Portable Storage Carried to Excess
Table of contents
- 1. Differentiation Doesn’t Always Help
- 2. Buffalo Microstation Portable Silicon Disk, SHD-UHR64GS (64 GB)
- 3. Walton Chaintech Apogee 64 GB
- 4. LaCie Little Big Disk Quadra 1 TB
We receive lots of different storage products for review. Regardless of whether or not we like the different concepts, ideas, and solutions these products represent, we typically find that most of them make sense in some way—unless they fail utterly at performance, reliability, or providing decent bang for the buck.
This time we looked at three storage products that are a bit different from what you’ll typically find at your local retailer. Buffalo offers all-flash portable storage, Chaintech sells a flash SSD that comes with an additional USB port, and LaCie sent us a state-of-the-art RAID product based on two 2.5” drives.
LaCie: Fast and Mobile Storage
LaCie is a popular storage vendor that is known for well designed, high-performance storage solutions for enthusiasts at the high end, or for small business users. The Little Big Disk Quadra is, despite its oxymoronic name, that type of an elite drive. It consists of two 500 GB 2.5” mobile hard drives inside a stylish and solid enclosure. It offers all popular interface types, and RAID technology to maximize performance. If you really need to combine high capacity and high performance with mobility, then this could be your product.
Buffalo, Chaintech: More Flash, Just Different
The flash market, especially the flash SSD segment, is changing so quickly that it is very difficult for smaller companies to keep pace. They are constantly working to release attractive products at acceptable prices before someone else releases the next product generation—which can sometimes offer double the performance and capacity at the same price points.
Because of this issue, Buffalo and Chaintech provide products for very specific niches that are less sensitive to product cycles. Buffalo believes that there is room for 1.8” storage products that are entirely based on flash memory. We tend to disagree at capacities of up to 64 GB—where you can get USB thumb drives—but in the range of 128 GB and more, this looks like a market segment to address. Chaintech believes that flash SSDs should not be limited to the SATA interface, and designed a 2.5” flash SSD, which comes both with SATA/300 and USB 2.0 interfaces.
Let’s look at some details.
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I wanted an article with the tiny HDD used as the image on the homepage.
mee too
yup, tiny hdd where is the info!
big fail to use that picture and not even mention the frigging hdd, that was what I wanted to read about
Well what can you say.
They lift articles directly form the American site and don't change spelling or prices.
Then when they actually get the finger out to make a new article for the UK they can't get it right.
Yet another reason Tom's should have a UK based office for the site, like every other country it does articles for.
It's becoming like shoutwire this place, sad times
Tom's used to be GREAT, it was the place to go, but for the last year+ it's gone down the drain, half done articles, US prices instead of UK prices.
If they're gonna use an unrelated picture why not use a picture of some tits while they're at it?
You will have to wait - Tom's only show tits at Xmas! Nice women though!
I'd go with tits with two of those tiny hdds for nipples. Maybe there's another QOTD "news" article suggestion?
WHy would they use a picture of Devastator_UK tho?
SO what we are all saying is
This site is not as good as it used to be; but so long as there is soft-core porn mixed into the hardware review some where, we will all be happy.
HOWEVER, due to the crapness of the site in recent times, the girls used should be extremely good looking to address the balance.
Browser boob babe being a good example. We need CPU babe, GPU babe, HDD, bade, Mobo babe. Monitor babe will need huge eyes and Case babe (should be a butch lass).
All those in favour say "aye"
It's not a tiny hard drive. It's a regular 3.5 demonstrated by a giant you fools!