My first blog post a year ago was about my full drive on my work PC. Since then I’ve expanded to 100 gigabytes. Nothing like my home PC, but work space requirements tend to be lower.
I’m in the midst of changing my backup method from a local desktop backup drive to a BlackArmor portable drive. It allows me to backup my work remotely. It’s got Seagate Secure technology, which means it’s hackproof – no worries about losing sensitive information.
I expect my next laptop to have a Seagate Secure encrypted drive inside as well.
Someday it will be considered stupid – and maybe illegal – to use a hard drive that’s not self-encrypting in a business PC.
Don’t agree? Read this, then just try and convince me otherwise.
The scariest part is how many people, processes and organizations had to drop the ball on data security for this to happen. Data loss these days is no longer a scandal – it’s about being human.
Storage vendors, please hurry! The safety of my personal information is in your hands!
Granted, PC encryption is just one of many changes that are needed, as crooks can and do steal data from places other than PCs. But basic hardware-encrypted data is an essential foundational security step that needs to be adopted ASAP.
The average user will be good with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250310AS, which in our opinion is the drive that provides the best cost/benefit ratio for the average user from all nine 250 GB drives we tested.
250GB 3.5″ drives are bread-and-butter products, good for a wide range of mainstream PC and extrernal storage solutions. Nice to see quality shine through even in this highly competitive arena.
Though not near as sound-bytable as 1 TB, Seagate’s announcement of the world’s first 1.5 TB drive is big news. The newest Barracuda 7200.11 adds 500 gigabytes to each drive in one fell swoop. It’s the biggest capacity jump in the history of disk drives.
Expect to see 1.5 TB and 3 TB solutions start popping up in all those high-capacity hot spots: high end destop PCs, backup drives and home entertainment systems.
Vista needs your help to make it truly valuable to your customers
Bill Gates made a case last month in Tokyo that Vista is “selling rapidly”, 140 million units and counting. He compared Vista adoption favorably with XP at this point in its launch in 2003.
A friend of mine who is head of marketing for a national solution provider told me that he’s still waiting for Microsoft to spell out for his customers good reasons to switch from XP. Vista’s a fine product, but his customers aren’t taking the time and risk to change over.
Security’s not it, because they’ve built security around their XP solutions that work just fine.
Maybe storage can help my friend and others. Vista with the right storage can do things XP can’t. Automated backup, entertainment ‘command central’, etc. With today big and cheap drives, solution providers can throw a terabyte into their desktops. Even notebooks can be high capacity now.
It’s in your hands. Translate Vista into new value for your customers, and it will deliver value for you.
Server SATA drives spice up desktop PCs without adding much cost
Want your desktop PC to stand out in a crowd? You probably wouldn’t think of using storage – at least not without adding a lot of cost.
Think again.
Good Gear Guide reviews the Seagate Barracuda ES, a 7200 RPM SATA drive with a difference. It’s a server drive, but unlike 15K RPM and 10K RPM drives, it’s priced at a small premium to mainstream desktop drives. Plus, it has the high capacity (up to a terabyte) desktops demand these days.
Seagate’s details on the Barracuda ES can be found here.
Seagate designed this drive for high capacity business applications, but as this review shows, it creates an opportunity for system builders and consumers to build a better desktop.
In China there are over 200 million internet users and the number is growing fast. Those that can afford their own PC usually go to a PC mall to get it, or to build their own.
There are 15 PC malls in Shanghai. I visited 2 sprawling malls last week and talked to Cheng Yue Fang, owner of seven “DIY” (Do It Yourself) PC shops in the Shanghai area. Her customers usually take 10-20 minutes to select component options from a printed “menu” for their build-while-you-wait computers. It takes about 30 minutes to build the PC.
She says two thirds of customers pretty much know what they want. They often come in requesting the lowest price disk drive. She recommends Seagate drives for their 5-year warranty. About half choose price, half choose the warranty.
Even in this price-sensitive market, reliability matters when it comes where people keep their content!
If you’re up to literally doing it yourself, there are scores of component shops shoulder to shoulder in these malls, ready to give you a deal. As you can imagine, the competition is fierce!
Businesses still on XP, but consmers are overwhelmingly choosing Vista
Ed Bott at ZDNet dug deep into a Dell database to come up with surprising insight on Vista adoption. While business are installing XP twice as often as Vista, consumers are adopting Vista at a 93% rate.
As I’ve posted before, I believe Vista is well on its way to widespread adoption. And Vista is the poster child for storage consumption, leading to larger, more profitable disk drives for desktop and notebook.
Consider Barracuda 7200.11 for gaming – performance AND capacity.
I’m proud of our new monster drive! Tom’s hardware rates Barracuda 11 as the fastest 1 TB drive on the market. More interesting to gamer system builders:
“With the exception of access time and I/O benchmarks, it also clearly beats Western Digital’s 10,000 RPM Raptor, and sets the new standard for desktop hard drives.”
Raptor has been the defacto gamer drive for a long time. Consider offering your customers a new twist: performance with capacity for their data-heavy gaming systems.
Here’s a comparison of the new 1 TB drives for the Mac world from Barefeats. Over 100MB/sec for sequential reads and writes! I’m happy to see such strong performance from a Seagate drive. It hasn’t always been our strength.
Take a close look at the Barracuda 11 at any capacity vs. a WD Raptor. The Raptor spins at 10K, but net system performance differences to the newest 7200 rpm drives may be in the noise at a system level, especially given the price difference.
