CES: Travelling storage
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Storage, Hardware, Mobile on
Every now and then I want to throw my laptop out of the window in sheer frustration. I’ve certainly flung USB sticks across the room from time to time, by accident. I’ve also done a Bill Gates and left my travel mug on the car roof when we drove off (although unlike the spoof video in Gates’ CES keynote speech the mug wasn’t there when we arrived). Most flash drives can survive a certain amount of damage - or at least the flash memory can. A USB stick would probably survive the fall from a car roof but I have a rather fetching 1Gb earring made from a flash stick that was sticking out of Simon’s PC when he turned his chair a little too far and snapped off the USB connector.
If you expect to treat your data roughly, Corsair has the rugged, rubber-coated Voyager and the Survivor which screws into an aircraft-grade aluminium canister. The Survivor we saw looked a touch battered; Corsair had driven a tractor over it to test it out. Voyager drives were sitting in ice, water and sand but they still worked when we fished them out.
Both now come in 32GB, and at that size you start to wonder if it’s worth carrying a portable hard drive. Except portable hard drives now have a lot more storage for the size; Seagate had a new version of the FreeAgent Go at the show that fits 250GB into something about the size of a CD case (remember those?). Verbatim’s new SmartDisk goes up to 320GB.
And if you want to take 4TB around with you, Intel has conveniently put it into a suitcase. Well, it’s actually a NAS box designed for the home but it looks like a suitcase - because that’s what you put things in and take things out of. Ideal for backup of course, but you can also put your media in it and stream it out to almost any device: on the stand Intel was streaming different video files to an iPhone, a Windows Mobile phone, an Xbox, a PC and a TV screen, all at the same time.
It wouldn’t quite fit in our cases for the trip to MacWorld, alas. As I write this we’re driving off down I-15, watching the moon set like a thin orange smile. And as I don’t yet have a 32GB SD card for my camera, the next task is to unload the photos from our driving trip through Arizona, ready to snap whatever we see next.
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