Nowadays, one of the biggest concerns people have when transporting their data is security. Well, not everybody is carrying military grade sensitive data that needs an extraordinary amount of security, so SanDisk has come up with a simple solution with their Cruzer USB flash drives.

The Cruzer itself looks like a standard flash drive, with a slide out USB head and a pulsating red LED inside the slide button. The LED flashes continuously when transferring files. The body itself is plastic, and I doubt it’ll survive any serious damage.

The goodies on the Cruzer come on the inside, with the encryption software. Inserting the Cruzer, the USB will be recognized as a regular flash drive. Inside you can transfer any file, but the encryption bit comes from the SanDisk Secure Access software.

Installing the software on your PC takes a couple of seconds, after which the ‘vault’ opens up. This is the point where you setup your alphanumeric password, and that’s it. A desktop widget opens up (which can be hidden) where you can drag any file from your PC and drop it in there. The file is encrypted as its being transferred, and that’s it. Instant 128-bit AES security.

So what happens on the Cruzer itself is that a new folder called ‘My Vault’ is created, where all the encrypted files are stored. Interestingly, the file size remains the same, and you can still see the encrypted files, even deleted! However, nothing can open up those files except logging in to the Secure Access software again. You can even create a YuuWaa account to get 2GB of free online storage, creating a cloud backup of your file. Although these aren’t encrypted.

The ease of use is incredible, files can be dragged and dropped directly into the folder (that opens up with Secure Access) or just the vault widget on the desktop. Sadly, to edit these files, you’ll have to copy them onto the PC and then save them back again. And this reminder pops up every time you try to open a file.

In one instance I simply opened an Excel file directly from the vault software, however after editing it I could save it anywhere, even the USB itself, but I have to manually transfer the edited file back through Secure Access.

In case you (or someone else) actually format the Cruzer, you can always download the software again from SanDisk.

The SanDisk Cruzer is a good USB drive for providing decent security. The online 2GB cloud storage isn’t bad either. Transfer rates remained 32Mbps for read and 3Mbps for write speeds. The build quality isn’t the best in the world, but it gets the job done nicely. At AED 42 for the 8GB and AED 77 for the 16GB version, the SanDisk Cruzer is an adequate storage solution if you want decent level of hardware encryption. [UPDATE: The encryption is completely software based using the YuuWaa Secure Access encryption application.]

One of the worst decisions to make while getting an iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch is that extra bit of storage is going to cost you a lot. Jumping from 16GB to 64GB seems an awful lot when you consider the price hike. However, Seagate wants to remedy this problem with their GoFlex Satellite wireless hard drive, where you can purchase 500GB for $200. That price would net you an extra 48GB on iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

The GoFlex Satellite is basically an external 500GB HDD but with built-in 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, which is why it looks chunkier than the average pocket HDD. Well, that and the rechargeable battery. There are two LEDs on the top to indicate power and wireless activity. On the top there’s a SATA power connector whereby you can connect the GoFlex USB 3.0 adapter to connect the hard drive to your PC or Mac to transfer files. On the right there’s the power button and on the left there’s the DC adapter plug.

Now the way the GoFlex Satellite works is very simple: you simply turn it on, connect to it via WiFi and playback everything on the device. Now playback of the type of files depends on your device. For instance on my iPhone 4 and iPad 2 I couldn’t playback .mkv or .avi files, but when connected to my laptop, I could playback any type of video file. Furthermore while compatible videos, like .mp4, would stream immediately on my iOS devices, on my computer I actually had to download the video files first, and then WMP11 would play it back. The same happens when trying to view video files on a MacBook Air. Images and songs streamed immediately, with certain .mp4 files streaming instantaneously.

The Western Digital My Book series of external hard drives have been a part of our daily lives since a good part of the last decade. The WD My Book hard drives are the household standard for data storage and backup, easily available in every high street retailer and for a very reasonable price as well. So today, I’ll be looking at the next generation of My Book external hard drive, the USB 3.0 equipped, 3TB My Book Essential.

