Review The IoSafe Solo USB drive is a robust storage device that promises to protect precious data in the event of a fire or flood. It uses patented technology to surround the 3.5in Sata hard disk with both waterproof and fireproof barriers, as well as an innovative cooling mechanism.
IoSafe’s Solo: disc burning and soak tests take on a new meaning
At 15lbs, the IoSafe drive feels reassuringly heavy – portable, it most definitely is not. The case measures 11 x 7 x 5.1 inches and of a sturdy “alloy steel” construction. Being terminally curious, opening it up we found it contained two large slabs of a solid fire-resistant material resembling plaster of Paris. Cooling channels are moulded into the slabs, leading to a large hole in the centre, in which sits IoSafe’s choice of drive, a 500GB Hitachi Deskstar, enclosed in a plastic jacket.
The drive cables are sealed at the neck of the bag with a silicon-based cement. On the back of the unit is the power switch and sockets for the external PSU and a solitary USB 2.0 interface – pity there’s no FireWire or eSata option though. Read the rest of this entry »
Group Test Anyone else remember how the death of the floppy disk was supposed to mean the end of the ‘sneakernet’ – files exchanged physically on a handy, portable storage format?
It never happened. Instead, floppies were briefly replaced by higher-capacity media like Iomega’s Zip disk and then, when USB really took off, Flash drives. Nowadays, Flash drives are so ubiquitous you can pick low-capacity ones up for nowt at trade fairs.
Flash for Freedom: L-R Corsair Voyager 128, Patriot Xporter XT, Sony Click Excellence, Lexar Lightning and Kingston DataTraveler
The freebies might do for some folk, but plenty of us prefer something rather faster than oh-so-slow giveaways. USB 2.0 helped a lot, but there’s still room for improvement, and drive makers are pushing ever faster drives. USB 3.0 will change the game, but it’ll be a while before compatible Flash drives arrive – let alone low-cost ones.
We asked the main Flash key makers to lend us their fastest drives. We’ve focused on speed, but we’ve factored in portability, solidity and price when we came to choose our Recommended and Editors’ Choice products.
The drive sequential and random read and write speeds were tested using CrystalDiskMark 2.2 running on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 machine. The drives were set not to use Windows’ disk cacheing. Read the rest of this entry »
Review LaCie was among the first hard disk manufacturers to produce high capacity, multimedia storage devices designed for media playback. These hard drives, equipped with A/V interfacing, enabled you to take your digital music and video files away from your computer and play them on a decent hi-fi and a full-size TV screen. With its new LaCinema Black range, LaCie has gone a step further and produced a full-scale set-top box.
Screen idol? LaCie’s LaCinema Black MAX
There are three models in the Black range, starting at around £280 for the Black PLAY, which is essentially a straightforward media server. However, we decided to test the top-of-the-range Black MAX, which costs a hefty £420 with 500GB hard disk or £505 with 1TB. That’s expensive, but the Black MAX does make an ambitious attempt to combine a network media server and a set-top DVR in a single unit.
The glossy black box measures around 9in wide and deep and a little under 2in high. It’s larger than an ordinary hard disk, but still only about half the size of our Sky+ box. A quick look around the back reveals a good selection of input and output options, including a digital TV tuner. However, at this price you might have expected two separate tuners, so that you could record one programme while watching another. Read the rest of this entry »
Review While most low-price NAS products tend to target domestic use separately from serious small office installations, the Buffalo Linkstation Quad attempts to straddle both these markets, albeit, with a price hike. Yet it offers home users a faster, beefier file store and media server, together with RAID redundancy, Internet-wide data access and high-capacity backup to satisfy office environments.
Buffalo’s Linkstation Quad: appears imposing, but is small and unobtrusive
The device is a gigabit Ethernet NAS server – supporting 10, 100 and 1000BaseTX network connections ¬– and contains a stack of four SATA hard disk drives, all encased in a compact and tough black box sized 150x150x230mm. A quieter-than-expected fan keeps the drives cool.
The Linkstation Quad has two USB 2.0 ports: one at the front and the other at the rear. You can attach a high-capacity USB external drive to either and back up your Linkstation Quad data to it. Alternatively, you can attach any external storage device, such as a portable disk drive, a USB flash memory or a digital Camera, and back up all its media files to the Linkstation Quad in one step by pressing the ‘Function’ button on the front. You can even attach a standard USB printer – although not a multifunctional printer – and share it between Windows clients, using the Linkstation Quad to manage the network print queue. Read the rest of this entry »
Review It may make its money shelling shedloads of its security centric USB Flash drives to organisations like the NHS, but Sweden’s BlockMaster believes the rest of us likewise need memory sticks with a high level of data protection built in.
Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether you really want to keep confidential personal information on a gadget that’s so easy to misplace, it’s certainly the case that if you do lose a USB key, you don’t want whoever finds it to have a nose through your files.
BlockMaster’s SafeStick: small, metal clad and with integrated encryption
Enter BlockMaster’s SafeStick, a compact black metal USB Flash drive with on-board hardware encryption which won’t mount its storage space until you’ve correctly entered the password.
Insert it for the first time, and up pops a read-only partition containing the password entry program. Our review unit had had a password pre-set, but it proved easy enough to change it to something with more than eight characters and with at least one captial letter and one number. Read the rest of this entry »
