And you give that type of anecdotal data any value? Do you consider the sample size of the number of your HDDs that have failed statistically meaningful? It is one thing to act irrationally, we all do. It is another thing to present it in a form that can be considered advice.
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Seagate Debuts iOS-Compatible Storage Option, Personal Cloud and Ultra-Thin Portable Hard Drive
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And you give that type of anecdotal data any value? Do you consider the sample size of the number of your HDDs that have failed statistically meaningful? It is one thing to act irrationally, we all do. It is another thing to present it in a form that can be considered advice.
Well it can in the realm of a pipe dream only where they have made a real cloud in a brain storming session if you know what I mean…
Though any tech company uses words to mean things far other than what they should mean and think they are on to something
Consumers though it is 2015 won't even think twice because they are in truth blindly dumb…For every comment like this you'll find other people who've never had an issue. Hard drives are cheap, I don't get why people care so much. If you don't have your data backed to that's your own damn fault.
Every manufacturer may have a failing line of product
my 6 year old Samsung laptop has a Hitachi hdd built in. And a lite-on bluray drive, all of which is ironic because Samsung makes grade A optical and hard drives.
I still use this laptop daily and the hard drive never was an issue.
Ditto! man, it would take a lot for me to trust my data to a seagate drive...
I don't think I agree with your answers. If I had more time I'd refute them. But thanks for your reply anyway as it seems to reinforce my original opinion.
Free Wi-Fi at hotels?
Yeah, right! Not free at quality hotels, especially business types where they get away with soaking you at least $14 per day.
Maybe Motel 6 or Fleabag Motel it's free.
Yeah, right! Not free at quality hotels, especially business types where they get away with soaking you at least $14 per day.
Maybe Motel 6 or Fleabag Motel it's free.
Not all countries outside the us have free wifi in hotels.....welcome to the 90's.
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I have never had a seagate go bad, just maxtor (I know bought by seagate) and western digital. My first computer was a dos box in the 80's then my desktops were all my builds after that.
I'm not saying seagates don't fail, just that experiences differ. I'm wondering if it wasn't maxtor that caused a lot of their problems after they bought them.
I almost forgot the 2 IBM deathstar's I bought at the same time and had go out at almost the same time.
Imagining that THIS poster doesn't travel much. While free WiFi is seemingly advertised everywhere, getting reliable free WiFi, at acceptable speeds, continues to be a major problem BOTH in North America and in Europe.
You're going to have to get out more INSTEAD of just spit-balling answers.
I had 2 deathstar's fail (along with maxtor's and weatern digital), I have had plenty of seagate drives, never had one fail on me, never!
See how that works? Different experiences for different people.
Personal clouds aren't so great
I'm always astounded about the various companies that have a personal cloud product. They all make it seem that it's the best type of cloud you could have for your data. Total BS.
1) When you're not home you'll be accessing your data at your home's upload speed, not your current download speed. Most home ISPs offer very slow upload speeds.
2) No data protection. Your data will be lost if there's a fire, flood or roof leak over your equipment.
There is no benefit to a home based personal cloud other than saving a few bucks a month.
I'm always astounded about the various companies that have a personal cloud product. They all make it seem that it's the best type of cloud you could have for your data. Total BS.
1) When you're not home you'll be accessing your data at your home's upload speed, not your current download speed. Most home ISPs offer very slow upload speeds.
2) No data protection. Your data will be lost if there's a fire, flood or roof leak over your equipment.
There is no benefit to a home based personal cloud other than saving a few bucks a month.
Here in mexico I have been to hotel's with free wifi where web pages will not even load. A couple megabits for a hotel full of guests.
Depends on your situation. For example our internet is not dependable and it's painfully slow. In situations like this it's not a bad idea for home use, forget on the road as that usually doesn't happen anyway.
Not everyone lives in the same situation. There's no benefit to you, but there's a whole world out there and not everyone is the same.
Not everyone lives in the same situation. There's no benefit to you, but there's a whole world out there and not everyone is the same.
It's not worth fighting with the trolls. One thing I have learned over the years is that, even more than CPUs, there is something about storage that brings out some sort of insane tribal instinct in humans: "you MUST bow down to the one true way of accessing your files; anything else is apostasy that deserves DEATH".
Would I buy any of these products? No.
But I know plenty of people for whom they make sense.
Very few people are capable of setting up the kind of home storage system I have cobbled together using old macs and command line tools. For them, a "cloud" storage system which is basically an easy-to-setup RAID, easily accessible from outside the house, is valuable.
Likewise, if you WANT some extra storage, especially something that can be plugged into multiple computers, a very small hard drive is actually nice. And let's not pretend a flash drive is comparable. Flash drives are dirt slow for writing And until the whole flash drive industry gets their act together and provides some sort of useful on-the-box guarantees about write performance (something I don't expect to happen EVER given how this has played out with SD cards) I'm not willing to take a gamble on what "super-duper-ultra-high speed 10,000x performance!!!" means for a "USB-3" flash drive, and I'm certainly not going to advise my friends to buy one, not unless they want to spend literally hours copying to the drive.
