Accessing the data from a hard drive via USB has never been easier. This USB hard drive adapter from Vantec handles SATA and IDE (2.5 inch, 3.5 inch and 5.25 inch) hard drives.
The separate power supply for the hard drive is included with the kit also.
This adapter is great for recovering data from a hard drive or just convenient access to a drive you don’t want to install or can’t install in your laptop.
Seagate has always had some of the best warranty in the business for computer hard drives. Buying a quality Seagate drive from a reputable source meant getting a 5 year warranty.
If anything happened to the drive during the 5 year warranty, simply go to Seagate’s website, validate the warranty and get an RMA; then ship it to them and wait for the replacement.
I have often touted the benefits of buying Seagate enterprise drives (in the Barracuda, non-enterprise have an “AS” in the model number whereas enterprise have an “ES”) for the increased reliability. Now, buying an enterprise bare drive means longer warranty also.
For non-enterprise bare drives the warranty is being reduced from 5 years to 3 years (includes Maxtor brand also). This does NOT effect retail external products.
Here is the release:
Effective January 3, 2009, Seagate will be making some important changes to its limited warranty terms for selected bare drive products.
The warranty period for consumer electronics, notebook and personal storage bare drives sold to Seagate Authorized Distributors will be changed from 5 to 3 years. Seagate believes that the new warranty period and terms better reflect current industry standards.
Seagate enterprise drives and Seagate and Maxtor external retail products that have 5-year warranty periods will not be affected by this change.
If you have any questions, please contact your Seagate Authorized Distributor or consult the Seagate Partner Warranty Information page
For great prices on Seagate and Maxtor hard drives, I recommend Buy.com.
When you install a server you have to make some decisions on partition sizes for the different drives. The wise individual will buy as big of disk as he/she can afford and double every estimate for size.
Just a couple of years ago it seemed perfectly logical to allocate 12GB to a Windows Small Business Server C drive partition, especially when many of the features would be installed to a partition other than C (ie, any application that would grow in size – especially SQL).
But everyone underestimates the disk space required by those darn Windows updates, if nothing else. You actually can go into the Windows subdirectory and delete the compressed directories of old, proven updates and reclaim a lot of space.
Sooner or later, though, you start getting those emails from the server “low on disk space”.
What do you do?
This happened on a server I am responsible for this past week. First, 1.2GB free wasn’t enough space to even run a Windows Update Services update. Then, once some other updates ran, it was all of sudden less than 100mb free.
Since the D: drive partition could easily spare 10GB, the obvious answer for me was
With Acronis® Disk Director® Server 10.0 I was able to easily steal some space off of the front of the D partition, then expand the C partition to use that space.
Upon reboot, Acronis Disk Director moved the data out of the way, then reallocated the space.
Windows Small Business Server 2003 then booted up and all was happy. I defragged the C drive with a very comfortable 47% free space.
This was a pretty nasty bind with what turned out to be a very simple solution.
Acronis Disk Director actually does more than just reallocate hard drive partitions. It includes
I highly recommend Acronis products in general, but I was really happy with Acronis® Disk Director® today.
Windows Home Server is advancing on track and due out sometime this fall.
My prediction: It won’t be just for the home.
I can see this product ending up in small offices where maybe an attorney or two and a secretary or two might finally get serious about sharing files and backing up data.
These offices probably could afford me to come in with Microsoft Small Business Server, it would offer them a lot of advantages. But many of these professionals are just too cheap for that. I’m sorry, stingy; I mean frugal. You get the idea. (They use Yahoo! email accounts, now that’s professiona!)
Where Small Business Server is designed to be easy to manage, Windows Home Server is designed to require practically no management at all.
Will it deliver on this goal? I think it has a good chance. Doesn’t mean they won’t call someone like me every few months to check on it or answer a question, but it will probably run unattended in a closet quite nicely.
It will probably be the first time these offices have had anything close to a proper storage of their data.
For many laptop users, USB 2.0 or Firewire offer fast enough speeds for external storage. For others, though, 400mbps just isn’t fast enough.
My work with the MBox and ProTools is one example. ProTools recommends recording music to a non system hard drive – tough to do on a laptop unless you’re talking external. Yet tech support specifically states that USB is NOT fast enough.
Welcome eSATA. I love eSATA external hard drive enclosures, the one from Vantec I’ve written about in the past. But how do you connect eSATA to your laptop?
Easy, now anyway. SIIG makes an expresscard adapter that sells for less than $70. The card slides right in to a slim ExpressCard/34 slot and features two eSATA ports stacked on top of each other. The controller housed inside supports a standard second-gen feature set, including 3 Gbps transfer speeds, Native Command Queuing, hot plugging, and support for drives that exceed 137GB.
If you want the latest and the fastest, go eSATA. You can pick up the adapter here –
SIIG eSATA II 2-Port ExpressCard – 2 x 7-pin Serial ATA/300 External SATA – ExpressCard/34
Subscribe to this site's RSS feed.