As usual, the design of the My Book Essential is a love or hate affair, with my personal opinion skewing towards the former given the hard drive’s simple, and rather elegant design. That, and the fact that when stacked together, the My Book Essentials give a very neat appearance. Although, given the 3TB capacity of our test unit, I can’t see anybody stacking this HDD, at least not for another good year.

The completely fanless design of the My Book Essential means that it’s running at a cool 5400RPM, which for an external storage/ backup HDD is a completely acceptable speed. We won’t be running games off of this oil tanker of a HDD. That said, it’s always interesting to test a HDD to see how fast it really is. However, you will hear the occasional read/write heads clicking loudly every once in a while as it starts to write large data.

For our benchmarks, I have used CrystalDiskMark to get the sequential read and write speeds, and HD Tach for the Burst speeds. To compare the My Book Essential USB 3.0 3TB, I have used one of its main competitor, the Buffalo DriveStation Axis USB 3.0 1TB  external HDD (which understandably costs AED 380). Furthermore to give an idea of the performance extremes, I have also added the numbers of the Kingston HyperMAX 3.0 128GB USB3.0 SSD (which costs AED 1,289) and the TwinMOS A3 USB3.0 8GB flash stick (which costs AED 75).

As you can see, the My Book Essential USB3.0 3TB is one hell of a performer, which is great given its major use of data storage and backup. The huge sequential read and write speeds are extremely impressive because this means you can transfer large amounts of data files to and from the My Book Essential to your PC.

The high burst speeds will ensure that regular backups of small files using the included WD SmartWareSoftware are promptly stored to the My Book Essential, ensuring a smooth experience in daily usage.

The Western Digital My Book Essential USB3.0 3TB external HDD is a step in the right direction, with WD providing a very fast, quiet and relatively cool HDD in a smart looking external enclosure. For the price, there’s nothing in the market that provides this much value for money when storage capacity and overall speed is concerned.

The transition that we are going through is between the extremely popular USB 2.0 standard and the upcoming and insanely fast USB 3.0 standard that offers almost ten times the speed of USB 2.0. The problem is that your current computer might not be USB 3.0 ready so you’re left wondering if you should spend a bit extra and get a USB 3.0 drive that you might never use or get the cheaper USB 2.0 drive but regret later when you upgrade your computer that does support USB 3.0. To add to the confusion, some people are switching from PCs to Macs that offer a Firewire port that is potentially faster than USB or shifting to an eSATA port found in many new laptops.

To explain what Seagate has done, you need to know one more thing- these external hard drives that you use on your computers are basically internal hard drives in an enclosure. They are very much the same drives as the ones found inside your laptops and desktops connected through a SATA interface. So, in essence, these external hard drives are, more of less, an enclosure that converts the internal SATA interface to a connector that can be easily connected to your computer externally through USB2.0 or USB 3.0 or Firewire.

So when you buy a portable external hard drive, you usually get the hard drive along with the USB or Firewire cable- depending on the type of connection that hard drive supports. What Seagate has done with their GoFlex drive is, instead of just bundling a cable, they bundle a cable and a converter. The converter attaches to the SATA interface of the included hard drive and USB 2.0 on your computer. So now, when you switch to a USB 3.0 or Firewire or eSATA interface, all you need to do is buy this converter instead of a whole new drive. Seagate calls these converters as “Upgrade cables”

Now that you hopefully have a grasp on Seagate’s GoFlex concept, lets take a look at their 500GB USB 2.0 FreeAgent GoFlex Hard Drive.

Back in the day, ok, about 2 years ago, when everybody was stuck with 7,400 RPM hard drives in their PCs, it was Western Digital who rocked the market with their first VelociRaptor SATA hard drives running at 10,000 RPM with 32MB cache. While initially designed for enterprise solutions, the Velociraptor HDDs found a huge and eager audience in the PC enthusiast industry who could finally have SCSI level of performance without shelling out ridiculous amounts of money on the HDD and controller cards.

