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Thailand Floods & The Resulting Consequences

Friday, November 11th, 2011 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

Let’s face it: the recent flooding situation in Thailand and the imminent hard drive shortage has many of us concerned, as approximately 40-50% of the world’s hard disk drives are manufactured in the affected areas. With production halted, suppliers and customers alike are worried about the impact this may have on hard drive availability, not to mention the looming price increases on currently available units.

While damage assessments from these major memory component manufacturers in Thailand are trickling in, several plants still remain submerged from the floods and photos capture the still “soggy” situation for Nikon’s factories, as crews work fervently to pump out the excess water from the area with generators. Aerial footage also demonstrates the severity of the situation and the long clean-up ahead:

 

A Simple Solution

Last week we discussed how to make the most of what you have by utilizing older, possibly forgotten, hard disk drive solutions to store your files now and in the future if you need to do so. If you’re using the Newer Technology Voyager or USB Universal Drive Adapter, a cool accessory like NewerTech’s StoraDrive is a simple way for keeping those drives organized for such future uses. After all, in light of recent events, you can never be too prepared…

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Category: Random Thoughts & Topics
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Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual mini Gets Great Review

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Come on, guys! This is getting embarrassing! As if raking accolades on our Mercury Extreme Pro Solid State Drives wasn’t flattering enough, now The Unofficial Apple Weblog just released a nice write-up of our Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual mini storage solution, which feature Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSDs inside.

The OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual mini features 14 pre-configured models with hardware RAID-1 “mirrored” redundancy for “live activity” data protection; or RAID-0 “stripe” for maximum data transfer speed. Each Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual mini contains two 2.5″ hard drives or OWC Mercury SSDs for up to 2.0TB of capacity, a “Quad Interface” of FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0, & eSATA connections for data transfer speeds up to 300MB/s.

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Category: Product Spotlight
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GreenSavers: Ideas on how to re-use that old drive (and save some cash, too).

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris H.

So you’ve just upgraded to a new hard drive in your computer and you now you have the old SATA hard drive sitting on your desk staring at you. Rather than delegating it to dark confines of the desk drawer labeled “miscellaneous stuff”, why not put it to good use and save some cash by using what you already have.

Or… if you insist on throwing that old drive into the drawer, consider putting some of your important data on it first. Doing this definitely doesn’t hurt anything and it gives you an extra copy of those family photos or financial documents in case something happens to your other copy or copies. This maximizes resources you already have available to you.

The perfect tool to utilize those old drives for backup, and subsequently putting in the drawer if you’re partial to doing that, is a NewerTech Voyager drive dock. All you need to do to backup, update, and restore data from the drives is pop them into the Voyager like a bagel in a toaster and they show up on your computer’s desktop.

I know occasionally there’s a drive I take out of a computer that I want to use on a daily basis. For that scenario, I like to put the drive in a case for protection and convenience of taking it with me wherever I may need to go.

For laptop drives, the most cost effective and sleek looking case is the OWC Mercury Express, which goes for less than $20. For an old laptop drive, you can’t beat the price for extended usability.

With that said, if  we’re talking about a 7200RPM drive, I would definitely go for the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro mini, which has FireWire 800/400, USB 2.0, and eSATA. Along with the OWC eSATA Expresscard (also for less than $20), I can connect and use my old drive externally at internal speeds. What can I say? I like to move my data fast.

For a full size 3.5” SATA drive, I either use it with my Voyager or put it in my case of choice: the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro. I admit, I am a big fan of the aluminum designs, but I do know some of you out there may prefer the OWC Mercury Pro Classic that has a stylish clear look to it. Either way you go, both styles have high quality Oxford chipsets and a variety of connection options to give you the best solution for your needs starting under $50.

For those of you with old machines in the basement with IDE/ATA hard drives in them that you think may have something worth saving, the NewerTech Universal Drive Adapter for less than $30 can not only handle SATA drives, but any 2.5” or 3.5” IDE/ATA drive.