Even the iOS drive makes sense for some use cases (like traveling away from home for some time, without a laptop, and want to take a lot of movies with you).
The fact that I (or YOU) don't want these products doesn't mean no-one wants them, just like I don't plan to buy soon a Backblaze storage pod, or an EMC SAN, or a 4TB SSD. Meanwhile I probably WILL buy an 8TB shingled drive as soon as they are available --- and that's a pretty specialized storage device that probably does not make sense for the vast majority of users...
Accessing cellular internet is an issue
Major problem with these devices are that one needs to connect to the hard drive's wifi hotspot to access/stream data. Which means that while you are using the hard drive you cannot use your cellular internet. So, while on the go, if you are accessing and or forget to switch off/disconnect from the hard drive's wifi, your phone will be out of internet for that long. It's solves one problem and creates another one.
If this issue is addressed even i'll purchase it right away, as i have iPhone/ iPad and iMac and keeping media synced/desyned across all is a hassle.
Major problem with these devices are that one needs to connect to the hard drive's wifi hotspot to access/stream data. Which means that while you are using the hard drive you cannot use your cellular internet. So, while on the go, if you are accessing and or forget to switch off/disconnect from the hard drive's wifi, your phone will be out of internet for that long. It's solves one problem and creates another one.
If this issue is addressed even i'll purchase it right away, as i have iPhone/ iPad and iMac and keeping media synced/desyned across all is a hassle.
For Mexico that is probably pretty shameful (but I don't know the details). But it's not always the hotel's fault.
I helped set up the IT system for a new hotel in a developing country last year. The hotel wanted to do everything right, and they did as far as they could. We used top of the line base stations, each one covering only about 6 rooms (basically we tested that there was a good signal to every corner of every room). And the hotel's policy was that charging for WiFi was idiotic --- you might as well charge for electricity and hot water.
BUT there are two things they cannot control:
- the first is bandwidth into the hotel. The particular country (like many) has limited bandwidth into the nation, then limited bandwidth to the capital city, then limited bandwidth inside the city. We did the best we could (which involved paying for the laying if a few km of dedicated optical lines from the nearest ISP station into the hotel) but at the end of the day the best we could arrange was 7 lines, each of 2Mb/s.
This may sound crazy --- running optical lines at 2Mb/s --- but there is a dedicated balancing act going on across ALL the city users who all want bandwidth, and at least the lines are laid. We now hope basically to be able to double the bandwidth on those lines every year for the indefinite future.
- the second is that for MOST purposes (basically everything except streaming and large file downloads) your internet experience is dominated by latency, not bandwidth. In the US this is not usually not THAT obvious because most sites are using high quality CDNs (precisely to deal with latency by moving data close to the major population sites). But when you're in a country basically half way round the world from the US, that speed-of-light latency really adds up (not to mention that the local national network, while the engineers involved are honestly doing their best) is struggling with hand-me-down equipment that's five or ten years old and so with substantially higher internal latencies than US state-of-the-art equipment.
This is also worse because, in the past, national ISPs could do a lot of local caching. But more and more pages these days are constructed on a "personal" basis, and more and more content is sent by HTTPS, both of which prevent caching.
So, yeah, your hotel may be incompetent or just unwilling to spend the money. (In Mexico I would guess that is the case.) But if your hotel is in much of Asia, or Africa, or South America, they may (just like their city ISP and national ISP) be struggling to keep things going in the face of the same sort of doubling of demand every six months that the US saw during the late 90s, but with far less money available than the US had. (On the other hand, the tech is much better than back then, so they can, *just*, keep their heads above water.) In five or ten years, things should be much better, but until then, we all just have to be patient.
1-3mbps is plenty for streaming, even with HD Amazon Video.
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Glad someone brought this up. It's amazing that a hard drive company can have such a bad reputation, and every Seagate drive my friends or I have used has died within around a year.
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Oh don't be stupid. These types of devices have been around for over a year, and the Seagate Media app is no different, conceptually, from the DropBox app, or the Overdrive app, or the Hoopla app.
I know that in some insane fantasy world, Apple supposedly dreams of the day they can force you to only access content from the iTunes store and no-where else; but in the real world Apple competes on the basis that the iTunes store is the most CONVENIENT solution, not on the basis that it is the ONLY solution. Apple has never erected moats of the sort you seem to imagine --- they didn't with Mac, they didn't with iPod, they didn't with iOS.
WD bought 'em out. The six HGST 1TB hard drives we have are always reliable. I hope WD didn't mess with them. I've never seen a WD external hard drive fail, but my '06 iMac's WD drive failed, and my mom's '11 iMac's WD drive failed then failed again after replacement and now seems to be failing again after the second replacement, this time out of warranty.