Two years later after the introduction of the first VelociRaptor HDD and Western Digital have introduced the 450GB and 600GB models for the masses. These 10,000 RPM hard drives are in the face of stiff competition from SSDs which have become less expensive over the years. Still, the performance of a VelociRaptor is nothing to sneeze at, neither is the price of an SSD which still up in the skies.

Western Digital’s new 600GB VelociRaptor is compatible with SATA 3 (6GB/s) speeds, however, I’ve tested it on our regular SATA motherboard as the difference between SATA 2 and 3 is absolutely negligible on traditional HDDs; it is the SSDs where SATA 3 really shines. The new 600GB VelociRaptor also has a claimed MTBF (mean time between failure) of 1.4 million hours, compared to 1.2 million of the previous gen 300GB VelociRaptor as well the Intel X-25M 160GB (G2) SSD I’ve used for the benchmarks.

For testing the WD 600GB SATA Velociraptor, I ran on it our usual testbed which comprises of an Intel Core i7 965EE @ 3.2GHz on an ASUS Rampage II Extreme motherboard, packing 3x 1GB Corsairs XMS3-1333 ram, a Kingston 64GB V-Series SSD running Windows 7 Ultimate; all of which is powered by a Corsair HX1000W PSU.

Canon calls it’s LEGRIA HF S21 its most advanced flash memory camcorder that puts pro-level HD shooting in your hands. Launched in June 2010, the camcorder is designed for serious amateur video enthusiasts especially with that hefty price tag of over $1,200.

The LEGRIA HF S21 is capable of recording AVCHD format progressive 1080p video at a maximum data rate of 24Mbps on a 64GB flash drive that can be supported by SDHC cards in its two slots. It also comes with 2 SDHC card slots that can each hold a 32GB card making the total capacity to a whopping 128GB.

The camcorder features a CMOS sensor capable of capturing 8 Megapixel still images, a high quality lens capable of an optical zoom of 10x, a 3.5inch LCD touch screen, dolby stereo sound, pop up flash, a DIGC III processor, manual controls and so much more. The pay-off for this top of the line specification sheet is that unlike the norm, the LEGRIA HF S21 is bulkier than its predecessor and its competition.

The LEGRIA HF S21 has a set of manual controls in terms of white balance, focus and exposure. It allows you to adjust focus view a small dial next to the lens or the touch screen interface where you can also control the white balance, shutter speed(between 1/2000th to ½ sec) and aperture. These set of controls give the user more space to be creative with their videos or images keeping avid video enthusiasts happy. You also have the Zebra pattern function that warns you when a scene is overexposed.

On top of the camcorder, you’ll find the hot shoe in the form of a mini Advanced Accessory Shoe enabling you to add a more powerful video light in situations when the inbuilt LED video light seems inadequate. Also the 58mm lens thread is compatible to various professional filters.

Sound is recorded via a two-channel dolby digital microphones while an additional (and optional) microphone can be used to create a 5.1 channel surround sound. The inability to record 5.1 channel surround sound straight out of the box from a top of line camcorder is a little disappointing to say the least especially when compared to competitors. There is a headphone output for monitoring the sound recording.

You can connect the LEGRIA HF S21 to a TV using composite or component output, or for maximum quality you can use the mini HDMI terminal to connect it to a HD TV. A USB port provides computer connectivity. The LEGRIA HF S21 allows you to convert AVCHD (MPEG4) files to smaller standard definition (SD) MPEG2 files enabling easy sharing for web.

Some of the earlier higher-capacity portable drives were a two-in-one solution, however, the STOR.E ART 3 has a single 2.5” 1TB hard drive inside its casing. So although it’s 6.4cm height might not sound as sexy as some of the lower capacity drives, it’s also not as thick as the earlier high capacity dual drive solutions either. With a glossy front and back along with a rubberized edge that is good for a grip hopefully enough to survice a drop, the STOR.E ART 3 is pretty average in terms of looks. An LED on the top of the unit flickers when the drive is accessed.

