external

Seagate today launched a new family of external hard drives that's a continuation of its popular GoFlex line-up but now with a completely different name: the Seagate Backup Plus family.

While the GoFlex name is now in the past, the flexibility remains with the external hard drives. The new Seagate Backup drives come in both a portable version, called Seagate Backup Plus, and a desktop version, called Seagate Backup Plus Desk. The former are bus-powered drives that are compact and don't require an external power adapter. The latter are larger drives, both in terms of physical size and … Read more

When it comes to Thunderbolt storage devices, generally the more internal drives it has, the faster performance it offers. This is because the Thunderbolt standard offers 10Gbps speed, while the fastest internal drive, be it a regular hard drive or a solid-state drive, is limited by the SATA 3 standard that caps at just 6Gbps.

The more drives means the vendor can aggregate the performance of each drive into a total throughput that's faster than the top speed of each drive. For this reason, Promise's Pegasus R6, a six-bay Thunderbolt drive has always been the fastest. Now, the G-RAID with Thunderbolt drive can challenge the Pegasus.… Read more

Beside death and taxes -- and April 17 is approaching, in case you don't pay attention -- the loss of data might be the third thing that's certain in life; it's just a matter of time. But there's hope.

Since you can file an extension to do the tax return, which you should avoid, there's also a way for you to further prevent data loss, which you definitely should do. And the Solo G3 from IoSafe is one of the best, if not the best solution, all things considered.

In a nutshell it's an … Read more

While Mac users can use the recently reviewed Windows-preformatted 2TB WD My Passport portable drive, they now have another drive to call their own.

Western Digital announced today the new My Passport Studio, which increased the storage space to up to 2TB. Similar to the existing My Passport Studio, the new drive offers USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 connectivity in the place of USB 3.0. This is because Macs generally don't support USB 3.0, leaving FireWire 800 the only second fastest peripheral connection to Thunderbolt. In fact the new 2TB model shares the same design as the current 1TB model with the all-metal casing. … Read more

Editors' note: This blog was originally posted on March 30, 2012, and updated on March 29, 2013, to update the list of devices and add relevant information.

This last Sunday of March is World Backup Day, and you'll see a lot of storage/backup vendors taking this occasion to pitch their products. I am about to do a similar thing, but from a very different point of view: yours.

This is because none of the existing vendors goes as far as guaranteeing the integrity of storage on the products. At most, a vendor would give you a new product to replace the broken one, or in the currently unique case of IoSafe, offer to pay up to a certain amount toward data recovery. I, on the other hand, promise, if not guarantee, that if you follow my advice, your data will be safe.… Read more

Tomorrow, as we've mentioned, is known in some quarters as World Backup Day. While we at Crave like to think of every day as Backup Day, we also understand that life (in the form of laziness, procrastination, and lack of a backup device) can get in the way of even the best backup intentions. This week's giveaway is here to help.

The winner will score an IoSafe Solo G3 external hard drive. As CNET's storage and networking reviewer Dong Ngo has personally discovered, the disaster-proof SoloPro lineup can survive serious abuse. For its part, the Solo G3 is designed to withstand temperatures up to 1,550 degrees Fahrenheit, submersion in 10-foot-deep water for up to three days, and other extreme conditions (but, hey, don't get carried away).

The Solo G3, like its predecessor, houses just one 3.5-inch internal hard drive. However, unlike the previous version, it sports a fanless design, making for nearly silent operation. It measures 5 inches by 7.1 inches by 11 inches, weighs 15 pounds, and is compatible with Windows and Mac.

Normally, the IoSafe Solo G3 external hard drive would cost you $299.99, but you have the chance to score one free. So how do you go about trying to win? Please read carefully; there will be a test (and please, whatever you do, back up your answers). … Read more

If price has been your biggest concern about a Thunderbolt storage device, and it should be, then the new My Book Thunderbolt Duo from Western Digital is worth the wait.

After teasing about it at CES 2012, WD finally released the drive, and it costs about $100 less than the 2big Thunderbolt from LaCie, which offers exactly the same storage capacities and RAID support.… Read more

If you need to expand your storage space with an external hard drive and you use both Mac and PC, you'll likely run into a few obstacles. Hard drives advertised as being compatible with Windows and Mac OS may have misled you into thinking you could actually use one hard drive for both computers.

You can, but not out of the box.

Most external hard drives (HD) are sold in a format called NTFS, which is designed to work with Windows. Macs read and write to a different format, called HFS+. Another format, called FAT32 is compatible with both … Read more

Western Digital announced late yesterday the first single-volume portable external hard drive on the market that offers 2TB of storage, 500GB more than the second-highest-capacity portable drive of its type, the GoFlex Ultraportable of Seagate.

The new drive belongs to the My Passport family which, prior to this, offered up to 1TB of storage space. Despite the doubling of the capacity, the new 2.5-inch drive remains compact, bus-powered, and portable. WD says it supports USB 3.0 and USB 2.0, and is preformatted using NTFS but can be easily reformatted for Mac OS.… Read more