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I bought a Netgear Stora MS2110 NAS (Network Attached Storage) device a few months ago for the dual purpose of using it as a cheap easy backup unit with built-in mirror RAID and a home media server to store my digital photos, videos and music so they could be streamed to other networked devices in my home.

I chose to buy the Netgear Stora because of its:

• NAS (Network Attached Storage) features like being accessible through my home network via an ethernet cable, automatic sleep mode after a period of inactivity and Gigabit ethernet transfer speeds at a great value price of $230+ retail
• Sleek black look – it doesn’t look like a computer device and completely fits in sitting next to my TV and TiVo in my home theatre unit
• Low noise – since it’s passively cooled with a big grill at the top of the box it doesn’t need a loud fan
• Builtin USB port – which makes it easy to share a USB drive or printer (I haven’t used this feature yet)
• Ability to make it easy to access my photos, videos and music from my TV and Digital/Streaming radio
• Included 1TB (1000GB) hard drive
• Mirror RAID feature which makes it easy to slide in another 1TB drive which automatically mirrors (backs up) the 1st drive without you having to do manual backups
• Upgradability. So in the future I could replace both 1TB hard drives with two 2TB drives

Some shortcomings

• At the moment the only choice if you put in 2 drives is automatic backup. A future firmware upgrade should enable JBOD (just a bunch of drives) feature so if you put 2 drives into the Stora instead of mirroring them it accesses the drives as one big combined drive
• The setup process requires a serial number for the software and the number is hidden underneath the Stora where you’d least expect it. It should be on top or on the side.
• I wish it had 2 hard disks already in it to make it simpler for mums and dads as a ready to to use backup solution without having to buy another drive and install it.
• I thought I had to turn the Stora off through it’s software interface but it turns out pressing the power button for 5 seconds turns it off. This should have been clearer.
• The browser based Flash interface for controlling the Stora’s admin features is slow and annoying, because you have to access it by logging into a website you can only use it through a PC/laptop with internet access

You can see speed tests comparing the Netgear Stora MS2110 to other NAS devices in PC World Australia’s review.

The Netgear Stora NAS MS2110 offers a cheap and relatively easy to use backup and home media server for a value for money price of $230+ retail

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I was recently part of a Tourism New Zealand/Canon Video/Photo crew and took along a Hitachi SimpleTough 500gb Portable Storage drive to review and backup my photos as I expected our backpacks would be treated roughly during car/plane/helicopter transfers.

I copied photos from my camera’s SDHC storage cards to the Hitachi SimpleTough Portable Storage Drive as often as possible, after viewing them on my Kogan Netbook Pro and deleting badly taken photos.

The drive performed as well as a portable USB2 hard drive can be expected to in terms of file transfer speeds (which means it was frustrating slow as I was transferring many GB of photos).

I can’t wait for the widespread adoption of faster USB 3 portable storage, as I said recently during an interview about USB 3 with Radio Australia’s Tech Stream program.

Other People’s Reviews of Hitachi SimpleTough 500gb Portable Storage Drive

There’s a saying in backup circles that there’s really only two types of hard drive. Those that have failed, and those that have yet to fail. We’ve seen it attributed to many sources, but no matter the original author, it’s still stunningly true.
…
A caterpillar-style tank tread runs the length of the base of this larger than average external drive, but it’s not just for show. It unrolls out to reveal a USB 2.0 type A plug on a sealed cable. On the plus side, this means it powers from a single USB cable. On the minus side, if something goes wrong with the USB connector, it’s goodbye drive.
- Alex Kidman – CNET Australia

The Hitachi SimpleTOUGH external hard drive’s rugged enclosure and embedded USB cable make it a great companion for road warriors. If you plan to knock your hard drive about during travel, this would be a good choice.
…
The USB 2.0 cable has been embedded directly into the hard drive so it never gets lost. It’s not quite sealed when inserted back into the drive, however, so we doubt it’s fully protected against contact with liquid.
- James Hutchinson – PC World Australia

The journalist Alex Kidman at CNET Australia commented in his review of the Hitachi SimpleTough Portable Storage Drive that: “On the minus side, if something goes wrong with the USB connector, it’s goodbye drive” and looking at comments on Amazon.com by people who bought the drive it seems this failure is very common eg:

I picked up one of these a couple of weeks ago. The concept of a good ruggedized portable USB hard drive for the consumer market is LONG overdue. The 500GB SimpleTough worked fine the first few times I used it, plugging the fold out USB ribbon cable into a laptop or desktop…everything seemed ok and it worked like a champ…and was faster than any other external USB drive of its size that I’ve ever used.

