Recently, Western Digital has come to market with three drives aimed at increasing the performance of both 2.5- and 3.5-in. drives: the Caviar Black, the Scorpio Black and the VelociRaptor. Nothing about them speaks to "green power." Rather, the "black" lineup is aimed at enthusiasts who want performance and let their power supplies be damned if they can't handle the load.
Ah, the joy of summer storms. A recent one involving a flooded basement (a torrential downpour traveled down a chipmunk burrow that led to an otherwise enclosed basement window with a broken windowpane) and several staccato blackouts sent one of my neighbor's computers, as well as one of my own, to their eternal rest.
Solid-state disks (SSD) are probably some of the most talked-about new gadgets of late. They easily distinguish themselves from the mechanical hard drives of the Jurassic period because they have no moving parts. Like USB drives, they use nonvolatile flash memory to store data, but SSDs are wrapped in an enclosure the size of a 2.5-inch mechanical laptop drive and have a SATA interface for an easy connection to the internals of your portable.
In a world where there's too much to do -- and too little time to do it in -- we're always looking for shortcuts. So when we stumbled upon <a href="http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DA410C7F7E038D!1665.entry" target="_blank">a blog entry</a> by Kurt Shintaku over on Windows Live Spaces that promised to let us install Vista from a flash drive instead of an optical disc, there was certainly interest.
Once upon a time, you could buy a computer that, despite being technically obsolete the minute you got it home, could still be useful for years and years to come. Lately, however, technology has been gaining speed on good judgment. Do the words "accelerated amortization" sound familiar?
If the words "peace of mind" seem like an oxymoron since you automated your business it might be time to look at Iomega's REV Loader 560. It's a comprehensive automated backup system based on disk cartridge technology that takes the worry out of being lazy ... well, maybe.
What if you could pick up your home and take it along with you wherever you went so that once you got there, everything felt just as familiar as if you'd never left? All right, suppose you didn't need a trailer to do that? That's the new rage among flash drives such as SanDisk's Cruzer Micro and its U3 technology.
While not quite having reached the "dime a dozen" category, external hard drives have certainly proliferated over the past few years. The concept is simple: take a drive that normally has an x-in.-wide cable with a preferred 18-in. limit to its length and convert it to another interface type (USB or FireWire, typically) with a quarter-inch cable and enough length to get it out of the way.