Big PC Geek Tech Blog

When I first saw Macally’s G-S350SU, I had to have one! I am certainly not a Mac lover but I will admit, Apple is amazing when it comes to hardware design, it looks and feels like an Apple product. This little enclosure is the perfect addition for anyone’s computer but especially if you have a Mac Pro or MacBook Pro. The brushed aluminum case matches a Mac Pro perfectly and even has a cool blue led power button.

With that said, I still have good and bad to point out about the features of this drive enclosure! Not only does this drive plug in to your computer via USB, it also has an eSATA plug which will give you speeds as fast as having an internal hard drive. Seriously, if you have a computer with eSATA and transfer a lot of files, use it because the data transfer is much faster than USB. Ok now the bad… I would like a little internal fan. This drive enclosure gets a "+" because there are air holes for air flow, but a "-" because there is no fan to cool down the drive. Given the fact that most external hard drive enclosures are sealed with no air holes and no fan, this drive enclosure is still better than most. Heat is the number one reason for hard drive failure. By the way, if the eSATA part did not give it away, this drive enclosure is for SATA drives only. Overall, I feel this external hard drive enclosure is superior to most, in fact, I liked it so much I bought two. The base price for this guy is $50 but amazon.com lists it here under 3.5" Sata Case for $35 with free shipping.

Of coarse be sure to read the date when you read this because all 500GB hard drives might be this price by then but $69.99 for a 500 GB Seagate is phenomenal. This is the cheapest price for a hard drive I have ever seen. Go to ZipZoomFly.com As usual, Seagate helps us out by driving the base cost of gigs per dollar down in hard drives.

I can’t believe it is here but we are seeing 1 TB hard drives sold for under $200! This price may be a limited time offer but since it is out there, I would not buy any 1 TB hard drive for any more than $200.

The link for this one is the "eco" friendly drive that has variable speeds from 5400-7200 rpm.

Some advice about high capacity drives: At first I was not sure about the investment in a drive that would operate at 5400 rpm because of slower speeds but I have heard from some people that this may actually be better for drives with really high capacities. It seems that because the densities in these drives are so compact, little movements from case fans or even the fast 7200 rpm cause the drive to error and it spends more time correcting errors than an average drive does. So although these new 1 TB drives may run slower than regular drives, a 5400 drive may be quicker than a 7200 rpm.

Eventually, we all have a spare or old computer we no longer need that is sitting around collecting dust. Some of us might get the idea to sell it but others may decide to give it to charity. Whatever the reason is, you must make sure you properly delete the data on the computer you are donating off of the hard disk.

It is a common misconception that reformatting a drive deletes the data on your hard drive. Actually, when you reformat a drive, you really just the the drive to forget where the data is. The drive in your computer may not show anything there but it is still there until it is written over by saving new data. With proper tools, data from a formatted drive can be recovered quite easily.

DBAN or Derik’s Boot and Nuke is a free utility that will really wipe all data from your drive. Instead of reformatting a drive, DBAN actually writes 0’s or blobs of data over your data. DBAN has a variety of options to overwrite data over and over multiple times for when you want to be really secure.

To find DBAN, do a Google search for "DBAN." Once there, read the instructions on how to create a bootable CD and run DBAN.

!!!Warning!!! If you use DBAN on your C drive, you will erase everything and never be able to recover anything again. This is exactly what you want to do if selling or giving away a computer.

It has been my opinion for quite some time that defraging your hard drive every week it overkill and too intensive on your hard drive. I have no idea if the way Vista defrags your hard drive is with less stress on the drive than XP but Vista by default automatically defrags your drive every week. At this point, until I have more information, I recommend you modify the setting to defrag hard drive to only once a month. To do this, right click on your hard drive, select "properties," then the "tools" tab, "defragment now," and finally "Modify Schedule." In the Modify Schedule box which is called Disk Defragmenter, you can select a different schedule and it should change the schedule for all drives you have in your computer.