Now all of a sudden I start getting “Device Not Recognized”, no matter what laptop or desktop, USB port, or even USB hub (powered) that I plugged it into, and regardless of OS (using XP or Vista). After several iterations of patiently unplugging it, letting it spin down for a minute, then plugging it back in…still not recognized.

So during my last attempt I was going to give up, box it back up and return it…I started to reach to unplug the drive and lifted it up off of my desk a little bit…and suddenly…it WORKED and my system recognized it. So I tried the theory, I unplugged it again, let it sit, plugged it back in while it was sitting flat…didn’t work…then as soon as I elevated it to about a 45 degree angle off my desk it was recognized and worked again.

Diagnosis…bad USB ribbon cable, and bad workmanship. I have treated this drive with kid gloves and it never got any kind of abuse, period. The drive may be ruggedized, but clearly the ribbon cable is a serious Achilles heel.
- Ryan Webb “webbr1″

After less than 3 weeks it stopped working. It may be rugged as per the case construction, but the cable is flimsy and the connection intermittent. I now cannot access my data as the driver is not recognized (and have not been able to find a new one to download). Customer service is a nightmare…. I have called 5 times, waiting up to 25 minutes; no one answers. Same applies to email requests for service. So I would not recommend the product nor the customer service. Pretty horrible.
- E. Hannes “Kika5″

DO not buy this drive; It is an absolute garbage.

It was a good idea to include the USB cable.
It was a cute idea to have a notch on the device where the cable can be stored for convenience.
Not such a great idea to have one end permanently molded to the device.
It was a terrible idea to have a ribbon cable with zero flexibility on one axis.
It is a horrendous design to have such a short cable — about 4 inches, that the drive will hang in mid-air if you connect to the front USB port on a desk top.

I am not sure how “rugged” the drive mechanism is, but the cable is as finicky and flimsy it can be.

My experience is identical to the other posters who got “unrecognized device” message after a while. It does it all the time and I was lucky to get my data out of the device.

I am just waiting for the next successful connection to format it so that I can return it.

All in all, the design is so bad to make the device unusable after about a month, if that long.
- kb-hunter “Good hunting”

Review Verdict

At first the Hitachi SimpleTough Portable Storage Drive “tank tread” style built-in USB2 cable seemed like a good innovation which meant purchasers didn’t have to carry a separate loose USB cable that could get lost easily.

However the majority of reviews by purchasers of the drive on Amazon.com are very angry as the cable is unreliable and often causes access to the drive to fail.

So my recommendation is do not buy any products from the Hitachi SimpleTough Portable Storage Drive series as long as they continue to have this USB2 cable design flaw.

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I was meeting with a friend recently and transferring some files onto their laptop when I realised I’ve been using USB Drives to do that for the last year. In fact I haven’t needed to burn any files to DVD ever since I got several USB Drives with 8Gb or more capacity.

Basically cheap 8GB and larger USB Drives (costing $15+ at time of writing) have made data transfers via burnt 4.7GB DVD’s obsolete.

Many people own laptops or netbooks these days so if you need to give them some files at a meeting it’s much faster and easier to copy the files onto a fast USB drive than it was in the old days of finding a blank DVD and waiting while your computer burnt the files to it.

On the more rare occasions when larger files need to be transferred eg: many videos or photographs, a portable USB hard drive is the best solution, far easier than burning dozens of DVD’s.

Do you Agree or Disagree? Have cheap 8GB and bigger USB Drives made data transfers using burnt DVD’s obsolete?

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You may think you don’t need a portable hard drive but I urge you to reconsider, many people keep only 1 copy of precious information like family photos on their laptop which can get lost or stolen or their home computer where the hard drive will eventually fail after a few years. This review compares the Iomega Ego and Seagate FreeAgent Go 320 GB drives (298gb usable space).

“lost precious photos” photo credit: Kalena Jordan

When it comes to backing up your precious data, it’s worthwhile investing a decent amount of time and money to make sure you buy the right product for your storage needs. However with so many portable media solutions on the market this can be hard.

Style, Drop Protection & Warranties

Iomega’s 320gb eGo is super sleek and curvy. It was clearly designed with style in mind for people who want their computer accessories to match their iPhone and Laptop/Macbook.