So quit wondering what could be on there and get the data off.

Don’t forget to recycle.

When you feel you’ve gotten every last bit of use out of your computer, drive, or any other electronic component, don’t just throw it in the garbage! Instead consider donating, recycling, or even repurposing as a much greener and responsible alternative.

You can find a local electronics recycler using this site: Local Electronics Recycling Search

I know there’s a lot of other different ways to keep using those old hard drives, so sound off in the comments with your ideas and experiences.

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Category: green, Tech Tips
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An elite deal on the Elite-AL “Quad”

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

quad-eliteYou may have noticed that when we announce price drops on one drive, more invariably seem to follow suit. That pattern rings true once again, as this time around, we’re announcing some great new prices for our highly-praised OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro “Quad-Interface” storage solutions.

The OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro “Quad-Interface” is the choice for high performance, reliability, and flexibility. Fully “Plug and Play”, its FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB2, and eSATA interfaces provide exceptional data accessibility via the best performance options the computer(s) it is being used with.

This Oxford 924 based storage solution is great for demanding Audio/Video (it’s ProTools Certified), backup (it’s perfect for Time Machine, or can be used as a bootable clone), music, photography, general data needs, and more. It’s  9.0″ x 2.1″ x 5.8″ aluminum enclosure with can either stand vertically or stacks great horizontally.

Other features of the OWC Mercury Elite-AL FireWire 800/400/USB2/eSATA ‘Quad Interface’ Solutions include:

  • Oxford 924-based performance bridge solution
  • Two 1394B 9 Pin FireWire 800 Ports, One 1394A 6 Pin FireWire 400 Port, One USB 2.0 Port, 1 eSATA Port
  • Large Data Buffer – up to 32MB
  • USB2, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, & eSATA Cables ALL INCLUDED!
  • Prosoft DataBackup III (Mac OS X), , Intech Speedtools (Mac OS 8.6-10.5.x), Carbon Copy Cloner (Mac OS X), and NovaStor NovaBackup (Windows) included
  • Fully Mac & PC Compatible
  • Industry Leading 3 Year Solution Warranty

Of course, it wouldn’t be a “price drop” posting without mention of the new prices:

These are great prices on a great external storage solution. Its versatility, reliability, and high performance make it an excellent addition to your system.

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Category: Product Spotlight, Special OWC Deals
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Guardian MAXimus – Plug & Play RAID 1 now even more affordable.

Thursday, January 7th, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Globe-n-GMAXNewerTech’s Guardian MAXimus is the Plug & Play solution that keeps your data safe and reliable with real-time, high performance data redundancy via hardware RAID-1 Mirroring. With its FW800/400+eSATA+USB 2.0 “Quad Interface”, you can connect a “GMAX” to any computer with Plug and Play ease via one of those four connections and it will take care of the rest. This solution is a hardware RAID 1 “Mirror” which automatically keeps your data backed up in real time to protect against a hard disk failure.

LED indicators on the front of the solution indicate the status of the two drives. Should one of the two internal drives experience a malfunction, the unit will still function normally until you can repair it. If the malfunction is a recoverable “soft” type, the Guardian MAXimus will automatically rebuild the mirror, in the background. If the disk failure requires a drive to be replaced, once the new drive is installed, the Guardian MAXimus will automatically rebuild the Mirror without loss of data or additional down time.

Available in capacities of up to 2.0TB of mirrored backup, the Guardian MAXimus is certified for Audio/Video, Graphics, Music, general data needs and more! It’s perfect for the ultimate Time Machine backup, too! With its “Quad” interface, you can easily hook it up to any computer—Mac or PC—and be up and running in no time. You can even use it as a boot drive.

Of course, as with all OWC and Newer Technology storage solutions, we include all the cables so you don’t have to go searching for the right one for your connection choice. On top of that, we include Intech HD Speedtools Utility Suite and the full retail version of Prosoft Engineering DataBackup III for Mac OS X (a $59 retail value) and the full retail version of NovaStor NovaBackup for Windows (a $49 retail value). To top it off, we back it all up with a Three Year NewerTech Solution Warranty.