Included in the package is a USB cable which is all that’s needed to power up and access the drive. The drive is pre-formatted NTFS-3g so Windows users will have no problems reading or writing to it, however, you might need to reformat it if you want to use a Mac or use an application like MacFuse that can write to NTFS partitions under OS X. Toshiba preloads the Windows version for NTI BackupNow EZ application that allows you to backup folders/files as well as create images. You can also schedule the backup process to automatically create a backup of your PC.

We tested the drive using HD Tach and as expected the USB 2.0 bus limited the throughput of the STOR.E ART 3 between 30 to 35MB/s which is with almost all USB 2.0 drives that we’ve tested to date. The following screenshot shows you the numbers.

Priced at AED 680 (US$ 185/-), the Toshiba STOR.E ART 3 goes for what you’d expect to pay for a 1TB portable drive at the moment. I do wish that it offered a USB 3.0 interface for faster access, as accessing 1TB of data over a USB 2.0 interface can a while.

The DriveStation we received had a capacity of 1.0TB, however, 1.5TB and 2.0TB versions are also available. It comes pre-formatted with FAT32 meaning it would allow direct read and write access to a Windows or Mac based platform. However, once you plug in the device, the auto start program kicks in and asks you if you to format the drive into NTFS while .dmg files suggest that you will be able to do the same on a Mac and HFS.

The DriveStation HD-HXU3 USB 3.0 itself is a sleek looking hard drive- not much bigger than your standard internal 3.5″ drive. On top you have an LED while the backside has the USB and power connections. You can keep the drive horizontally or vertically- I prefer the latter as that saves some space. The chassis has active cooling but the fan is extremely quiet and I did not hear it at all during testing. There are vents towards the bottom of the chassis to let the hot air out.

We still had the Buffalo USB 3.0 PCI-E x1 expansion card with us which is what we used to test the older 2.5″ drive as well. As usual, we ran HDTach to measure transfer rates. Before that though, we installed the USB Turbo application present on the drive which, as you will see, inflates the burst rates to unbelievable levels. Here is what the throughput of this drive looks like.

That throughput you see above is actually faster than your average internal SATA drive that starts off at about 110 MB/s and ends at 60 MB/s which means that the DriveStation is pretty darn fast. Average Read Speeds posted by this drive is 109.3 MB/s which again is faster than your average desktop hard drive that posts about 85 MB/s.

In short, the Buffalo DriveStation USB 3.0 is an incredibly fast external hard drive. It doesnt take much space on your desktop and is barely audible. About the only thing going against it is the price and the fact that you need a USB 3.0 equipped PC to utilize it. Priced around AED 650/- (US$179), the DriveStation is quite a bit more pricey than your average 1.0TB USB drives that retail under AED 500 but then you always pay a bit more for the latest/fastest. That being said, if I was to buy an external USB drive today, this would be it.

Its time to revise this standard as well as you must have seen the limitations of bandwidth that USB2.0 offers in our Flash and Hard Drive tests of late that pretty much saturate the bus. Although USB 3.0 doesn’t offer a fortyfold speed increase from USB 2.0, it still offers a pretty decent jump at ten times the speed of the bus its succeeding. At 4.8Gbps or approximately 570 MB/s, USB 3.0 should satisfy most of the peripherals connected to it.

Now just like the original USB and USB 2.0, you’ll have to wait for a while if you want it supported natively by your chipset. Until that time, if you want to enjoy USB 3.0 speeds, you will need to get an add-on card for your computer or look for a Notebook/Desktop that offers this through an additional onboard controller. Buffalo was kind enough to send us their PCI Express based USB 3.0 add-on card for the desktop along with their 2.5” portable hard drive that is also USB 3.0 based.

Installing the Buffalo USB 3.0 PCI Express Interface Card was as easy as opening the chassis of your desktop PC, finding an empty PCI Express slot and connecting the four pin power adapter included in the package. Buffalo bundles a low profile backplate if you have a slim PC. Once the card was inside the computer, you simply pop-in the included CD to install the drivers and you’re all set.