If you don’t want your computer to defrag your drives on a schedule, just uncheck the box, "Run on a Schedule (recommended)," when in the Disk Defragmenter dialog box is open. When you want to do a defrag, just go back to the Disk Defragmenter dialog box and select, "Defragment Now."

I have to say, hearing Hitachi and Toshiba announce a 500GB laptop hard drive is amazing and just impressive but they can’t be used in today’s laptops. Hitachi’s and Toshiba’s just add and additional platter which makes the drive thicker so it won’t fit in most of today’s traditional laptops by adding about 3mm. I don’t think this is the wave of the future but this could be a step to smaller desktop computers and for specialized smaller computer. I could see HP putting this in their super small desktop business and home computer or servers. Not entirely useful but seriously amazing to to see how far we have come. We are probably a year away from seeing standardized 500GB drives in most laptops.

The data on our computers is important and priceless to us which is why hard drive failure is big issue these days. Data Robotics’ Drobo "The world’s first storage robot," hopes to fix this issue for everyone with a robotic smart approach to managing your hard drives. Drobo is available for $500

Drobo works like this: You fill up two to four of the four available slots for SATA hard drives, currently 1 TB is the max. Drobo gives you approximately half the amount of storage you put in it. Drobo automatically backs up another copy of your file on another drive so that in the event that one drive fails, you still have your data and you just replace the defective drive. Upgrading drives with Drobo is also easy, you just need to only replace one at a time and wait till Drobo tells you with it’s lights when it is ready. Drobo is making copies of your files to the new drive so you wont lose any data. An important note to make is that Drobo formats a drive with it’s own format each time you put a drive in, so if you take all four drive out at the same time you will lost all of your data. Drobo does withstand power outages so if you want to take out all drives, possibly try unplugging the power plug do whatever you need to do, put the drives back in and then power on Drobo. With Drobo running off of USB only, the people at Data Robotics say Drobo is not for  backup but it certainly can serve the process.

Oh wait a minute, Drobo now has a new friend DroboShare which allows more of a data backup solution with its network connectivity. Available for $200, DroboShare sits on the bottom of your Drobo and allows it to connect to your network via Ethernet.

Drobo cons: Expandability used to be my biggest worry but DroboShare boats connectivity expansion allowing two Drobos to work together. Drobo is also super loud, the fan in the back always seems to whine when I don’t want it to and I worry about heat on the drives because I see minimal airflow. Another note on the fan is if it breaks, there is no easy way just to replace the fan. The fan is necessary to cool your drives. Finally, my biggest concern is price. Why pay $700 for a Drobo and DroboShare that comes with no drives when I can pay $600 for an HP MediaSmart Server that does way more than the Drobo and comes with a 500GB drive. Why spend approximately $600 on a Drobo and a 500 GB drive when you can get the same but a whole server to for the same cost with the HP.

My final thoughts: Drobo is not worth the cost and is too loud. If you turn off your computer when you don’t use it and you don’t mind spending extra money for simplicity, a Drobo is for you. I really like the idea behind Drobo and the creators deserve to get paid for their creation. I just hope that Drobo can sell enough to drop the price closer to what I think it is worth. I do like that Drobo works with PC’s and Macs.

You can buy a Drobo here: Link

I just read on the blog www.appletell.com that they have a really reliable source that the Mac Book Pros will have solid state hard drives in them. I am glad I did not buy a MackBook Pro for Christmas. I have been waiting for Macworld to buy one and all the bloggers are making me think I was smart to wait.

What are solid state drives? Why is this good?

Well simple, if the hard drive in a notebook were flash memory, which has no moving parts, (the memory is stored on computer chips instead of a tradition hard drive with mechanical parts), they should be able to take a beating. Laptops have an issue of dying because if you drop one (and they are more susceptible to being dropped) you chance damaging the hard drive with all of your precious data. Your odds are much better that the drive wont break as easy with solid state. This idea suggests that the drives will last much longer but I am not sure about this since flash memory usually has a limit of read and writes, that is they might wear out sooner than the tradition hard drive.

Well either way, I cant wait to get a new laptop. I will be getting one soon and I hope to be able to try out one with solid state drives.