With all that, the Guardian MAXimus is a great value. Now, though, we’ve made it an even better value with some great new pricing.

Everybody should have some sort of backup plan. With built-in redundancy and even more affordable pricing, the Guardian MAXimus is a great component to your backup strategy.

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Category: Product Spotlight, Special OWC Deals
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A little bit Mirrored, a little bit Striped.

Monday, July 6th, 2009 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Looks like the NewerTech Voyager isn’t the only one getting the all the reviewers’ love. OWC’s Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 is pulling in the accolades, as well.

We haven’t really talked a whole lot about the Qx2 on the OWC Blog, and that’s kind of a shame, because it’s a product I really, really like. In short, it is an easy-to-use, multi-drive storage solution.

External storage is insanely useful, especially for backups. In most cases, your standard single drive external storage solution will serve you well. However, while single-drive options are inexpensive, they are limited in speed and redundancy.

For FireWire and USB 2.0, most drives will be bottlenecked by the connection bus. With eSATA, though, the drive mechanism itself becomes the limiting factor, relying on how fast the drive itself can access the data. While OWC Storage Solutions use high-quality drive mechanisms, we have yet to find a single drive that can take up the entire SATA bus’s bandwidth.

The other place where single drives are limited is in data redundancy. When a drive eventually fails (which, granted, can be years from now), all the data on the drive is lost. Regular backups and/or clones are ways of getting around this, but they also are limited to only being as up-to-date as the last time they were run.

Both these limitations can be addressed by the use of a RAID device, such as the Qx2.

A little bit about RAID

For those of you who don’t know the term, RAID stands for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks.” Effectively, multiple hard drives are connected together and appear as one large volume on your desktop. There are a number of different RAID types, each with different levels of redundancy and speed.

RAID 0 (Striped) – This addresses the speed limitations of a single drive, and is a great choice for instances where fast data access is needed, such as video and audio capture. Data is split into blocks over two or more drives at same time for high speed and large capacity. However, if one drive goes down, the whole RAID array is ruined. Technically, you could say that this is not a “RAID,” as it eliminates the “Redundant” part. But that would be nit-picky, and nobody likes people like that.

RAID 1 (Mirrored) - This addresses redundancy issues, and is best for when you have data you can’t afford to lose to hardware failure. In this mode, data is written simultaneously to to two different drives. If one drive goes down, you still have a second copy. The down side to this is that you effectively lose half your total drive capacity.

RAID 10 (1+0) - This RAID level combines both RAID 0 and RAID 1, effectively layering one over the other. While you still maintain the speed of a RAID 0 and gain the redundancy of RAID 1, you still have the loss in capacity mentioned of RAID 1, only now you have TWO drives you lose the capacity of.

RAID 5 (Striped with Redundancy) - This is a slight variation on RAID 10, which addresses the capacity loss. In RAID 5, data is striped between 3 or more disks, with only one drive’s worth of data being lost to redundancy. In effect, the more Disks the RAID array has, the more space-efficient the RAID’s redundancy function becomes. For a more detailed description of how RAID 5 works, check out this informational PDF.

There are, of course, other RAID levels, such as RAID 6, RAID 0+1 & RAID 53, but they’re mostly just variants or combinations of these major ones.

RAID-in-a-Box

The Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 makes adding RAID functionality and massive capacity up to 8TB to your system incredibly simple. All you need to do is put four identical drives into the Qx2 case (or select one of the pre-configured complete solutions), and select the type of RAID you want  (it comes pre-set as RAID 5…which is my personal preference incidently). After a few moments, the Qx2 will configure itself and you can then attach it to your computer via the connection of your choice, where it will behave just like any other external device.

I won’t kid you, the Qx2 isn’t for everybody. In fact, for many, a simpler solution may be more useful. For those in a “small office” situation or power users with more advanced storage needs, though, this may be just what you’re looking for.

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Category: Tech Tips
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