Seagate recently launched two portable drives with very different personalities. Why? One size no longer fits all. But which drive is right for you?
Seagate FreeAgent Go - a great personal drive. It’s the thinnest portable drive in the world, with up to 500 GB and a desktop dock.
I use the FreeAgent Go for my personal data. I can drop the Go into a dock at work and easily use the files on my work PC. I don’t have to mix my personal and work content, but have access to both.
Maxtor BlackArmor – a great business drive. It’s the safest drive in the world, with government-grade 128-bit AES encryption and up to 320 GB.
I use the BlackArmor for backing up my work files. I keep it at home as a simple disaster recovery scheme. There is absolutely no risk of anyone accessing the data without the password, even if it were to fall out of my bag at a hacker’s convention.
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.
490 gigabytes today, but just wait till my old TV dies…
I added up all the digital content (and storage) in my living room: 373 gigabytes. I also calculated the digital equivalent of all of my analog movies, music and photos: an additional 96 GB, for a total of 490 GB.
One thing became very clear: DVDs and home videos dominate the stash. We’re on a pretty strict Netflix regimen, so we only own 22 DVDs. Still they accounted for 40% of all of our digital content.
My terabyte future
When my TV finally kicks the bucket, watch out! I’ve got big dreams for Entertainment System 2.0, including terabytes of movies at the ready. The challenge will be to make sense of all the technology options to arrive at a system that works and lasts.
Seagate’s new FreeAgent consumer drives have a rockin’ new look and totally revamped innards.
I got my hands on the anorexic 250GB FreeAgent Go, said to be the world’s thinnest. Just how thin is it?
The Go is very easy to use – a big improvement over the original. It took me 3 1/2 minutes to install, and 30 minutes to auto sync it with my My Documents folder (16 gigabytes’ worth).
Other “firsts” for the FreeAgent line:
First dockable consumer drive
First 500 gigabyte portable drive
First 1.5 terabyte desktop drive
First Mac versions of FreeAgent
First FreeAgents with color choices (4)
The dock is the biggest deal, in my opinion. With AutoSync and Auto Backup, I can drop it in the dock at work and at home to keep my data current. This solves a nagging problem for me for my personal content.
The new FreeAgents are available starting today. Let’s hear your experiences with these drives.
I added up all the data storage in my home office, just for kicks: 652 gigabytes. Two thirds is disk-based, most of the other third is optical.
Pretty pedestrian quantities - I mostly work out of a Seagate office, so our home office is literally that.
I’m satisfied for now with my manual disaster recovery system – although I don’t rotate my offsite backups nearly often enough. As I download more video, I’m considering a move to online backup to complement my backup drive.
How much storage is in your home office? I’m sure you can top mine.
Removable disk drives create unique value and profitable business
Jon Johnson of CRU-Dataport described some of the new, high-growth applications for removable storage. We’re not talking about thumb drives. He sees removable storage re-inventing surveillance, education, and professional services applications in less-than-obvious ways.
Sound familiar? Nortech and Cor Digital both called out these markets as fertile ground for their businesses.
Consider enhancing your solution with technology that makes things easier and more productive for your customer – and sets you apart from your competitors.
High-end video distribution and a Paramount partnership
Scott Bahneman, CEO of MusicGiants and the new VideoGiants, filled me in on his business model and some solution examples. VideoGiants will follow the MusicGiants model of providing high-end content, in this case HD movies.
Paramount has signed on to provide movies. Scott and I talked to several solution partners already on board, including Envive, Olive and Logitech.
Another great example of how storage demands are accelerating because consumers are choosing higher quality experiences. Disk drives for distributing content? Go figure.
Going beyond the obvious drives growth and profits
I had a chance to talk with Nortech President David Bollig and Marketing VP Todd Swank at their Minnesota headquarters. Nortech is a fast-growing, national custom system builder that’s succeeding with a focus on vertical markets – education, high performance computing, mobility and others.
Highlights:
“Green” solutions for education markets, as much for school infrastructure as lower electric bills
The 80 Plus Initiative
Portable supercomputers – going beyond conventional solutions to create a profitable niche
400 TB servers in Milwaukee for the LIGO project
The huge mobile opportunity beyond notebooks - supercomputers, digital signage and embedded PCs
Dom Daninger gave me a tour of Nortech’s mobile cluster, a supercomputer that can go almost anywhere. It’s opening up new applications for high performance computing.
A peek into APEX IT’s data room with Jean Charles Campagnon. How APEX selects their storage, Dell support, what’s in a name? In servers, today’s Ferrari is tomorrow’s Yugo!
APEX IT is a consulting a US nationwide firm focused on Oracle implementation.
