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Review of LaCie 1TB Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive

The LaCie Rugged XL is a 1 TB Portable Hard Disk Drive. It is built to meet all your storage needs on the go. It comes along with a sleek and stylish design.

This durable Hard Disk drive offers one terabyte of storage space along with a high-speed USB 2.0 connection and eSATA interface of 3 Gb/sec. The aluminum alloy case of the hard drive dissipates heat generated during the operation. An added bonus to LaCie Rugged XL is that it has shock-resistant inner bumper. A colorful exterior rubber that surrounds the hard disk protect Rugged XL when you are transferring the data between machines.

The key features of Rugged XL 1 TB Portable Hard Disk Drive are:

1) 1 Terabyte of disk space.

2) Rugged design for outstanding performance on the go.

3) eSATA and USB 2.0 connectivity.

4) A sleek and stylish design by Neil Poulton.

Let us discuss these features of Rugged XL in brief.

Rugged XL has a plenty of data storage space to accommodate about 1,420 DivX movies, 330,000 photos or 270,000 songs. The Rugged XL hard drive offers a high-speed USB 2.0 connectivity (which is also USB 1.1 backward compatible) with a speedy eSATA interface. Exchanging data between two machines is very simple through this device. For example the data exchange between Macs and PCs is very simple. All your files will get automatically backed up. The Rugged XL hard drive requires no extra drivers installation for Windows XP, Windows Vista or Mac OS X operating systems. This high-performance device features a very fast data transfer rate. The data speed offered by this hard drive device is up to three gigabits per second via eSATA connection. This device comes in a compact size of measuring 5.1 x 1.7 x 8.5 inches. Due to the compact size of the device, it easily install on any desktop. So you can easily transfer the massive amounts of data. Apart from this LaCie Rugged XL comes along with the LaCie software bundles to enhance the performance and functionality of the hard disk drive. The software bundle includes LaCie’s One-Click Backup Software (this works on both, Mac and PC) and SilverKeeper Backup Software (this works for Mac only). LaCie Rugged XL also provides the Protection for Hardware and Software. Styled design of LaCie is exclusively created by the world-renowned product designer Neil Poulton. The Rugged XL is built to give a dynamic performance. It can withstand bumps and scrapes and comes along with a unique look. Its scratch-resistant aluminum shell and the shock-resistant rubber bumper serve as an additional layer of protection. Additionally, an LED indicator alerts you when the system gets overheating or experience slow transfer rates. The setup of this product is effortless. It serves the plug & play features and offers customizable formatting along with LaCie Setup Assistant. This advanced hard disk drive features aluminum casing that gives superior protection.

Its extremely tough and resistive design comes along with a internal bumper, rubber sleeve and heat dissipating features, that makes LaCie Rugged XL both effective and sturdy.

5 Best Practices of Maintaining your PC

You might often get confused as to what is the optimum way of maintaining your PC. It is not just installing an Antivirus or Spyware or reformatting your hard disk on a scheduled basis. However, maintaining your PC is all about becoming habitual with looking after different aspects of your PC. This article will tell you about the ten best practices that you should keep in mind while taking care of your PC.

Malicious software: If you have the habit of installing or downloading games from the Internet on a frequent basis then you be careful about the source from where you are actually getting the content. Often websites that boast about free downloads actually have a malicious software attached to them which can steal your financial information.
Bringing back deleted files: You do not have to worry about files disappearing from the recycle been. There are a lot of software that are available for download on the internet which make it easy to retrieve your deleted file. Utilities such as Recuva can be used to retrieve the files without a hassle.
Get a head start by removing application on start up: There is no need to “crash land” your PC when you push the start button. If you have widgets, chat messengers and applications on the start-up stray, you can easily disable them by clicking on the options menu of the program and uncheck “Open on Start Up.” You have all the time to open these applications once your OS has settled loading up. So the best advice will be to install shortcuts of the applications and open them once your OS has stopped loading.
Regular Fragmenting: Depending on the amount of software that you are installing on your PC you should at least fragment your PC once a month. However it you are one of those types that just have to try out a new software, then running the disk fragmentation should be done once a week for optimum performance.
Delete redundant files and applications: There are plenty applications that are available on the Internet which can be used to detect how long it has been since have opened a file or application. Depending on the time since you have accessed any application, the software lists the programs or applications that have not been used by you for six months to a year. This listing gives you the advantage of unseen applications or programs that you never knew were installed in your PC.

These are just some of the best practices that you can keep in mind in order to maintain your PC without any hassles.

Solid State Drives to be introduced in the end of 2010 by Hitachi GST

Before the discussion about the news in detail, its important to know what actually a solid state drive is. This is basically a device for the data storage which stores the relevant data by using the solid state memory. All are aware of the hard disk drives that they are electromechanical devices with spinning disks and read/write heads which are movable. But these solid state drives are different from hard disk drives. SSD’s makes the use of microchips and does not have any moving parts. These are much better than hard disk drives and so keep the capability of replacing the hard disk drives in most of the applications.

