This article was written by Don VanSyckel, the club president, as a part of "The President's Pen". This article appeared in the June 2007 WYSIWYG newsletter.
External USB Drives are Getting Cheap(er)
by Don VanSyckel
All I can say is "Wow!!" and "Now there's no excuse!!" I just purchased a 500 G byte external USB hard drive for $120. To that I say "Wow!!" Since it's an external USB drive, I'm going to count $20 of the price for the case and USB electronics. That leave $100 for the 500 G byte disk drive. That's a measley 20 cents a Gig. I can remember not so long ago, well it seems like it was not too long ago, that I was waiting patiently for hard drives to punge to the incredabily low price of one dollar a Gig. I thought that 250 G byte hard drive was a great deal at $250. Now prices are 1/5 of this.
I don't know where all this is going. I think I don;'t even want to guess but I can't believe the price can go to 1/5 again. That would be somewhere in the $25 to $40 range, remember the case and USB electronics are not going to drop by the scale that disk storage is dropping.
Now that you can get 500 G bytes for a price like this it means "Now there's no excuse to do backups!!" Yes we're back to backup, backup, backup!! Enough said, you've heard it all from me before, several times.
This hard drive has several other interesting features. I haven't started using it yet but if understand the write up Open Office Dot Org comes installed on the drive. This install can be run from this drive and does not get installed on the local hair drive. This could be particuarly handy if you had occasion to use other people's computers or computers at a school or library. You would have your own office software with you. By the way, I happen to use Open Office Dot Org for the word processing and spread sheets that I do. This article is being written on it.
The next feature is password security on accessing the data on the hard drive. If you used this feature and the hard drive was stolen or you lost it while traveling, your data would not accessible by anyone. The bad news is if you forget the password, you can't get the data either.
There's a push button on the front of the hard drive, which if you activate it, does a backup! I'll have to take a look at this but I tend to like the next feature better.
The last feature is a data synchronization process. This is billed as used to synchronize data between the external hard drive and one or more computers. Synchronizing the data like this can be another form of backup.
I didn't mention the store or the disk drive manufacturer on purpose. I don't want to advertise for them in the club newsletter. If you're interested, send me a email and I'll send the info,
End of Article