REVIEW: ioSafe SoloPRO Fireproof External Drive

Today, external hard disk drives are a “dime a dozen” so to speak. They all use drives from a handful of companies, wrap them in a plastic or metal enclosure with USB, eSATA or some other interfaces, add a cheap external power supply, and box it up for sale. What all these drives lack, however, is security for your data. Sure, you can use a RAID, but if catastrophe hits- a fire, flood, tornado, etc, your data is gone. This is where ioSafe stakes their claim.

Blu-ray victory spells the end of tape.

Data DVD’s have already been used to distribute all sorts of media, as the replacement for the formerly ubiquitous floppy. From short raw DV files, to completed commercial spots, 4.7 GB of space is pretty good. But for completed TV shows in a HD codec, a DVD is very small.

Blu-ray’s recent vistory bodes well for the independent producer because economies of scale will bring down the cost of both the 27 GB and the new 50 GB Blu-ray disks. The optical media that is at the heart of Sony’s Professional Disk system.

Open letter to Steve Jobs. Re: Mac Mini Pro.

Dear Steve,

The MacBook Air is cute. The iMacs are cute.
The Mini is cute. iPods, cute again.
But the Mac Pro is an expensive behemoth.

You see, I’m one of those “Pros” that you target your $1300 software to…
I’m not looking for “cute.” Nor am I looking to get screwed.
So, I’d like you to make a Mac Mini Pro.

Hard Drive as Floppy – Redux. (Now with SATA!)

I wrote about this back in October, and lamented that it was limited to USB.

Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one and the company has upgraded their hard drive “dock” to SATA for just $10 more than before.

Sweet!

SSD RAID = 800 MBps & 0.1 ms latency. Really.

Next Level Hardware.com has a report on their Battleship Mtron. This is a test of solid state disks (SSD) and how they can take your computing system to the next level. In reality, they take a computing system to the next order of magnitude. Previous tests have taken the Mac Pro to 284 MBps with four internal hard drives striped n a RAID-0.

Would you like 800 megaBYTES a second with near instantaneous access?

Read on…