Some good features of solid state drive is that it use the flash memory which is NAND based that retains the memory even if there is no power. If any situation occurs that more faster access is required but does not compulsorily require data after power loss or makes the use of battery for backing up the data ,then SSD’s with volatile RAM also exists.

Introduction of first enterprise solid state drive by Hitachi GST:

There was a uValue convention 2010 held in Tokyo this year in which Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has declared about its first enterprise solid state drives.

Features of this new product:

This product will have SAS (Sports Serial Attached SCSI) and FCAL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop) interfaces which will help it to fit in the 2.5 inch form factor disk drive slot in a Fibre Channel or SAS disk drive array claiming to give the best performance. At presentFibre Channel interface SSDs with the ZeusIOPS line which is available in different form factors is only supplied by STEC. The model is basically meant for the enterprise drive array manufacturers. But still one thing is not clear that whether this new solid state drive is a single layer cell or multi layer cell NAND flash memory chips, but it is expected that SLC should be used as its faster as compared to MLC. There is an uncertainty regarding the capacity points also but is expected to reach up to 512GB. Currently, only STEC is selling the solid-state drives with FC and SAS interfaces, so Hitachi will not have to face much competition and can favorably stay in the market.

Promise to start shipment in 2010:

There was an announcement in the year 2008 that Hitachi GST and Intel will collaborate and will work together on the enterprise-class solid-state drives and claimed to launch it and give its delivery in first half of 2010. But they could not keep their promise, may be because of the economic slowdown at global level but now Hitachi GST has claimed that it will definitely start the shipment of this new product in second half of 2010. This product might be branded as UltraStar. So this product by Hitachi GST is basically intended for use in the enterprise drive arrays and people are now expecting it to get the delivery of same by the end of 2010.

Intel SSDs

Over the last two years, Solid State Drives (SSDs) more commonly known as flash drives have followed a fashion of being sold directly to the laptop or portable device manufacturers or through special online consumer electronics retail sites that have only a handful of physical outlets.
A major changed happened last week when Intel Corp., a market leader in manufacturing of flash drives, made an announcement that its flash drives will now be available at more than 800 conventional retail outlets. After Intel other cos. have also announced to follow the same pattern.

Expected Turn Around

It can be easily smelt from this step that the consumer has moved a step closer in replacing or supplementing computers hard drives with these flash drives as they now become affordable and available.
An analyst at market research firm Forward Insights expects that this move will definitely broaden the end market consumer profile. While he also said that gaming and technically sound users will remain among the major consumers but retailing of these SSDs will surely enhance the appeal for these SSD’s and accelerate the adoption process of these SSDs as prices also come down.

Cost Efficacy

SSDs remain 10 folds costlier than hard drives and their cost seems to be increasing in past years. The second quarter of last year saw an increased price of per unit price of flash memory chips up to $4.10.This clearly represents a 127% increase from the final quarter of 2008.It is believed that the SSD prices can come down from $1.9 to $1.7 approx. but only for PC, laptop manufactures. Online shoppers couldn’t find any remarkable difference in the prices and will continuing paying $3.
A normal SSD of capacity ranging from 80 GB to 120 GB of memory is offered on prices from $215 to $400.Intel offers an 80 GB X25-M for $225 in its stores, whereas a hard drive of capacity up to 1TB (1000 GB) can be bought for as little as $99.

SSDs can supposingly beat hard drives on the basis of performance especially for computer boot up applications. A test conducted by a famous site shows that an SSD took just 20secons in comparison to HDD’s 40 seconds of cold boot.

Advantages

• SSD restarts in 26 sec while HDD requires 37 sec.
• SSD seems to be more durable since they do not have any mechanical moving parts like actuator arms etc. thus they become a better option for mobile devices.
• Cost wise as SSDs are still costlier than HDD but there will be a point when you can actually buy a SSD of capacity around 16GB in cost of a HDD.
The increase in the performance of computer when its HDD is replaced by SSD is remarkable. It can be easily foreseen that in the upcoming years the SSD will become an integral part of our systems and notebooks. Availability of these SSDs in retail outlets has added a seasoning in the curry.

How to Install and Remove Hard Disk Drive

The most common upgrade that everyone undergoes is an upgrading of storage space. This is because storage space is the first thing that you run out of in the world of computers today. This is perhaps the biggest rational update in terms of the original one used while your computer was made. The reason to this is because storage spaces have been enhanced and the denominations are multiple times compared to the ones year or two back. There are two types of hard disks available in the market that is doing this job for you. These hard disks are explained in the article below.

External Hard disk drives

This is by far the simplest way to deal with storage space. You can plug in an external unit in order to make the simplest upgrade of space in your system. The external hard disk drive is a simple storage space that you cannot use as your primary disk where you can install your operating system. These volumes can be used for the purpose of storing program files and other files that need plenty of space.