With this in mind it has a shiny tough aluminum case and comes in three metallic colours: silver, midnight blue and ruby red. Iomega offers a 3-year limited warranty (registration required to extend from 1 year).

According to Iomega, the eGo is shock proof from 1.3-2.1 metres depending on the model you choose. This is handy if you accidentally knock it off your desk or if you’ll store it in a briefcase or backpack during work trips or a travelling around on a backpacker holiday.

Although it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside knowing that your data should be safe even if your eGo gets battered and bruised, it’s probably better to limit the amount of stress you put on the eGo and avoid dropping it to just to see if it still works afterwards because magnetic platter hard drives were never designed to survive excessive or frequent shocks during use, storage or transit and will always be susceptible to some form of data loss or corruption if they’re thrown about.

Video Overview of Iomega eGo

Like most other portable hard drives in the market, the Seagate 320gb FreeAgent Go doesn’t come with any shock protection. If you’re going to use it in one place this isn’t a big problem but it is called a “portable” hard drive and therefore you’d expect it will get a few bumps and knocks during its lifespan.

What the FreeAgent Go lacks in shock protection, it makes up in size. It has a noticably smaller footprint than the eGo in terms of overall size and weight, and is equally sleek and thinner than its flashy counterpart. The FreeAgent Go is available in ten different colours and is backed up with a 5 year limited warranty, two more years than the eGo.

Video overview of Seagate Freeagent Go

4 tiny rubber feet help to prevent the eGo skidding off your desk at the slightest touch as well as allowing some airflow underneath the drive during data transfers. The FreeAgent Go doesn’t need rubber feet because its case feels rubberized which gives the unit grip on most surfaces.

Both portable hard drives connect to your Laptop/PC via a USB cable for data transfers and power. The 57.5cm Iomega cable is long enough to plug into USB slots on the bottom of a tower case and extend so the drive can sit on top of the tower case whereas the 45cm Seagate cord is too short to do this.

The Iomega eGo is sold in a standard cardboard box with an easy to access plastic case inside. In comparison the Seagate FreeAgent Go is sold in a horrible multi-layer hard plastic case which you could easily cut yourself with quite badly. If you do buy it be very careful with your fingers while pulling the drive out of its case after using big scissors to hack through the plastic.

Iomega has a little blue LED light next to the USB port which flashes quite brightly and obviously when the drive is being used for data transfers. The Seagate has a much cooler dotted pattern of holes on its case that light up and pulse slowly during data transfers but this pulsing can be hard to spot if the drive is under bright lights.

Portable Hard Drive Speed Test

Both portable hard drives were put through their paces in a two pronged speed test transferring a large amount of data from a desktop computer (Windows XP SP3) hard drive to the portable hard drives. Results reveal that the eGo delivered faster performance than the Free Agent Go in both tests by a small margin.

Test 1 (34.1 gigabytes – 8,445 photos & small .mov video files)

Test 2 (16.8 gigabytes – 100 video files)

Verdict & Price Comparison

A quick price comparison of Australian online shops revealed that the the Seagate Free Agent Go sells for $98 which is a little cheaper than the eGo for $115.

The Seagate FreeAgent Go has the advantages of being slightly smaller, lighter and cheaper than the Iomega eGo but in the end I recommend buying the Iomega eGo for peace of mind because of it’s drop protection and aluminium case.

Other People’s Reviews of Iomega Ego and Seagate FreeAgent Go

Plenty of companies have their own lines of portable external hard drives for carrying data on the go, but few have the polish of Iomega’s eGo drives. We’ve already reviewed several eGos including the eGo Helium, eGo Camo, and eGo Brown Leather and they all impressed us with a healthy amount of extra features and added drop protection.

We haven’t heard from Iomega in awhile, so we’re happy to welcome a new addition to the eGo family; in fact, we think this new 320GB eGo Portable reinvigorates the series with a sleek new design, a triple-layer software bundle, and even faster transfer speeds than previous models; we have no hesitations about giving the Iomega eGo Portable a CNET buying recommendation.
- CNET USA – Iomega eGo Portable Hard Drive w/ Protection Suite (320GB, silver)

The latest generation of Seagate’s FreeAgent Go drives comes in a slender casing (12.5×80x130mm) and is certainly light enough for easy transport at only 160 grams.

