Laptop Thoughts: News & Reviews on Laptops, Netbooks, Slates, and More.

"Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) today announced it is shipping a new 4TBGoFlex® Desk external hard drive - the highest capacity hard drive in the industry. This latest addition to the GoFlex Family of external hard drives showcases Seagate's new desktop design. The streamlined industrial design delivers a smaller footprint and better reflects the aesthetic of today's modern offices while still providing all of the benefits of previous generations of the GoFlex drives. The new 4TB GoFlex Desk is now available from www.seagate.com and will be available from select online retailers next month for a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $249.99 USD. The entire line of GoFlex Desk products will also adopt the new industrial design in the coming weeks. The GoFlex Desk for Mac featuring both Firewire 800 and USB 2.0 will be available in Apple stores by the end of the month."

And the march toward larger and larger storage goes on. It's impressive to see a 4 TB hard drive, though the number of end users that need that kind of storage can't be very big. I'm personally looking forward to 4 TB hard drives because I've been ripping my DVDs and Blu-ray discs to ISO format and space vanishes quickly when you've got 8 GB (DVD) and 50 GB (Blu-ray) ISO files. 99.999% of people aren't going to do that though, so how many of you need/want a 4 TB storage drive?

"Backing up your computer is important enough that you shouldn't need a day dedicated to it, or a collection of deals on online backup services and hard drives, but that is exactly what today is. March 31 is World Backup Day 2011, which should serve as a reminder to backup your computer, smartphone, iPad and even the hard copy pictures and documents you have around the house."

I'm not entirely sure who decided today was World Backup Day - oh, looks like a few people from Reddit - but it's a great idea! People simply don't pay enough attention to the importance of backing up their data. Notebooks.com has a great collection of resources for the tools and services required for having a solid backup plan. Well worth the read!

I'm personally using Crashplan for my off-site backups now - what with Mozy jacking up my rates by 1309% and all - and a combination of a Windows Home Server, Windows Live Mesh, and a 2 TB external drive keep my data secure. How do you protect your precious data? Better yet, how do you protect the precious data of friends and family who don't know any better?

UPDATE: Yes, it's two World Backup Day posts in a row...what can I say, I really want you to all be backing up! :-)

"Sabio Products, a leading provider of external storage solutions for digital imaging, creative professionals, offices and ‘prosumers' who need large capacity, high speed, professional grade content protection, announced the availability of the DM2PT - an extremely small footprint, 2 drive, RAID enabled external storage solution with exceptional data transfer rates of more than a 115MBps. This all-in-one, high capacity, portable content backup and storage solution has been specifically designed for the studio, office, home or field environment and because of its built in RAID controller with RAID 0, 1, JBOD and span configurations is ideal for any data imaging, HD 1080 video editing, DSLR photography, JPEG/RAW imaging or straight forward media protection and back up application."

The design isn't quite as slick as Seagate's Data Lunchbox prototype, but the basic functions are all there and I'll take a real product that I can buy over one I can't any day. However, it's weird not to see USB 3.0 supported - and what's with the 115 MB/s data rate? What type of connection did they use that on? That's about half what the Seagate Data Lunchbox was doing over USB 3.0 in RAID 0, but 115 MB/s is more than you'd get over USB 2.0...so is that over eSATA? I'm also unsure of the price - I did a little hunting and couldn't come up with anything. I think Seagate's GoFlex solution is more elegant - there's no point having a drive with all those connectors if you don't need them.

It's all about The Cloud these days - your data, you entertainment, your everything - stored on a service that you can access with any online connection. The benefits are many, but what you don't always hear about are the down-sides of everything being cloud-based. What if you get locked out of your account? I've heard of more than a few people that get locked out of their Gmail account or who can't access their Gmail calendar. It happens to Hotmail and Yahoo users as well. What if the company hosting your information deletes it, either accidentally or not, or goes out of business? That's not an uncommon problem. In terms of uptime most cloud services are fairly robust, when things go wrong, they can really ruin your day. Read more...