Today LaCie announced the Mirror portable hard drive that is encased in mirrored Corning Gorilla Glass.  The Mirror features a 1TB hard drive and comes with an ebony wood base to be a functional mirror on your desk.

The Mirror portable hard drive has a capacity of 1TB but is not just about function, it is also about form.  The drive is encased in mirrored Corning Gorilla Glass giving the drive a striking look, it especially looks great if you take a look at it.  This drive comes with an ebony wood stand for the drive to sit in while on a desk, transforming it into a functional desk piece.  The ebony wood was sourced from Makassar and should really make a wonderful stand for the drive.  Users can rest assured that their drive will stay in great shape even with the mirror finish.  Thanks to the Corning Gorilla Glass used in the case the finish will stand up to even the roughest handling of the drive.  The drive is able to be used with all OSes, so you should not need to worry if this will work for your computer.  Even though LaCie did not disclose the connectivity options it is easy to see from the picture.  The power and data will be handled through a micro USB 3.0 cable which means you will only need to carry the drive and USB 3.0 cable to use it, there is no need for a power cord.

The LaCie Mirror portable hard drive will be available in 1TB capacity with a MSRP of $279.99 later this month from LaCie’s online store and authorized LaCie resellers.  The drive will carry a three-year limited warranty that users can extend or upgrade.  The warranty provides worldwide repair and/or replacement, so this drive is ready for your adventures around the world.

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Today LaCie announced the Rugged RAID mobile drive featuring user selectable RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration.  The new drive featuring Seagate hard drives will be available later this quarter.

The Rugged RAID mobile drive is a drive featuring two hard drives that can be put in RAID 0 for speed or RAID 1 for data redundancy.  RAID 0 uses two drives to store one piece of data, allowing it to read and write faster by storing half of it on both drives to form the single piece of data.  RAID 0 is much faster than a single hard drive (by about 2x) while being less secure for data since if one drive goes then the data is gone.  On the other hand RAID 1 stores the same data on two hard drives so that if one of them were to ever fail you will still have the data on the other.  This is a much more secure way to store sensitive data that is important for a user to protect.

The Rugged is exactly what it is called, rugged and that is thanks to its design.  The drive is resistant to shock, with it being able to withstand drops of up to 1.5m (about 5 feet) and 1 ton of pressure.  It is also resistant to water with its cap in place, and when it is the drive is IP 54 rated.  That IP 54 rating means that the drive is dust tight and will withstand splashes of water on the drive.  The drive also features USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt connectivity, which means that users will be able to use RAID 0 to its fullest.  The drive in RAID 0 will be able to get up to 240MB/s sustain performance.  The drive is compatible with all operating systems and it also includes LaCie Private-Public software.  The software enables users to password protect the entire device or just certain volumes with AES-256 encryption.

The LaCie Rugged RAID will be available in 4TB capacity with a MSRP of $449.99 later this quarter from LaCie’s online store and authorized LaCie resellers.  The drive will carry a three-year limited warranty that users can extend or upgrade.  The warranty provides worldwide repair and/or replacement, so this drive is ready for your adventures around the world.

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Seagate Technology PLC (NASDAQ:STX) today announced the launch of a new ultra-slim external hard drive that holds 500GB of data while only being 7mm thick.  The steel drive will be available in mid to late January at a MSRP of $99.99, and pre-orders can be made now at Seagate.com and Amazon.com.

The portable hard drive looks like a stylized 2.5” notebook hard drive with a smooth finished steel case. The Seagate Seven’s case is made entirely of steel to give it structural integrity while allowing it to be as thin as possible, with the added bonus of looking pretty stunning as well.  The 500GB capacity is held in the drive that is an amazing 7mm thick, really showing just how far hard drive technology has come these last few years.  The industrial design of the drive is very nice and evokes a lot of memories of bare hard drives that Seagate has been producing for years, 35 years in fact.  The drive will make for a nice addition to users who want to back up their files and take the data with them in a small package.  Notebook users will appreciate that they can store more data with the added plus of the drive barely adding any weight to the notebook bag.  The drive features a low profile motor technology that includes extreme gyro handling capabilities ensuring that the drive operates safely in a variety of environmental factors.

The MSRP of the Seagate Seven is $99.99 for the 500GB drive, equating to just 20 cents per Gigabyte of Storage. The drive will be widely available in mid to late January.  The Seagate Seven though can already be pre-ordered for those who want to get their orders secured.  The preorders can be made at Seagate.com and Amazon.com.

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With so much media available today the need to either backup or store it creates the need for external storage.  Samsung’s D3 Station line is out to provide storage at a good price point while not having much extra “fluff” in the package.   It has some simple functions via software that is for both OSX and Windows like automated backups and password protected partitions.  In testing we hope to see just how fast this thing can be for a 4TB hard disk with USB 3.0.