These volumes are a great help to those who have to carry their stuff with them all the time. You can add as much of your photos and videos in it depend on the size denomination that would give you plenty of space in any way. Music, videos and photos are the type of stuff that needs plenty of storage space and the standard hard disk drives run short of space due to the same reasons.

The handling is as simple as anything. All you need to do is to plug in your external hard disk to one or two of the USB ports available on the back of your computer. Almost all of the hard disks available in the market today are having inbuilt power management as well. The USB cable carries ample current to run them in proper manner. In case your hard disk has an external power management system, connect it to the power supply before you can use it.

Internal Hard Disk Drives:

Handling internal hard disk is technical compared to the external version. The first step that you must follow is to disconnect your computer from the power supply. This ensures that you don’t get an electric shock while playing around with the computer CPU. There might be two ways to enhance the storage space. One is to add a hard disk of larger denomination replacing the previous one while the other might be adding a new one with your existing hard disk still there. Follow the following steps in order to add an internal hard disk:

Remove the cover of your system that might be fixed using clamps or screws.
In case you are replacing your previous hard disk, disconnect the power cord and data cable from the hard disk and release the screws setting the hard disk on the bay. In case you are installing another one, place that on the empty bay and screw the hard disk to make sure that shock does not displace it.
Once fixed, connect the hard disk with the power cord at the first place.
Connect the hard disk with the type of cable that fixes in the slot. Technically, there is a choice between IDE cable and SATA cable. Connect it accordingly.
Place the cover back and connect your computer with the power supply.

You can move into the computer management tools to make partitions in the hard disk and manage space that you can use for storage. Most internal hard disk drives need to be formatted before use. You can perform the format by right clicking on the new volume and format it using the format selection.

How to Add an Extra Hard Drive

The fastest way to over come the storage problems is a second hard drive, in addition, its great method to protect critical data. It’s not only an easy and quick way as well as it’s a cost effective, approximately 1$ per gigabyte. So if you need additional storage on your machine, this article will tell you the simplest way to push you forward towards living this experience and obtain your desired results.

Instructions to follow:

As long as you reached this part, this means that you are about to begin this exciting process, shall we delve?

First check if you want the Serial ATA or IDE (parallel-ATA). Although older machines have the IDE (Parallel ATA), modern ones might support only (Serial-ATA). To make sure of that, you can open up the case and try to distinguish the used drives type. Usually the IDE drives have a flat and wide ribbon cable. The SATA ones have thinner cables and no jumpers.
Free a room for an extra hard drive:
Restart your machine then log into the BIOS-Menu.
Hit the Standard CMOS Settings.
Restart your machine
See a trusted manufacturer to get the external hard drive you want to add , make sure that its compatible with your master hard drive
Turn off your machine, unplug all cords attached to it from the back and unscrew all the screws of your case.
Place the screws in a well know place then remove the side panel and drag it out of the case.
Look for the region where all flat ribbon cables (or even the SATA cables) attach to the mother board.
Pose the jumpers to change the drive status to a slave or a master. Follow the instructions printed on your hard drive to do so. Meanwhile you won’t have to do so if you were dealing with a SATA, as each SATA device uses only its own cable, IDEs can share devices.
Locate the empty bay inside your machine case.
Connect the ribbon cable that to your hard drive.
Connect the Molex power cable; you can distinguish it by the 3 thin internal wires of red, yellow, and black. Notice that SATA drive has a non similar kind of power cable.
Place the side panel where it was to your computer then screw it back.
If you reached here it’s the last step as you will have to plug all of cables, connect them back to their power source incase while installing the drive you unplugged them.
Now we need the computer organization to feel all the changes, and that’s why you will restart your machine. Log into BIOS startup (depending on your mother board manufacturer you can show it by either pressing F10 or DEL key on keyboard). Now check back the BIOS Auto-Detect to make sure that the additional drive got detected. Check the screen that presents the both the Primary and Slave drives, you should see the name of the new added one.

Once you log into it, you will face 4 settings named as following: PRIMARY MASTER\AUTOPRIMARY SLAVE\ SECONDARY MASTER\ SECONDARY SLAVE. Hit them all and change them into Auto-Detection.

Some users ask does it work with me if I had a Macintosh machine. Same goes on Clamshell-Cases those small shape cases from Dells operate differently.

As a tip, we recommend you to use SATA drives as they are pretty much faster than IDEs, plus the IDE ribbon really stands against the air flow.

OPS Technical Solutions : +1 315-226-4249

Review of LaCie 1TB Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive

5 Best Practices of Maintaining your PC

Solid State Drives to be introduced in the end of 2010 by Hitachi GST

Intel SSDs

How to Install and Remove Hard Disk Drive

How to Add an Extra Hard Drive

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