From a pure data shifting viewpoint, we averaged a read speed of 23.8MBps with the FreeAgent Go and an average write speed of 25MBps, which is solid without being stunning for a drive with these characteristics over USB. Bear in mind that your choice of files – whether you’re shifting single large files or folders of many files (and especially your operating system of choice), Vista for whatever reason is still horrible for file transfers, while XP and OS X tend to perform equally well — can affect your results
- CNET Australia – Seagate FreeAgent Go Portable Drive 320GB

This article has been written by Pranav Bhatt. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Economics and Business at Sydney University. He has an interest in world travel, cricket, politics, technology and the media.

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You may think that all USB Flash Thumb Drives are the same and therefore buy the cheapest one from Ebay or a stall at your local computer market – YOU ARE MISTAKEN and this article will tell you why

As you can see in the photo above: USB Flash Thumb Drives vary in many ways: Price, Storage Size, Physical size and shape, Material they’re made from, Whether they can be attached to a lanyard, Retractable USB connector that doesn’t need a cap, With cap for the USB connector, with/without Activity light etc

NOTE: prices mentioned in this article were accurate as of October $2009. The Sandisk, Lexar and Dell products mentioned were on media loan for review. All other products mentioned are owned by me

Price

When I bought a Corsair 256mb USB flash drive in mid-2006 it cost $36 ($144/GB)

Today I could buy a Corsair 16GB Flash Voyager for $36 ($2.25/GB). My point is that the price for USB thumb drives constantly falls and the capacity constantly rises.

If you need to buy one, buy it now at the capacity level you need now. Chances are by the time you need a larger drive it’ll cost next to nothing anyway

Storage Size

The largest size commonly sold in Australian stores at the moment is 32GB starting at around $70. 64GB, 128Gb are also available at a much smaller number of stores but are understandably much more expensive eg: $550 for a 128 GB drive!

I don’t think 64GB, 128GB, 256GB+ capacity USB 2.0 flash drives are going to be useful because they are limited by USB 2.0’s transfer speeds.

Speed

A 32GB Transcend Jetflash V60 drive filled with JPEG photo files connected to a Dell Studio 17 laptop took 22min 43.2 seconds to copy the photos onto the laptops hard disk. Because the write speed is half as fast it would take roughly 47minutes to fill the drive with photos copied from the laptop.

I estimate that even if a 256GB USB drive can be as fast as the Transcend drive I tested it would take 352 minutes (5 hours 52minutes) to fill it with files and 176minutes (2 hours 56minutes) to copy the files back to a hard disk drive.

This shows the limitation of the USB 2.0 connection used by USB flash drives. 32GB+ capacity USB flash drives won’t be useful in real life until the widespread implementation of USB 3.0 which is supposed to be 10 times faster than USB 2.0 and can upload and download simultaneously (USB 2.0 can only do one or the other).

Physical Size and Shape & Material

If you have a look at the top of this article you’ll see that there’s a big range in how large drives are, the smallest drive is both thinner and much shorter than the largest.

Most USB thumb drives are made from plastic so they are cheap, light and usually small. Unfortunately this means they are much more likely to break if dropped, stepped or sat on.

Some USB flash drives have an all metal case like the Lexar Jumpdrive or a mostly metal case like the Sandisk Cruzer Contour. They’re much more likely to survive being scratched by car keys, dropped, sat on etc but are heavier and fatter than the plastic drives so they make it hard to plug other devices into adjacent USB slots.

Reliability

Generally speaking USB Flash Thumb Drives have a limited number of write/delete cycles. The more heavily you use them to transfer many files/often the faster they will fail. For 99% of people this isn’t relevant because a drive will likely be discarded and replaced long before it wears out.

However I strongly advise against using cheap no name USB flash drives sold on Ebay and computer markets or given away at a conference. These are cheap/free for a reason – it’s because they’re made from low quality parts and are much more likely to fail.

I do some casual work at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the flash drives I’ve seen students using which fail and cause them to lose whole assignments are almost always cheap no-name drives.

Activity Light, Caps, Lanyards and Inbuilt U3 software

I think that flash USB drives with flashing activity lights are useful because they show when the drive is being written to. You should never pull a USB drive out of a computer when it’s light is flashing because you might lose data

USB Drives with a detachable cap are useless, sooner or later you will lose the cap.

Drives with swivel cap protection for the USB connection can be found every now and then (see 2nd drive from the left in photo at top of article). The benefit with these is they can be much smaller.

