In the past on this blog I have talked about the need for an external hard drive for backups or in case of the Asus Eee PC for some decent storage space.  I have even looked even a purpose built server to help manage all the data that we are all accumulating at an ever increasing rate.  But what if you your data requirements are such that you need something substantial but you don’t really want to go for something as meaty as the HP MediaSmart Server.

Buffalo LinkStation Live

Well in that case you only really have two options,  the first is to use the cloud, and the second is to look for something like the Buffalo LinkStation Live 500GB Network Hard Drive which is something, sort of in between what we have previously looked at.

The Cloud

Lets look at the cloud first. “The cloud” is becoming one of the standard ways of referring to the Internet. So if you store and publish photographs on Flickr for instance you are storing them in the cloud. The cloud refers to the fact that you don’t actually know where the computer your photo’s are stored on, is physically located. Your photo’s are just out there on the cloud, but importantly it is easy to find them. There are now plenty of online storage options available, just search for “online storage”.  Online storage does actually have some advantages, your data is probably safer out there, rather than on your non backed up laptop hard drive, and of course you can access your stuff from anywhere and on any computer anywhere in the world as long as it has a Internet connection.

Network storage

However a lot of people are often a little uncomfortable about putting their data out there, and so the Buffalo LinkStation is a good alternative providing a good amount of network storage. This can free up space on your laptop or provide a backup solution.  The LinkStation also has the added attraction of being able to integrate nicely with iTunes and stream media to your PC.

How do you store all your stuff?

As I have discussed in the previous few posts, my family now is the proud owner of an Asus Eee 4G PC. This is used primarily by my youngest son, but has proved to be quite popular with all the family. However as we said in my last post the Eee 4G PC comes with only 4GB of solid state storage, and since the majority of that is used by the operating system there is not much room for other content. In the previous post I looked at adding extra storage via a SDHC memory card but in this post I thought I would look at external hard drives.

Eee External hard drive

As the external hard drive is designed to be used with an Eee PC, I really wanted one that would fit well with the “small is good” theme that the Eee stands for. So any external hard drive had to be as small as possible, but still provide a good amount of storage, look good and work easily with the Linux operating system installed on the Eee.

After searching around I manage to find something that seems to fit the bill. Take a look at the
Passport Essential from Western Digital which is neat looking, small enough to fit into a shirt pocket, and has plenty of storage space. As it is a USB drive it will be supported by Linux and should therefore work fine with the Eee.

Check Linux compatibility

This last point is an important point that one needs to be careful off when buying equipment for a Linux PC. Thanks to the Linux community most devices will be supported by Linux, even if the vendor does not provide drivers. However this takes time and so when buying for Linux and especially for new devices it pays to do some research on the Internet first. In this case although the manufacturer does not state that it supports Linux, a quick search of the Internet shows that a number of people haved confirmed the Passport Essential working with the Eee.

Do have an Eee PC? Do you use an external hard drive?

We now have an Asus Eee 4G PC in the family. We are still very happy with the Eee 4G PC sub notebook and would recommend it to anyone looking for a starter computer for a child or for something small, capable and very easy to carry around. The Eee 4G is limited on the storage side though as it has no conventional disk drive and coming with 4GB of solid state storage only.

Limited storage

The solid state storage is nice and robust, but a significant amount of the 4GB is used up by the Linux operating system leaving only about 1.5 GB for user content. Now for my son’s homework and other text files this would probably be fine for the foreseeable future, however he already wants to store some music and digital images on the computer. My wife also uses the Eee a lot and so we are shortly going to have to think about additional storage.

Interface and storage options

Fortunately the Eee 4G PC comes with plenty of interfaces. There is the wired and wireless networking, a good number of USB sockets and a media card reader that excepts SD and SDHC cards. So there are plenty of options to access external storage. The Eee can always access a shared drive on our home desktop PC which also acts as our server, but this of course is only usable when at home. One approach that I have been looking at is to maximise the use of the SD card slot. I investigated and found this very useful SanDisk 4GB Extreme III SDHC Memory Card & Card Reader, which I think is just the ticket for an Eee owner. Why the card reader as well as the card? Well this would make it easy to transfer content from the Eee to other computers who don’t have card readers.

I have also looked at external hard drives for the Eee, which I will cover in the next post.

