Seagate unveiled the world’s highest-capacity hard drive Wednesday with its Exos Mosaic 3+ HDD platform, hitting the 30TB mark for the first time, the company said. That’s enough space to store a thousand Blu-ray movies.
The company said it used several new technologies to get there, and its road map shows the arrival of even bigger storage devices in the coming years. And while businesses will certainly go for these megadrives, they will also be available to many kinds of end users and require no special hardware to read.
When you splurged for a new Mac, or picked up one of our amazing refurbished deals, did you opt for a model with less storage to save some cash? It’s a genius idea in theory. But now you might find yourself stuck with a full hard drive and a bogged-down computer.
You don’t need to upgrade your Mac — or pay recurring cloud storage fees — if you pick up this 1TB portable external hard drive. And right now, it costs just $56.99 (normal price: $63.99).
You might ask yourself, “Do I need an external hard drive?” After all, you may be just like the average user — content with the 250GB or so capacity of your computer.
However, if you are a gamer, a movie buff or have a massive collection of downloaded material, consider adding more storage space. But even if you aren’t, there are other productive uses for having an external hard drive. For any of your storage needs, this sleek, portable hard drive can do the trick. It’s now on sale for $32.99 (regularly $39).
We could all use more space on our devices and a bit more fun and flair for said storage. The Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hard Drive combines a massive 2TB of storage with RGB LED lighting, and it’s now on sale for only $69.99 (regularly $104).
Ring in the Fourth of July by giving your laptop a new lease on life. Any one of these four great deals on MacBook accessories will give you a new feeling of … independence.
Statistics on hard drive reliability just released by data-storage company Backblaze would seem to indicate it’s not a good idea to buy a Seagate hard drive. Of the 104,954 drives it uses, Seagate’s are the least reliable by a wide margin.
On the other side of the coin, this company has found drives made by Western Digital’s HGST to be much more reliable.
You’ve heard my speech from the soapbox: Backup your iPhone photos. A little device called Fotofami couldn’t make it easier.
In fact, it’s shaped like a little thin box that will travel well in a pocket. It works by getting to know the faces of family and friends in those pictures while fiercely defending them from the reach of hackers.
One click and your digital life gets stored in the Cloud. Where or what that is exactly is a mystery to most of us. Two startup companies are producing products aimed at the segment of the computing population that doesn’t want to save pictures, videos and documents to large cloud-based servers.
These products let you create your own cloud to store the personal stuff.
Need bags of speedy storage you can take with you anywhere you go? With VisionTek’s USB Pocket SSD, you get a bus-powered solid-state drive that’s small enough to fit in your palm, and fast enough for almost anything.
I’ve been using one as a Windows drive for my Mac for the past few months; let me tell you why it’s been great.
Believe it or not, Black Friday has already come and gone. Pretty soon the Christmas season will begin, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.
Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.
From now until Christmas, Cult of Mac will be putting together holiday gift guys full of ideas for the special ones in your life, no matter what their interests or your budget. Today, we’re looking at gifts for Mac lovers (not Mac fighters).
Lacie’s new Thunderbolt Little Big Disk claims to be the fastest portable Thunderbolt drive around, running at up to 635MB/s – “a 33 percent increase from the previous model.”
External hard drives: super handy, but oh-so-slow, especially since Apple put a bullet in the back of FireWire’s head. Thankfully, Western Digital has once again come to the rescue with a neat new addition to its My Passport line of portable drives: The Edge.
These new versions not only look way more high-tech than the previous curvy plastic models, they also support MacBook-friendly USB 3.0.
MacPaw, makers of CleanMyMac, released a new menubar Mac app today called CleanMyDrive. As a simplified version of CleanMyMac, CleanMyDrive lets you monitor and clean up external hard drives connected to your Mac. The app is super simplistic, and it’s free in the Mac App Store.
Seagate has bought French high-quality digital storage company LaCie for a reported $186 million. LaCie CEO Philippe Spruch will become head of Seagate’s consumer storage products division. LaCie makes Mac-friendly peripherals, and Seagate has been a long-time titan in the data storage business.
