hoping that 1 terabyte hard drive
comes out soon so I can get four of those and put them on a RAID controller.
Don’t think I can fill up 4 terabytes? I would not bet against it (besides by
the time they get that big, Diablo III will probably ship on 8 DVDs and take
up 800 gig — just running games will eat up half the drive space).