Portable Storage Carried to Excess
Table of contents
- 1. Differentiation Doesn’t Always Help
- 2. Buffalo Microstation Portable Silicon Disk, SHD-UHR64GS (64 GB)
- 3. Walton Chaintech Apogee 64 GB
- 4. LaCie Little Big Disk Quadra 1 TB
We receive lots of different storage products for review. Regardless of whether or not we like the different concepts, ideas, and solutions these products represent, we typically find that most of them make sense in some way—unless they fail utterly at performance, reliability, or providing decent bang for the buck.
This time we looked at three storage products that are a bit different from what you’ll typically find at your local retailer. Buffalo offers all-flash portable storage, Chaintech sells a flash SSD that comes with an additional USB port, and LaCie sent us a state-of-the-art RAID product based on two 2.5” drives.
LaCie: Fast and Mobile Storage
LaCie is a popular storage vendor that is known for well designed, high-performance storage solutions for enthusiasts at the high end, or for small business users. The Little Big Disk Quadra is, despite its oxymoronic name, that type of an elite drive. It consists of two 500 GB 2.5” mobile hard drives inside a stylish and solid enclosure. It offers all popular interface types, and RAID technology to maximize performance. If you really need to combine high capacity and high performance with mobility, then this could be your product.
Buffalo, Chaintech: More Flash, Just Different
The flash market, especially the flash SSD segment, is changing so quickly that it is very difficult for smaller companies to keep pace. They are constantly working to release attractive products at acceptable prices before someone else releases the next product generation—which can sometimes offer double the performance and capacity at the same price points.
Because of this issue, Buffalo and Chaintech provide products for very specific niches that are less sensitive to product cycles. Buffalo believes that there is room for 1.8” storage products that are entirely based on flash memory. We tend to disagree at capacities of up to 64 GB—where you can get USB thumb drives—but in the range of 128 GB and more, this looks like a market segment to address. Chaintech believes that flash SSDs should not be limited to the SATA interface, and designed a 2.5” flash SSD, which comes both with SATA/300 and USB 2.0 interfaces.
Let’s look at some details.
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nice information
An interesting look at alot of options. Just what are people copying from computer to computer that needs these huge flash drives? I am doing just fine with my 1 gig stick thanks!
Wolfgang Loss-Wells
It is nice to have many Virtual Machines on external storage that you can take from place to place. VMWare Fusion on my Mac at home can play the same XP VM that my VMWare workstation at work can run. Or I can take it to a friends house and run it under VMWare Player.
It's nice to have a number of virtual machines you can take with you in a small pocket device.
how funny, I just bought http://www.addonics.com/products/e [...] 5RDESU.asp (build-in raid hardware support) and 2x 500gb seagate 5400.6 disk to make my own portable device for less thann 400$ canadian, lot cheaper than the Lacie one!
I will receive everything next MOnday so I could do my own test and I will compare them :-)
how funny, I just bought http://www.addonics.com/products/e [...] 5RDESU.asp (build-in raid hardware support) and 2x 500gb seagate 5400.6 disk to make my own portable device for less thann 400$ canadian, lot cheaper than the Lacie one!I will receive everything next MOnday so I could do my own test and I will compare them :-)
forgot to say, 400$ tax and shipping included
(is there an edit comment somewhere?)
okay the article is the usual TH standard, that is to say "Phenominal". But seriously. I clicked the link cause I wanted to see more of that midget HDD in the article pic!
I just port around my 1TB hdd w/ USB interface. As well as several 8GB flash drives, a couple laptops, a digital camera with a 4GB card and two spare 2GB cards, and a 16GB iPod Touch.
I'd like to see more portable TB+ drive.
how funny, I just bought http://www.addonics.com/products/e [...] 5RDESU.asp (build-in raid hardware support) and 2x 500gb seagate 5400.6 disk to make my own portable device for less thann 400$ canadian, lot cheaper than the Lacie one!I will receive everything next MOnday so I could do my own test and I will compare them :-)
I wonder if yours will overheat like mine did? I posted a bit about the product when I had it here: http://rtmal.blogspot.com/2008/02/ [...] disks.html Look towards the end for the "02/14/2009 Update".
It took me quite a while to find an "affordable" portable raid solution that just worked like it should.
I wonder if yours will overheat like mine did? I posted a bit about the product when I had it here: http://rtmal.blogspot.com/2008/02/ [...] disks.html Look towards the end for the "02/14/2009 Update".It took me quite a while to find an "affordable" portable raid solution that just worked like it should.
thanks, I will check for heat problem and if there is any, I can return it, do you remember if you had SMART information over it?
how funny, I just bought http://www.addonics.com/products/e [...] 5RDESU.asp (build-in raid hardware support) and 2x 500gb seagate 5400.6 disk to make my own portable device for less thann 400$ canadian, lot cheaper than the Lacie one!I will receive everything next MOnday so I could do my own test and I will compare them :-)
I just got and tested the enclosure, I have big problem with my asus p5k motherboard and esata(i'm not alone and google proved it)
in anycase, the seagate 500gb 5400.6 are quiet and run cold, maximum temperature while i was formating or while i was copying about 400gb file was about 48c
in raid0, read speed over esata was about 90m and write speed about 85m
Interesting name. I wonder if Buffalo did any research before launching this product. Microstation is one of the 2 most popular CAD applications used in the US (see http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Produ [...] ct+line/).