rudis dot net

Hitachi has announced a forthcoming release of 400GB and 500GB 2.5" laptop SATA drives coming in February.

Half a terabyte. In your laptop.

Asus will be shipping a notebook config with two of these drives in them. Wow.

Hopefully, this is the start of a year full of decent tech announcements.

Save your pennies!

I/we have a large amount of data and also have a number of computers and personal files that need to be backed up. I have been debating the best way to accommodate our storage needs for quite some time and was eager to try out LaCie's latest offering since it had almost everything I was looking for (I prefer FW400/800 as well as USB).

The Ethernet Big Disk is a terabyte drive with gigabit Ethernet and 2 USB ports (one for interfacing with a computer as a non-networked drive, the other for expanding the storage with additional units). It supports SMB, AFP, FTP & HTTP file access over the network. I plugged it in to power, plugged it into the network switch (just 100MB) and it DHCP'd and address. I didn't use the utilities that came with it for configuration since I mapped an IP to the MAC address and planned on using the web interface to manage it. It does have tools that work under both OS X and Windows (I didn't look for the Linux ones yet, but will) if you need to tweak the config before using.

I setup a few basic shares and users - the admin interface is dead simple - and started copying files. On my 100MB network, it does about 10GB an hour copying from USB or FW drives through my MacBook Pro over the network. Mounting the shares was as easy as browsing my local network with OS X's built-in browser under "Connect to Server...".

I noticed it has something called a "media server". it will scan selected shares for media files and add them to that "media server" automatically, so I dedicated a share for just our media files (iTunes music and movies/shows mostly) and waited for it to scan the contents. I poked around trying to find a UPnP client for OS X (since it says that is what's needed) when I noticed that the "media" share I created showed up in iTunes!

I haven't fully tested it across all platforms and haven't setup the system and user backup strategy yet, but am very happy with the performance and capabilities in my single-system, single-user test. Since it does not do RAID, I will probably be getting a second unit or a separate TB plain drive and configuring some type of backup system to ensure our data is safe in the event of a hardware failure.

You can grab one of the units here: LaCie Ethernet Big Disk