We computer hobbyists, as well as small-business owners, have come a mighty long way from the humble days just a decade ago when a mere half dozen floppy disks held all of our word processing files, Quicken data, spreadsheets and pictures.
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For younger readers, that’s “floppy disks” with a “k” instead of a “c” as in Compact Discs, Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs) and the discs inside our hard drives. Our discs with a “c” keep growing in terms of storage room, but there never seems to be enough.
So today I’ll cover the latest developments in home and small-business data storage with reviews of the Sabio Storage CM-4, a whopping 1 terabyte hard-drive system, and of Fireman 2.0, a leading-edge software package for fast burning of DVDs at both 4.7 gigabytes and 8.5 gigabytes.
The race for ever bigger, faster, safer data storage gear may be the one thing that has remained constant throughout these early years as this century’s Digital Revolution has replaced the last century’s Industrial Revolution.
A gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes or 1 billion bytes. A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes or 1,000 billion bytes. That’s indeed a mighty tall pile of zeros and ones, friends and neighbors.
As storage space has soared we’ve been using the same Windows XP operating system for half a decade now, and it’s been about 3 years since the speed of chips from Intel and AMD needed to be faster to create data.
In other words, our computers are fast enough but our storage capacity is far from sufficient. Chip speeds allow us to handle things like movies, music files and photographs, not to mention business processes.
But the longer we use our speedy computers the more we are running out of the space needed to keep all these digital treasures. Once-sufficient hard drives of 100 gigabytes all too quickly get filled with recorded movies from TiVo and Media Center PCs. Anybody who has shot digital home videos knows how fast a kid’s birthday party can gobble up a gigabyte-and-a-half of drive space.
NASA didn’t have a gigabyte-and-a-half of storage space the year men walked on the moon. Today if you record an hour of video at HQ (high quality) it takes 4.7 gigabytes.
And remember that a lot of our storage space must go to holding backup copies of these digital treasures as well as the originals.
A relatively new company, founded in 2004, with branches in North Dakota and Southern California, Sabio Digital Inc. offers what amounts to a box full of hard drives that can store and protect data at several levels. It’s at SabioProducts.com.
At the home-user level, Sabio’s daisy-chained CW-4 hard drives can simply back up one’s movies, CDs, music, photos, etc., and then dole them out to all of the computers in a network.
At the most business-like, the CM-4 can set up so-called RAID 1 through 5 storage layouts that can make redundant copies of all data and monitor all the PCs and Macs on the network, and automatically back up the data they create without user intervention.
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, and the software can either treat a number of different hard drives as though they were a single disc or implement several different backup schemes named RAID 0 through RAID 5. It’s pretty head spinning stuff, so let me point you to the Wikipedia description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID.
The company submitted for review a version with 4 bays, each filled with 250-gigabyte hard drives, and I can happily report that setting it up was as simple as advertised. It’s not quite beginner-level stuff, but the installation works through a browser interface, and there are plenty of hand-holding wizards.
I set it up without incident on a network including my Media Center PC hooked to the living room TV set, two desktops and a laptop. The CW-4 connects with an Ethernet cable to a router (wireless, in my case) and even has USB ports for adding external drives.
The network let me stream all of my recorded movies, music and photos to play on whichever member of the network desired. At $1,000 for the box and four of the 250 gigabyte drives, it’s a tad expensive, but when one considers the benefits, it really only is a tad costly.
If a grand for all those gigs sounds gargantuan, take a look at making ongoing backups of your data with software like Fireman 2.0 for $39.99. It stands out for a simple-as-soup interface and the ability to drag and drop data files into a special folder to permit on-the-fly backup storage.
Fireman 2.0 also creates and backs up digital movies and makes ISO files that are copies of an entire disc that can be stored on a hard drive and used for fast duplication of discs.
It works with both 4.7-gigabyte DVDs and the twice-as-large Double Layer discs, and while not in the same class as a RAID drive, Fireman 2.0 offers dirt-cheap storage and ease of use that will make you want to use it.
It’s available at Honestech.com (Honest Technology Inc.) and it’s joyfully simple. Honest.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.