Samsung D3 Station drive enclosure

Samsung D3 Station STSHX-D401TDB 4TB specifications

• Windows 8/7/Vista/XP SP2, Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later
• SuperSpeed USB 3.0 (Max): 5.0Gb/s
• Temperature (operating): 5° to 40°C (41° to 104°F)
• Temperature (nonoperating): –20° to 65°C (–4° to 149°F)
• AutoBackup personal backup solution
• Secure Drive for worry-free data security
• SecretZone™ can encrypt data on a virtual drive
• 7.11″ x 5.09″ x 1.85″
• Length: 180.6mm
• 3-year limited warranty

Contents
• D3 Station External Hard Drive
• USB cable
• Power adapter
• Quick Install Guide
• Software preloaded on the drive
• Electronic User Documentation (PDF)

Samsung D3 Station underside

Design

The enclosure is very simple but looks very nice for something that will be sitting on most peoples desks. The drive is in a simple external enclosure with just USB 3.0 and port ports, and an indicator light on the front. The actual 4TB hard disk at the heart of the unit is made by Seagate, a version of their ST4000DM000. The D3 Station comes with a 3 year warranty, which is a year more than the hard drive were to have if you bought it to put inside your system. The bare drive can be found at a price higher than this external solution, though demand for bare drives is most definitely the reason for that higher price.

The D3 Station’s accessories

The drive comes with a power adapter that will work in many different countries, which is likely a way to easier package one drive for sales in various locations.  This also means that it will be nice to have in case you are visiting another country and want to take the drive along with you.  The USB 3.0 cable that comes with it is a little short and makes positioning the drive a bit harder, so it would be advisable to get a longer cable.

Samsung Drive Manager Software

 Software

The D3 Station comes with a couple folders on the drive with installs for the included Samsung Drive Manager software.  The software comes with a few useful features such as automatic backup scheduler, SecretZone, disk diagnostics, and disk management.  The SecretZone is a utility that allows you to create a partition that is password protected and it has the ability to make multiple password protected partitions.  The utility allows you to select either a normal set size partition or one that is dynamic and will expand automatically if needed.

Performance

With the proliferation and adoption of USB 3.0 into devices slow transfer speeds are no longer an issue with many external drives having taken to the standard. USB 3.0 has a maximum speed of 5Gb/s as opposed to the older 2.0’s 480 Mb/s, which is a huge improvement. This means that the SATA 2 hard disk drives that you find in most every external drive will not be limited by the connection anymore since SATA 2’s max speed is 3Gb/s (which hard disks will never come close to saturating any time soon).

The D3 Station’s read and write are very fast and are on par with speeds of an internal hard drive.  This is a great solution since you can add a full speed storage solution to your computer and not have to worry about it being slower.

The drive is showing that it is getting 160MB/s read and write in ATTO as well, which means that this will make quick work of your file transfers to the drive and off of it.

Value

The drive can be found at Newegg on sale for $119.99 on sale and is normally at $139.99 . If you have only plans for just one drive for your storage needs this is by far a better value than installing a bare drive.  You will still have the speed with USB 3.0 and you will have a year more warranty on the drive.  With the drive being from Samsung you can rest assured that if you ever need to use the warranty service that the company will stand by it.

Is it worth it?

The drive is definitely worth the money you will spend, especially if you get it on sale.  The downside of the external drives over internal drives is that they will take up extra space and ports on your computer while requiring another power outlet to be used.  All in all the drive is a standard external hard drive without any extras, but at a great price and with good speeds.  I am personally very satisfied with the drive and can see myself buying another if I need one down the line after I consolidate my media onto this drive from my others.

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During the raid on Kim Dotcom’s property, the NZ Police took countless computers and hard drives from his residence and offices, many of which were fully encrypted. However, there was a lot of data on those drives that the NZ Police had no right in sharing with the FBI or any US authorities. In fact, they had already shared copies of the drives’ encrypted data to the FBI, which by now has probably cracked the encryption without Kim Dotcom’s keys. Kim’s lawyers have been wrangling with the policy negotiating whether or not he would provide the encryption keys to them and under what circumstances.

