Swordie Bloggie

Every year we collects piles of boxes… these boxes are packaging box for all the things we bought this year…. they are packaging box for electronic stuffs. And these boxes are not the normal box… they are thick and strong used as shipping boxes… strong enough to be thrown into the airplane cargo belly…

So, from time to time, our office will reserve some days before we go back home to arrange all the boxes piled in our training room cum store room cum multipurpose room 😛

Usually some of us will take back some of the boxes which can be used at home… For the rest of the boxes, we throw it to a re-cycling center… 😀

Throughout the years I have used all kind of pen drives… many type of brand, small and big storage size and all kind of design.

Pen drive has many names… sometimes people call it usb drive… sometimes they called it thumb drive… or pen drive… or flash drive.. and so on… but it all referring to the same device… a portable storage… with huge storage size…

If I remember correctly, the first thumb drive I used was a 256 KB by Apacer… I think it was somewhere in 2003.

Then the storage size of these thumb drives grows… and it keep growing… until donno what size… And every time during any IT events, Promotional usb drive will always be the hottest item especially during IT Expo or sales… and its price can drop up to 50% or more of the retail price.

The biggest storage size of thumb drive I ever seen is a 128GB!!! And it cost somewhere around RM1,500.00 or USD$470.00 😮

Then, from the manufacturer’s website, the biggest storage size I can find is 256GB!!!… man… soon, we don’t have to carry those ‘gigantic’ 2.5” potable hard disk any more…

Kingston DataTraveler 300 with 256GB storage

Kingston DataTraveler DT200 with 128GB storage

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…