Have you got an Asus Eee 4G PC? What do you use for external storage?

In the last post we looked at the Sony Vaio TP2 Home Theatre PC a very stylish Media PC that would always look good in the living room. However there are a number of alternatives which may offer a better alternative in terms of system features that while perhaps not quite so stylish as the Sony, still have a set top box look that would fit right in beside the living room TV.

A very good example of this type of media PC is the Acer Aspire iDea 510 Home Theatre PC which sports a DVD player like look, but is able to give all the benefits of a normal PC . One important thing is that this device with the exception of the disk storage has been built using laptop technology rather than standard desktop components, this is means that it is very quiet which is an important factor when looking for a media PC. You don’t want to be turning up the volume just so you can hear the TV over the PC fans!

Like the Sony this device provides 500GB of storage, 1 GB of Ram and a Duel Core processor but it also provides dual TV - tuners allowing you to record two channels at once or record one channel while watching another. One other feature of this device is the vast array of input and output options meaning you would have little difficultly in connecting up to any input or output device. If there was one thing that was missing it would be probably be the lack of a Blu-Ray disc drive but I wouldn’t be surprised to see that in newer devices soon.

All in all a nice complete package that because of the PC capabilities will give you additional value than you would get with something like a Sky +, like the ability to manage music and photos, act as a DVD player & recorder etc. The included wireless keyboard would also allow you to browse the Internet etc.

There also seems to be some good deals around on this particular device at the moment.

Are you looking for a media PC?

The big tech news news this week is the joint launch by the BBC and ITV of Freesat a free satellite television service. Freesat is available to 98% of UK homes, including all those like myself when in the UK, that are unable to receive Freeview through a TV aerial. New users will have to make a single initial payment for a dish, set-top box and installation, but will not pay an ongoing monthly subscription.

So what with a free satellite service and the iPlayer from the BBC and the equivalents from ITV all giving the ability to download content, people are going to need something on which to save that content. For a long time I have looked at buying a media PC that was quiet enough to sit in the living room. Things like the Tivo have been available in the US, and we have the Sky + but media PC’s have yet to really take off in the UK. Things might be about to change however and I thought it might be worth looking at a few examples.

First here is one that would not be out of place in the most stylish living room, the Sony Vaio TP2 Home Theatre PC. Great looks, with a Blu-Ray disc player, a digital TV tuner, 2GB of Ram and 500 GB for all that digital content. The Sony is definately trying to redefine the PC for the living room.

In the next post I will look at another option with perhaps more substance than style. Do you have a Media PC? Is it a device whose time has come?

In the last post we looked at the new Apple MacBook Air which while innovative does has a very limited hard disk space, at least by recent standards. These days such a lack of disk space could be something that would have an impact on some people especially if they routinely have to carry around large digital files.

One way to help in this situation would be to purchase a high capacity flash drive such as the Corsair 16GB Voyage we’ve looked at in a recent post. However that would only really be a temporary solution at best as it does not really significantly increase the available drive space.

A good solution would be to get an external hard drive. Although this means carrying an extra device, having a separate portable storage and backup solution is a good way of expanding disk space on a laptop. It is always a good idea to have a separate backup solution anyway. An external such as the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini Hard Drive is good example of what is available.

Systems like these generally come with automated back up systems and encryption to protect your data should you lose the drive. Being a USB drive of course means that there is no need for a separate power cable.

Following on from the previous post about memory, I thought we would have another look at flash drives. We have had a look at them before but now there are some very large capacity flash drives available which are becoming more and more cost effective.

Convenience of a floppy disk

OK so hands up how many of you remember floppy disks? How many have still got a floppy disk drive in your computer? Floppy disks are pretty much a thing of the past, although I do have to admit to remembering a time when they were one of the newest things around, but perhaps the least said about that the better! Things moved on and the writable CD appeared which while it was less convenient, it provided a lot more storage space. The thing about a writeable CD though was that they were nowhere near as easy to use as a floppy drive. It was much more of a process compared to the stick the disk in, drag your contents across, and away you go process with the floppy disk. Unfortunately CD’s were soon not big enough either as storage requirements where also increasing as we started hoarding digital content like music and photographs

Enter the flash drive

Nowadays the flash drive or USB stick have become the standard manual way of moving data from computer to computer or for the temporary storing of data. And they are great, we are back to a nice easy of capturing any data that you want to go. But of course storage requirements keep rising and I am finding that my trusty 1GB Flash drive is at times just not big enough. The good news is that there are some huge capacity drives available that while a little more expensive will not break the bank. Take a look at the Corsair 16GB Voyager USB Flash Drive for example which is what I am considering for my next flash drive. Very useful for travel.