According to a recent ruling, a judge has ruled that the NZ Police cannot provide the FBI with any of the keys that Kim Dotcom may provide them with in order to access the data on the hard drives. The problem is that all of these assets were effectively seized from Kim Dotcom’s residence and offices without any real evidence of wrong-doing and they still haven’t really provided much of a case against him. Kim Dotcom is still technically under house arrest but he hasn’t really been found guilty of any official charges because the Crown Prosecution has failed on many counts trying to include evidence that would later be thrown out. Realistically, most of what the New Zealand authorities have done to Kim Dotcom has been mostly unfounded and based upon murky charges levied by US authorities, which technically have no jurisdiction over New Zealand. Furthermore, they are still trying to have him extradited to the US where they would try to get him to stand trial, but the possibility that he will be extradited is hopefully low considering all of the mistakes the New Zealand authorities have made.

The justice that ruled against the NZ authorities sharing Dotcom’s keys with the FBI and other agencies ruled this partially because they had already provided the US authorities with harddrives and copies of data that they weren’t supposed to give them to begin with. This once again shows the New Zealand authorities’ incompetence as well as the likelihood of how unfounded the US authorities’ case was when they had initiated the raid on Dotcom’s property and Megaupload.

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Many websites have been talking about the return of the cassette tape with the announcement of Sony’s new storage medium innovation. Yes, Sony has managed to innovate a new standard for magnetic tape drive storage, however these tape drives require a fairly large 5.25″ mounted LTO reader which is usually connected via SAS to a server as a backup to the hard drives on the server. Sony has improved upon the LTO-6 Ultrium standard of magnetic tape drive systems and instead has improved the storage capacity per square inch by 74x. Resulting in a final drive density of 185 TB per tape drive based upon an unheard of areal density of 148 Gb per square inch, which comes out to 18 GB of storage per square inch when converted from Gigabits to Gigabytes. This is possible because of Sony’s new magnetic and chemical composition of their tape drives and how they are able to pack so much data density into such a small space.

Essentially, Sony’s approach is far more precise and results in capturing more data into a smaller area, which allows for significantly more data density within effectively the same surface area. The images above show how Sony’s approach (and results) thanks to IBM’s testing have enabled this astonishing breakthrough. IBM was brought onto the project to evaluate and benchmark the tape drive technology’s actual density, even though Sony is the sole owner of this technology.

What does this mean for us? Absolutely nothing. This technology is almost exclusively going to get used by the enterprise in large server deployments and data backup deployments. These tape drives are designed to be a long term backup to the backups of your data. That way, if there are any critical errors on the hard drives, there are backups of those drives somewhere on tape because buying one of these tapes is still cheaper than buying a hard drive of equal capacity especially since they don’t require power to store the data and only need power when being pulled to be read by the LTO drive.

So no, cassette tapes are not making a comeback, but Sony has potentially vastly improved the value in using tape drives for backups and could have possibly made themselves the defacto standard for the future if their data density provides a good enough value to the enterprise customer. Also, remember, that Sony has recently also developed a new physical media standard in their Archival Disc which they developed with Panasonic and is currently capable of storing 300GB of data per disc and is aiming to store up to 1TB per disc.

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There is no denying that SSD capacities have been steadily increasing with each generation of NAND improvements and with newer and newer controllers. But the holy grail has always been how much capacity can you fit into a 2.5″ drive since that is the most commonly used form factor for more enterprise drives nowadays. As such, it was astonishing to hear that SanDisk was able to cram 4TB of solid state storage into a single 2.5″ drive, which supposedly isn’t the end of SanDisk’s innovation. The SanDisk Optimus MAX SAS SSDs are specifically designed to replace spinning 10k and 15k RPM 2.5″ HDDs and to do it without compromising on performance or capacity, in fact, with the new 4TB drive (if you can afford it) you can actually get far more capacity than with a traditionally 600GB 15K RPM drive. If you go down towards a 10k RPM drive, you can probably get a drive up to 1.2 TB, but even then you’re nowhere near 4TB or anywhere near the IOPS that the SSDs are capable of delivering.

The drive’s performance numbers are using SAS 6Gb/s (they have a different series of drives that are SAS 12Gb/s) sporting a Sequential Read/Write (MB/s) of up to 400/400 MB/s and random read/write IOPS of 75K/15K. This is all backed by SanDisk’s 5 year warranty which covers the drive for at least 5 years or until the drive is ‘worn’ down completely (which ever comes first). The reason why this drive is capable of such speeds and such capacities in such a form factor is because SanDisk is using their new 19nm eMLC NAND which is going to give the drive unbeatable capacity. Even more importantly with the 19nm eMLC, this drive will be capable of unparalleled writes compared to most other MLC-based enterprise drives, which will give it fairly good performance but unparalleled longevity and stability, which is ultimately the most important thing when replacing 10k and 15k RPM spinning disks.

