Portable Storage Guide

Elite 4CE writes "If you're like me, you are always transporting data from home to work, and back. I was surprized at how many options there were to facilitate this. Hardcoreware.net have posted their Portable Storage Guide for 2005, covering everything from flash based devices that fit into your pocket, to huge FireWire drives with a capacity of 400GB."

Beware Large Externals

[Shadow Wrought]

We have used some of the 250GB Western Digitals here and a known fault is that, if you remove the drive improperly, it will corrupt the entire drive. Rendering useless all 200+ gigs of info on there. But yeah, other than that, they work great! So be careful how you unplug and always use the "Remove Drive" feature.

Re:Beware Large Externals

[fm6]

I once bought a LaCie USB drive. You had to format it before first use. And the power socket was badly designed — so the power lead fell out halfway through the formatting. There's no way to fix that on a USB drive without taking the whole thing apart. Between that and LaCie's lame support and warantees, I will never go near any of their products again!

Security Risks?

[MandoSKippy]

Not saying Poster is security risk. But as someone who does security audits for banks, "taking data home" ie becoming more and more of a Security risk. It is easy for an employee to copy, burn, etc information with customer data with it. Another issue is smaller banks don't have the dedicated resources to devote to proper DRM and OEMS like Dell often include CD-Rs and make USB flash drives so cheap that it gets more and more troublesom to block it.

PQI

[Solder Fumes]

I use a 1GB PQI Stick, I don't think there's a smaller, cheaper, and more reliable option for the same capacity.

Coralized

[Milican]

Coralized [nyud.net]

JOhn

Re:Beware Large Externals

[Anonymous Coward]

This has nothing to do with the specific model of drive. Not telling the OS you intend to remove the drive will corrupt the file system for the exact same reason as if you shut down your computer by pulling the plug out of the wall. The OS does write caching. It must be given the opportunity to flush that cache.

Kids these days don't know nothing...

Re:Data encryption on portable device?

[L. VeGas]

For Windows, the best option is TrueCrypt [truecrypt.org].

I've got a review of it here [nedwolf.com], if you're interested, as well as some other portable security tools. I've a bigger list [nedwolf.com] portable software tools as well. (shameless link, but on topic)

Software for your portable deviced

[leftyfb]

For those of you who have USB flash drives or just about any other type of portable media, check out http://www.no-install.com/ [no-install.com] Tons of applications that you can run from your portable media and not have to worry about losing your settings betweeb different machines.

Apparently Windows Only

[mardoen]

It seems they only tested the hardware on Windows; there is no info on Linux or OS X support/testing. I'm not sure if all drives mentioned can even be used on other OSes, or if there still are driver issues. This is especially bothersome as they seem to install any software provided by the respective manufacturers before benchmarking the drives; but they don't mention if this includes installing custom drivers, or if the software in each case consists simply of data management tools.

Re:Beware Large Externals

[tigris]

Or just optimize the drive for quick removal [microsoft.com]. This disables write caching.

Re:Ask Slashdot: Redundant external storage

[obarthelemy]

Moving data around and backing it up are two different things. Oh, and so is 'high availability" which is what RAID does. RAID is NOT a backup solution, it just allows you to keep working when 1 disk, and one disk only, and nothing else, fails. If your house / PSU / controller burns, if you get burglarized... you STILL loose everything. RAID IS NOT BACKUP.

Plus, in my experience, RAID doesn't work very well, because data gets corrupted, the controller fails, your PSU fries and all the disks go... Don't trust raid.

So:

- for backups, have en extra USB or FW disk 3"1/2, that you connect from time to time to do backups of everything (hopefully several if you have enough room on it, that depends on which files you work on, count $150 for 200gigs+enclosure).
Also burn a weekly DVD with your most important files (mail, photos, work documents, anything you CANNOT replace, NOT your porn+MP3 stash), and spread them around offsite (family, friends...). Maybe your ISP gives you some space for personal pages, which you can use for a second backup instead.

- for mobility, use email, FTP, USB sticks, a 2"1/2 external PSU-less HD, whichever suit your needs / capacity requirements.

There are quite a few solutions for quickly synching 2 drives, I use xxcopy (www.xxcopy.com) because I'm old school, MS has a new Synctool that I haven't tested, there are a lot more, those are free. Linux has a nifty rsynch command, but I don't know Linux.

And then you need the discipline to actually DO those backups ;-)

Re:Beware Large Externals

[siliconjunkie]

That only works for FAT formatted drives, not NTFS.