Your MacBook Air might be the fastest, lightest, portable-est Mac you ever owned, but it is likely also one of the most storage-deficient Macs you have ever owned, in modern times at least. That will all be solved when bus-powered Thunderbolt drives start to show up, but in the meantime, take a look at Western Digital’s new 2TB My Passport USB drives.
The MacBook Airs are wonderful machines, let down only by the still-small storage offered by today’s SSDs. Worse, whilst external Thunderbolt drives are finally trickling into stores, they’re neither cheap nor plentiful.
Alas, Elgato’s rather awesome-looking Thunderbolt SSD drive combines the worst of both worlds — a high price and low capacity. Then again, I imagine this things is fast enough to burn a hole in your desk.
It’s taken a while, but it seems that the dried up tear-duct that was the supply of Thunderbolt accessories is about to turn into a torrent of high-speed, daisy-chainable tears of relief. Hard drive supremo LaCie will at last sell you a 2big Thunderbolt Series external drive.
When you buy an external Hard Drive for use with Time Machine, Apple’s backup software, you will most likely need to format it before you can use it, since chances are that it is formatted for a Windows based computer. You could always spend the extra money to get a Mac formatted Hard Drive, but what’s the sense in that? You can format your own external Hard Drive right from Mac OS X. This video will show you how.
Have you ever found yourself thinking that your Mac takes too much power or that your MacBook battery is draining too quickly? If you have, you’ll want to check out this video. In it, I’ll show you some of the best, yet most overlooked options for saving energy on your Mac.
Friends, Romans, Applefans, I come to bury hard drives, not to praise them. The evil that poor technologies do live after them, and our good files are oft interred with their ashes. So let it be with hard drives.
Look at your MacBook Pro. It’s beautiful, no? Bright screen, thin body, buttonless trackpad, carefully engineered ports, MagSafe power port… it’s a master-work. Except for one thing. It carries a vestigial organ that all-too-often reveals itself to be the ruptured appendix of computing: a hard drive.
Yes, for all of our wonderful computing progress (spaghetti ports to USB; mobile dual-core processors, DDR3 DRAM, insanely fast GPUs), the lowly hard drive continues to exist based off of approximately the same technology it was back in the 1970s. Spinning magnetic platters with read/write heads, saving our entire digital lives in the process.
And while they have many wonderful qualities (massive storage capacity, more so than anything but TAPE; extremely low cost), they also have a fatal flaw, which is that they break and they break hard. Platters get warped, spindles get loose, heads get misaligned, and suddenly your computer stops working and you lose the project you’ve been slaving over for the last few months (see my wife’s recent calamity for evidence and a little solace in the iPhone).
If you’ve decided to pick up one of Apple’s miraculously thin new MacBook Airs, but have a large media or photo library, you’re probably going to have to pick up an external USB hard drive to go with it: those SSDs are blisteringly fast, yes, but they’re not exactly voluminous.
What external hard drive can match the Air’s resplendent svelteness, though? Try the Hitachi G-Drive Slim. It’s only 0.39 inches thick and clocks in at 320GB for $99.99. That’s not a lot of storage space for the price, but then again, neither is the Air.
Employing the iPad Camera Connection Kit, it’s technically possible to hook an iPad up to a portable USB hard drive… but only if that hard drive falls within the maximum range of the SD card’s storage capacity. That’s only 32GB, which makes the Camera Connection Kit’s ability to read storage off of an external hard drive more a matter of trivia than practicality.
That gruesome device above, though? That’s the Sanho spacious 750GB HyperDrive, designed to circumnavigate the iPad’s restrictions by turning individual file folders into virtual 32GB drives on the fly. It comes with a CompactFlash and SD card slot for slurping up your camera’s photos, as well as a 3.2-inch QVGA color display and the ability to interface directly with your Mac. All yours for just… $600.
*Sputter* That’s a lot of money to drop on a hard drive that, because of iOS limitations, can’t even read music or launch apps. Of course, this isn’t for consumers who need to upgrade their iPad space: it’s clearly aimed at photographers who want to be able to juggle huge archives of RAW files on their iPad’s on the fly. A very niche market indeed, given the relative lack of powerful RAW editors on the App Store, but perhaps that will change in time.