Swordie Bloggie

People will do anything to promote their products… including exploiting children. The prodigy boy named Adi Putra was not spared.

He might be genius but greed probably made the people around him to take advantage. Last week, his house in Gombak Selangor was raided by the Health Ministry’s pharmaceutical services division. The 11 year old boy and his family were away in Sabah to conduct seminar.

In the raid, health supplements worth RM600,000 were confiscated. Among the items seized were healing remedy for joints, anti aging product, memory booster and many more. Clinical tests confirmed some of the products contained steroid and not a traditional medicine as stated on the label. The products are not certified by the ministry and believed has been in the marked for a few months.

Today, our private or personal digital data are so huge that it can reach hundreds of gigabytes. But lucky for us, today we have many types of external storage and come in many sizes… sizes in term of storage capacity and physical or footprint size.

A couple of years ago, owning a 256MB thumb or USB drive is considered luxurious. But today that size is considered ‘dinosaur’. 16GB of thumb drive is so common today… just like the 16GB Kingston Data Traveler which replaced my 8GB PenDrive SLIQ. And although the storage size is huge, the read and write access speed is better and faster than before. The price also has gone down so much that they are no longer considered luxurious item, everyone have at least one of it.

And if you need larger storage, there is always an alternative. You can use the external hard drive which can reach in terabytes of storage. My less than two years old 2.5” Western Digital My Passport external hard drive with 250GB of storage is no longer enough… used about 80% for storing digital photo alone. Storage is easily exhausted if you own a digital camera. With today’s camera with at least 8 megapixels of resolutions, you will require a lot of storage than you expect. But alternatively there are 500GB or more external hard drive which are available everywhere today.

But what I’m interested today is the small footprint external storage system with RAID and eSATA. But I’m not interested with the usual RAID 0 or 1, but RAID 5. And with eSATA, data will fly between your PC and external storage. Using USB 2.0 for huge data transfer is almost suicidal, you will swear at your PC and external storage, trust me…

eSATA should be the answer for today’s huge external data storage… well network will do too but eSATA is quite common in most motherboard today. But what disappointment me most is the lack of eSATA support on notebook. Well it is available, but only in large size notebook for now…