There are talks of SanDisk introducing 8TB and 16TB models of the Optimus MAX drives down the road, but as of right now, the 4TB drive is the biggest that SanDisk is offering, but enables petabytes of SSD storage per rack rather than per row. In fact, if you went with a Supermicro SC417E series server, which is only 4U. You could cram a massive 288 TB of SSD storage per server, meaning that you could get 1 Petabyte of SSD storage in essentially half a rack, or around 2 Petabytes per rack. Keep in mind, that this isn’t even possible with spinning disks as the 2.5″ drives are only capable of capacities of up to 2TB per disk and even those are rare. There’s no denying that these 4TB drives are going to cost a pretty penny, but they consume very little power, generate very little heat and cause zero vibration which means they don’t negatively affect each other’s longevity like a lot of other spinning disks do when they’re installed in high density clusters.

I’m excited to see what Seagate’s competitors can come up with, namely Toshiba and Samsung, but as of right now they are the high capacity kings and they’re probably going to win some serious business because of it.

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Today I’m taking a look at the Seagate Backup Plus FAST 4 TB portable hard drive. However, referring to it as a hard drive is a bit misleading, as the Backup Plus FAST is actually two 2 TB 2.5” drives in a RAID 0 array. This contributes to the speeds the drives can provide, as a striped RAID 0 array improves performance to up to double of what a single drive would be capable of.

The drive comes in basic packaging, which includes a quick-start guide, an 18” USB 3.0 cable, and a USB 3.0 Y cable, which has two USB connectors: one for power and one for data. The reason it comes with two separate cables is that some USB 3.0 ports alone will not have enough power for the drive, so in those cases, the Y cable should be used.

The drive itself is 4.6×2.35” (116.9×82.5mm). It comes in a single color, black, and has a sleek metal exterior. I took some pictures with it next to and on top of my Nexus 5 to provide some reference.

The Backup Plus FAST 4 TB comes with the Seagate Dashboard software preloaded for easy registration of the product and installation of the software.

The Seagate Dashboard has been recently redone, and Seagate has certainly made some improvements to the UI and functionality of the software.

In addition to backing up computers over the network, the software also allows for backing up social media accounts as well as mobile devices. A really cool feature for the mobile backup is the ability to back up to the hard drive over WiFi, or to set up the phone to back up to a cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive, allowing the mobile device to be constantly backed up on those services. This is a huge feature since phones are often lost, stolen, or broken. It provides a really easy and simple way to keep the contents of your phone backed up. I especially like the fact that Seagate doesn’t require you to sign up for their own cloud service for backup, but allows you to utilize Dropbox or Google Drive instead, as they’re much more commonly used cloud services.

Seagate Dashboard supports Windows and Mac, and the mobile app (necessary for mobile backup) is available for Android and iOS. Getting to the performance side of things, the Seagate Backup Plus FAST 4 TB is accurately labeled “FAST”. It should be noted that all our benchmarks were done using USB 3.0 to maximize the capabilities of the drive.

CrystalDiskMark showed sequential reads of 245 MB/s, and sequential writes of 250 MB/s, most hard drives provide half those speeds, even when connected via SATA rather than USB. Clearly the RAID 0 array is speeding things up nicely.

AIDA64 showed a Maximum Linear Read at 238 MB/s, a Random Read of 179 MB/s, a Buffered Read of 310 MB/s, and an Average Read Access of 0.00 ms. To put that in perspective, a single new SSD usually gets an Average Read Access of 0.09 ms. The RAIDed Backup Plus FAST truly provides some awesome performance, especially for a portable external hard drive.

Now to the bad news: the Seagate Backup Plus FAST 4 TB has an MSRP of $270, and currently retails for the same price. Compared to Seagate’s other offerings, such as a 2 TB Backup Plus that is lighter, thinner, and currently retails for around $120, two of which could be had for $240, you may want to consider if the $30 premium for a single, thicker drive is worth is. A Seagate desktop (non-portable) 4 TB drive currently retails for $170, creating a $100 differential with the portable drive. However, it’s important to remember that the Backup Plus FAST provides things these other offerings do not. The Backup Plus FAST is much smaller and lighter, and obviously more portable than the desktop external drive, as well as significantly faster. Also, compared to the other portable drives, the performance of the FAST far exceeds them, and a $30 premium to have a single device rather than two separate ones, and one that is much faster than the other two would be seems like a small price to pay.

One has to consider if they need that level of performance or that capacity in their drive, and also if they want their external drive to be portable or not. If those are all requirements, the Seagate Backup Plus FAST 4 TB is hard to beat. Western Digital recently released its My Passport Pro 4 TB that also utilizes a RAID 0 array for similar performance, but uses a Thunderbolt connector rather than USB 3.0. Also, the Western Digital has an MSRP of $430, a far cry from $270. For those looking on the high end, we highly recommend the Seagate Backup Plus FAST 4 TB.

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