How do you use your flash drive?

Digital information, we have it, we all collect it and in fact we are collecting more and more of it all the time. As I have mentioned before everyone these days is likely to be experiencing their very own digital data explosion. Almost on a daily basis we are all creating or downloading more and more digital content, in the form of documents, digital images, mp3 files etc. This means we really have to start thinking about things like large disks to hold all of that data and ensuring we are making regular backups to ensure that data remains available.

Now if you have more than one computer in your household, and lets face it these days just about everyone does, you are multiplying this need for disk space and having to perform multiply backups. One solution to this problem is to centralise all your storage to a server, and by doing that mean that a backup only needs to be done once to protect the whole household’s data.

A potentially nice idea, but apart from setting up a separate computer configured as a server, there isn’t too many options on the market. Probably the only on is the HP MediaSmart Server. This admittedly expensive bit of kit which runs Microsoft Windows home Server provides centralised storage and can serve data securely to all users on a network, backing up their computers as required. If you are thinking about this sort of thing then the MediaSmart server is worth a look. I predict that we will see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future.

If you have a Windows laptop with a good sized hard disk drive like me, you may have opted for splitting your disk drive into a number of different partitions. When you partition your hard drive you are essentially creating a number of independent hard drives on your computer. So instead of a just a C: drive you can have a C: and D: drive and perhaps even more drives on your computer. These partitions act like completely separate disks but the main difference to actual separate hard disks is that partitions share their hardware (and therefore any potential failures so backup is still very important).

Now why would you want to partition your hard drive? Well there are a number of good reasons a few of which I have listed below;

- Separating and isolating specific files, to make it easier to recover or back up an important data set.
- Maintaining good computer performance, smaller file systems are generally more efficient. i.e. Having one huge C: drive will potentially slow a system down especially when full.
- For the geeks it provides the ability to have a number of different operating systems on the same computer. You could install Linux on one partition (so it doesn’t conflict with Windows) and have the choice of booting into Linux at power-up.
- Provides a high level means to organize data, you could have separate partitions dedicated to documents, music, photos, email etc.

Partitions are becoming more important as we all get larger and larger hard drives. I have a separate C: and D: drive. On the C: drive I have all the operating system files, program files etc., while on the D: drive I have all my data. One reason for this is that I can point my data backup up at just the D: drive and not include all the system files as well, making it more efficient.

So maybe you’re sold on partitions and want to create your own? Well the best program that I have found for this is the excellent and aptly named Partition Magic, which will allow you to create, merge and delete partitions to your hearts content. Always do a backup before though to be on the safe side.

This week I have been in the market for some flash storage, specifically an SD card. This was to give me extra backup storage for my truly excellent Pentax K100D DSLR camera. If you want an entry level digital SLR, that takes fantastic pictures, makes it easy for first time user of an SLR, but still gives you the control you may want when you have learned enough to start playing, then I can highly recommend this camera.

Now if you are in the market for SD storage for a camera, there is a new, and expensive, product that has caught my eye which has the potential to change the way we work with our cameras. The new Eye-Fi 2GB SD wireless card allows you, in theory at least, to automatically upload pictures from your digital camera to your PC or Mac and even to your favorite photo sharing, printing, blogging, social networking or whatever website. Which hopefully means no more cables, no more trying to find a card reader that works, and basically a lot less hassle. Unfortunately the Eye-Fi is only available in the US at present, so for now we are restricted to standard flash storage.

Here there is plenty to choose from at least. If you are into digital photography and want fast write and transfer speeds, you might want to look at the SanDisk 1GB Ultra II Plus USB Secure Digital Card, which is also available in larger capacities as well. The neat thing about this model is that it has a built in USB adapter which means this card is a very versatile, and means you can eliminate the hassle of trying to find a card reader etc. Not as elegant as the Eye-Fi perhaps, but a nice pragmatic solution at a good price.

If you do need a card reader the SanDisk 12 in 1 USB2.0 Card Reader should do the trick nicely.