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LaCie's Newly Designed Mobile Hard Drives Provide Up to 5TB of Storage
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I am waiting for LaCie's new Neil Poulton-designed floppy disk drive.
130 MB/sec ? No thanks. After using thunderbolt storage at 2800 MB/sec, I can never go back to anything slower than 500 MB/sec.
I went with Seagate. First tried Western Digital, but had issues with the Western Digital bus-powered mobile drives not reaching enough power on my USB 2.0 port of my PS3 to get the drive functioning well. Worked fine with my Mac. Returned and got a replacement Western Digital to test with my PS3 and I had the same issue. Switched over to buying Seagate mobile drives after that and didn't have this issues—have about five of those.
Er no, kinda not like that at all. Last I checked the internals of an iPhone were a bit more than a 3rd party hard drive slapped inside a box.
Awful comparison.
I even use SSDs RAIDed for my NAS. They are on 24/7, but have a very low write rate. A spinning rust drive would wear out quickly. A SSD only takes wear when it is being written, not when it is just spinning around waiting to be written.
As Ashbash75 said above, it's an old spinning rust drive. That makes it slow and more susceptible to damage from being banged around. It's a low cost but dead technology.
Wasn't there a time LaCie sold cool high-end storage equipment in the '90s?
This just seems sad. If you need bulk storage there is an argument for spinning rust, but portable spinning rust? In 2022? Really?
Seems expensive, slow, boring, and old.
This just seems sad. If you need bulk storage there is an argument for spinning rust, but portable spinning rust? In 2022? Really?
Seems expensive, slow, boring, and old.
SSDs are more likely to fail for use as a cold storage medium - data retention is measured in the span of weeks, whereas for HDDs it’s measured in decades.
As with everything there is always a right tool for the job. I love HDDs and SSDs for what they each bring to the table. This particular product doesn’t seem to make sense for any real use case though.
I put my SSDs on the top of a power drill. It does make cables a lot more likely to tangle up.
SSDs don't lose data in weeks... dude, everyone's mac would be screwed every time they went on vacation. When a drive is heavily used and worn out it might start to become temperature sensitive but in general SSDs actually do better than spinning drives in cold storage, no mechanical parts to seize up and fail for one thing. Neither are good for true long term storage though, tape properly stored is better for ex but no medium is perfect, replication is key.
You are correct on those last part, though data retention for SSDs really IS measured in weeks. You can look up these statistics yourself. 52 weeks (1 year) is optimistic, as the expected lifespan of the data halves with every 4° rise in temperature or something to that effect. It’s pretty dramatic. SSDs are great for your boot drive but I would never throw one into the back of a drawer or closet and expect to retrieve that data again after any extended period of time.
True, the mechanics of a spinning drive CAN seize up or go faulty in cold storage, but history has shown that old drives can and do often spin up again just fine. And even if there is a mechanical issue, repairs - though pricey - are possible. Actuators and heads can be swapped. But you can’t do anything about SSD cells that are slowly losing electrons and erasing themselves just by sitting there, once that data is gone it is really gone.
I would trust an HDD or LTO tape to cold storage any day of the week over any SSD currently on the market. The cost/tb makes these options more attractive too. The biggest benefits of SSDs, like mechanical reliability and pure speed, don’t serve any purpose for a drive with important documents/backups you might want to leave in a safe deposit box or store at a friends house (3-2-1 rule)
The design is different and looks good. Would have been nice if it came with more colour options.
It's highly dependent on type of NAND (see backblaze's writeup at https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-reliable-are-ssds/), it can be mitigated through filesystems (APFS is not a great archival FS, but ZFS for example is and can mitigate bitrot on an SSD), and is temperature dependent (as are spinning rust mechanical drives). tldr SSDs are a lot more durable as an archival medium than you're making them out to be
I understand the not trusting the cloud, no company is 100% trustworthy to not mess up. But I sure do hope you swap out backup drives to different physical locations. If you merely have your backup under the same roof as your Mac, and the building burns down, of thieves swipe the lot, you're in trouble!
Money printing drives inflation. The more dollars that exist, the less each dollar is worth. Yes, it’s more complicated than that, but not by much.
Irrational consumer behaviour has been baked into prices for at least a century, since the beginning of mass marketing.
Our irrationality is nothing new, so it can’t be used to excuse inflationary policies implemented by western governments.