Monthly Archives: August 2008

SAN vs. NAS

Posted by on August 13, 2008 12 comments

My Summary: A NAS is just a filestore. It is just like a shared external hard drive. It is accessed as a shared drive and accessed like \\NAS-Server\folder1.

A SAN is also like that, but is accessed as a disk, and computers (servers) connecting to the SAN are allocated certain amounts of storage. They deal with the SAN as they would with a disk, in blocks. That allocation can change, so the storage is in a sense, virtualized. Computers have storage, and by expanding the SAN, you can allocate more space however you wish, to the computers accessing the SAN. So how do you access the SAN? iSCSI is one way - it just means using existing ethernet to access the SAN. It is lower performance and lower cost than alternate means. Fibre Channel is currently faster at around 4 GB/s.  Duration : 0:8:26

[youtube vdf6CvGQZrk]

ioSafe Fireproof NAS storage server and hard drives

Posted by on August 13, 2008 3 comments

ioSafe makes fireproof NAS and USB devices, and they claim these are like an 'aircraft black box'. See this short video - they set the ioSafe on fire and recover the data on the hard drives inside.

Duration : 0:1:29

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Would ubuntu 7.10 work with a maxtor 500 gb external harddrive?

Posted by on August 13, 2008 3 comments

i'm gonna make the switch to ubuntu soon and i need extra storage so i want to know if a 500 gb maxtor external harddrive would be detected and installed automatically by ubuntu because i'm nervous about taking the linux plunge and i want to make it as easy of a transition as possible by having my hardware detected automatically. the reason i want to go with the maxtor is that i need 500 gigs, it's gotta be cheap, and it's got to be reliable. this maxtor drive fits those catagories but the one i'm really worried about is whether or not it'll work with ubuntu. i figure it will since it works with macs and pcs but still i need reassurance that it'll be easy as plug and play.

Yes it will be automatic, but only read access if it's NTFS. If it's NTFS, then you need to install ntfs-3g first before you can write to it.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=217009

Verbatim Introduces 500 GB 2.5 inch External Hard Drives in India

Posted by on August 13, 2008 No comments

The press release is here. Verbatim Corp. has launched a new line of its 2.5-inch Portable SmartDisk Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) in India, which includes the first 500 GB 2.5-inch portable hard drive. There are 3 x 166 GB platters  spinning at 5400 RPM and with 8 MB cache.

Being in the US market, it is interesting to see the pace of the Indian data market and product introductions.

 

SimpleTech ReDrive – Environmentally Friendly External Hard Drive

Posted by on August 13, 2008 No comments

Environmentally friendly drives in the past have focused on powering down when idle, quietness, etc...but SimpleTech I believe has really done well with this.

The SimpleTech ReDrive External Hard Drive has a bamboo-aluminum casing and really looks amazing. Why do I like it so much? The thought never crossed my mind that computers were anything but metal and plastic. Desktop computers could also become wooden maybe?

Simpletech writes, "A thick aluminum casing is used not only for durability, but because it’s the most recycled metal on the planet. It also acts as a heat sink, cooling the drive without the use of a fan, saving additional energy and noise."

They also claim the bamboo is locally grown. This drive also comes with online backup - 2GB free, or 5$ for unlimited upload/download.

500 MB for around $160 - not too bad.

Western Digital SATA Hard Drive VelociRaptor 300 GB 10,000 RPM!

Posted by on August 13, 2008 No comments

Today's news from Western Digital is that the latest version of the VelociRaptor SATA hard drive is available. These are 10K RPM drives and have the 3 GB/s SATA interface. See here