The Buffalo MiniStation Lite USB 3.0 hard drive comes in a glossy black finish and looks very much like a standard USB hard drive except that the USB port looks a bit different. The new SATA 3.0 specification calls for a new connector which is a bit flatter but wider than the old connector. The other side of the connector is a standard flat USB connector so you don’t have to worry about backward compatibility- all USB 3.0 drives should work with USB 2.0 at the lower speed of USB 2.0.

With our testbed all set, we brought in the MiniStation Lite USB 3.0 Portable hard drive but first, we thought we’d benchmark it using a built-in USB 2.0 port on our desktop. The following is thr result of data throughput using a USB 2.0 interface for this drive.

Its seems pretty clear from the graph above that the MiniStation is saturating the USB port with a constant throughput of about 35 MB/s. Next, we powered this drive on the USB 3.0 plug on the Buffalo and here is what it looks like.

As you can see, there is a pretty big jump in the performance under USB 3.0 with the graph starting at 70 MB/s which is double of what you got from USB 2.0 and finishing off at around 35 MB/s. The Average Read performance for this drive under USB 3.0 was 54 MB/s which is a lot higher than 34 MB/s under USB 2.0

For those of you wondering how USB 3.0 compares to your internal SATA drive, well, there is still room for improvement. Here is an HD Tach screenshot for a pretty standard 250GB 7200 RPM internal SATA drive.

As you can see, USB 3.0 is not out to replace your internal hard drive but it offers a pretty decent throughput for external hard drives moving forward. I would be particularly interested in testing Solid State and Flash drives when they come our as there is a good possibility of them saturating the USB 3.0 bus.

But if you’re looking for the best bang for your buck, the traditional mechanical hard drives will continue to lead that segment. The Buffalo MiniStation Lite USB 3.0 drive will cost you around US$160 (AED 590) for the 500GB version and $199 (AED 730) for the 640GB version.

Dual Core CPU – The Thecus N4200 is powered by the new Intel Atom™ D510 dual-core processor. Running at 1.66GHz, this CPU, paired with 1GB of DDR2 memory, delivers quick system response and can even smoothly handle multiple client access. Data can be accessed and transferred quickly, so you don’t have to wait around to enjoy your favorite movies, music, photos and more. The N4200’s Intel® Atom™ D510 dual-core CPU offers wicked performance for the home user.

Dual DOM Technology – The Disk On Module (DOM) of a NAS device contains all of the software necessary to operate the machine. Should it fail for any reason, your NAS will become inaccessible and your data could be at risk. To ensure maximum uptime, the N4200 includes Thecus’ Dual DOM Technology, which allows a secondary DOM to reprogram the primary one if anything goes wrong.

Dual Displays – Take control of your NAS with the Thecus N4200’s Dual Display Technology. The N4200 comes with an LCD display that shows you critical system information, while the 2.8” OLED display allows you to change a number of settings right from the device including WAN, LAN, Link Aggregation and language. Managing your home NAS just doesn’t get any easier than with the N4200.

Dual Power – If the power happens to go out during a critical firmware upgrade, your NAS could be in trouble. The N4200 comes equipped with its own Battery Backup Module (BBM) – a lithium-ion battery pack that kicks in during a power outage and allows the system to save unwritten data to the hard disks, thereby maintaining data integrity.

Dual HDD Profile Support – The N4200 features combo drive bays that allow users to install either 2.5” or 3.5” hard disks. Users can install the smaller 2.5” drives to save power and lower noise, or choose 3.5” drives for huge capacity, making the N4200 an incredibly flexible NAS.

Dual RAID – Why choose between performance and security? The N4200 allows you to configure two RAID modes simultaneously for optimum data transfer rates and rock-solid data integrity. With the power of Dual RAID, the N4200 is your digital data fortress.

Fast, secure, and incredibly easy-to-use, the N4200 with 6D Technology is the ideal storage device for the digital lifestyle.