USB Drives with retractable USB connections are becoming more popular because they don’t need a cap. However this brings up other issues because the retractable slider switches are not always designed well and can get stuck.

If you like to hang your USB drive around your neck make sure it has a Lanyard loop and it’s big enough to attach your preferred lanyard.

U3 software is builtin to some USB drives and allows some applications to be run directly from the USB drive without leaving any trace of your programs or data on the computer. I personally dislike U3 software as it causes more harm than good:

All USB Flash Drives that support the new U3 standard have a locked, undeletable, 2nd drive emulating a CD-ROM drive which is setup to auto-install the U3 software on any Microsoft Windows PC you plug the Flash Drive into. If you don’t disable autorun, or hold down the shift key anytime you plug one of these drives into someone’s Windows PC the U3 software pops up and annoys you .. every .. single .. time

I have also seen U3 flash drives not work properly on Linux, Apple Mac OX, Windows 98 etc as well as not working at photo printing kiosks. So U3 sucks and you should avoid buying any USB drive with it builtin. If you’re unfortunate enough to own a USB drive with U3 builtin try these U3 uninstall instructions

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Camera cards are continuing to grow in size at an astounding rate. Today I can buy a 16GB SDHC card for the same price that I bought my first ever 1GB SD card.

I asked Sandisk & Lexar to send me fast SDHC camera card readers to see how much time they would take to empty 8 and 16GB SDHC cards onto a laptop computer hard disk compared to the laptops inbuilt card reader

My suspicion was correct. The increase in card size from 1GB/2GB+ to 8GB/16GB and even larger means there was a big difference in time taken between an inbuilt reader and a specialist fast camera card reader to download photos from a full camera card to a computer

Note: The test laptop was running Windows 7 RC 7100 and speed tests were taken twice with results averaged. The specific card readers, SDHC cards and laptop used for tests were:

• Lexar Professional UDMA Dual-Slot USB Reader – UDMA CompactFlash, standard CF, SDHC and SD cards
• SanDisk ImageMate All-In-One USB 2.0 Reader/Writer – supports, SD, SDHC, miniSD, miniSDHC, microSD, microSDHC, MultiMediaCard, MMCplus, MMCmobile, RS-MMC, RS-MMC DV, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick PRO Duo, Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo, xD, xD Type M, xD Type M+, xD Type H and CompactFlash cards.
• Lexar Professional 133x 8GB SDHC card (Class 6, 20mb/sec)
• Sandisk 16GB Ultra II SDHC Card (Class 4, 15mb/sec)
• Lenovo Thinkpad X200 ultraportable notebook computer

Sandisk & Lexar Camera Card Reader Speed Tests

The specialist card readers were roughly 9-10% faster (50.3 seconds time saved) at transferring from this Lexar Professional 133x 8GB SDHC card full of 8 megapixel photos to the laptop hard disk compared to the laptops built-in SDHC reader.

The specialist card readers were roughly 20% faster (4 minutes 36 seconds time saved) at transferring from this Sandisk 16GB Ultra II SDHC Card (Class 4 15mb/sec) full of 8 megapixel photos to the laptop hard disk compared to the laptops built-in SDHC reader.

Verdict

Specialist camera card readers can cut transfer times by appx 10-20% (4 minutes 36 seconds time saved for a 16Gb SDHC card).

The Lexar reader was a tiny bit faster than the Sandisk reader but speed test results from both brands were almost the same (within the margin of error).

The Lexar card reader is what I would use on photography day trips because it’s more robust and folds closed to protect the card slots however the Sandisk reader would be more appropriate for an office environment as it can read many more varied camera card formats – why not buy both

At time of writing the SanDisk ImageMate All-In-One USB 2.0 Reader/Writer was available for purchase online for $40+postage

At time of writing the Lexar Professional UDMA Dual-Slot USB Reader was available for purchase online for $55+postage

Other People’s Reviews

We’ve been using Lexar’s Professional UDMA dual slot memory card reader for a few months and have been very impressed by its compact size, sensible design and operational efficiency. With a 72 x 65mm footprint and a weight of just under 67 grams, it’s small enough to pack into a laptop bag and takes up very little desk space
- Photoreview Australia

The SanDisk ImageMate reader is a stylish addition to any photographer’s arsenal, and with a wide range of support for most card types, it’s good value too. It’s perhaps more suited to sitting on a desk rather than being lugged around with a stack of lenses and peripherals thanks to its somewhat delicate stand system.
- CNET Australia

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