Seagate makes CES splash with $99 drive, 'personal' cloud offerings Seagate's arriving at CES 2015 with all guns blazing, with a new "living" logo and personal cloud, wireless, and anorexic hard drives to store the data of tomorrow. Thin, portable, $99... The first of the new products is a 7mm thick, 500GB portable external drive called the Seagate Seven - as in 7mm. It has a bare drive look …
There probably is no internal SATA connector as such, the external one the cable plugs into will be straight on the drive PCB & poke through the case. I suspect this having dismantled a Samsung/Seagate M3 last week in the hope of having a usable case after giving up on the drive. I was disappointed. The drive didn't work right from the day it arrived and like an idiot I did not keep the packaging so could not return it. 3 minutes with a ball pein hammer did wonders to relieve the tension caused by weeks of failed backup attempts.
"The two-bay system can be reconfigured after purchase to function as a single copy data store (RAID 0) ...."
Why would anybody want RAID 0 inside a remote NAS type box? If you want to combine capacities you could do some disk spanning or JBOD type of technique. The write speed of a modern SATA disk is far faster than most domestic networks could provide, so there is no speed advantage and the reliability gets shot since _all_ data would be lost in case of failure of one of the drives.
Why would anyone want a RAID 1, for that matter? As they said it themselves, that's no replacement for a backup - any number of thing from a nasty drop to voltage spike could kill both drives at once, so you still need another backup anyway. I can see how limping on with one drive in case of failure is a feature in an uptime-sensitive server environment, but this is a *personal* "cloud" - I suspect most people don't care all that much about 99.999% uptime (when they have some other backup anyway) as much as they care about having twice the capacity...
Seagate CEO and chairman Steve Luczo had a ready-prepared quote about this: "The new Seagate brand is a powerful representation of the total commitment that Seagate is making to help businesses and consumers realise the full potential of ‘living’ data."
"We are refreshing the look and feel of our company and we are redefining the relationships we have with our consumers, businesses and partners," he added.
The new logo looks crap. I guess there is some vague logic to it as the original Seagate logo looked like bit like two tape spools with some untensioned tape between so you could (kind of) argue they've gone from tape to disk to stream. :)
Maybe its just me but that broken hob logo looks much better.
a Cloud was once a term to mean online storage systems that existed in undefined systems not under a user's physical control. It could be anywhere, and everywhere. And that was at least acceptable.
Then people selling SANs started calling the same kit as a Cloud and just changed how it looked to the Administrators. Same stuff, new blinkenlights on the box.
Now we're getting USB drives called "the Cloud" and some of them aren't even NAS capable. Because it's not physically inside your desktop, anything is now marketed as "cloud".
And that p*sses me off. Now get off mah lawn! All you MBAs out of the server room, let the grognards get the work done! :P
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