Eternal Life and Longevity May Elude You, But Unlimited Storage Space Is Now A Reality

Review by Bill Davies

If you have ever used a Zip drive, you are familiar with the concept of putting in a blank disk, copying stuff to it, and ejecting the disk. But as new Macs ship with hard drives in the 60gb to 80gb capacity, you probably are also aware that doing any sort of meaningful copying (backup) of data from your Mac to an external storage device could take days, or weeks, given the small amount of data a Zip disk holds.

Those of you who are more adventurous have probably purchased a second hard drive and either installed it in your computer, or have purchased an external Firewire hard drive. Firewire drives are easy to connect, largely foolproof, and require no knowledge to set them up.

So what do you do it you are close to filling up your external Firewire hard drive? You bought a 20gb drive and now you have 50gb of data you want to copy? Well, you could buy another external drive, or replace yours with a bigger model.

And now there is a third option. If you buy into the Granite Digital FireVUE series, you get a hot-swappable Firewire hard disk that allows you to pop out one drive and insert a new drive! These external Firewire drives are available in 60gb, 120gb, and 200gb sizes. If your drive fills up, you just buy an empty drive bay from Granite Digital, slap in a new ATA drive from Fry’s, eject the full drive bay, and insert a new blank hard drive. So this is just like popping in a blank Zip disk, except instead of a paltry 100mb Zip disk, you can pop in a blank 60gb drive and keep right on saving huge amounts of data.

This system offers essentially unlimited storage and data. Now you can use inexpensive IDE drives in SMART FireWire Hot- Swap Trays and dedicate as much storage as you need for backup, DV, AV, database application, and all other types of storage needs. Simply buy extra bays whenever you need them to add more drives. The bays are inexpensive and offer the best solution for large storage needs.

In addition, the drive bays support S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics and monitoring. Granite Digital, a manufacturer of FireWire 1394 storage solutions, has begun shipping S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Reporting, and Analysis Technology) in its SMART Drive family of external FireWire enclosures and hot-swap bays. Combined with Granite Digital’s SMART user interface – a unique LCD display built into every SMART Drive product – the S.M.A.R.T. technology gives users the unprecedented ability to monitor the performance and reliability of their hard disks. “When we began offering our SMART Drive products we told customers the built-in user interface was like having a technician in each box,” said Frank Gabrielli, President of Granite Digital. “With the addition of S.M.A.R.T. we’re building on that foundation, and we’re extending our lead in offering the best FireWire enclosures in the industry.” S.M.A.R.T. is an industry standard for monitoring performance and reliability parameters in ATA hard disks. Granite Digital’s FireVUE 1394-IDE bridges – at the heart of every Granite Digital SMART Drive product - incorporate proprietary, patent-pending technology, which allow the FireWire bridges to use S.M.A.R.T. to monitor hard disk reliability. The unique, built-in LCD display in each SMART Drive product allows the user to view performance and reliability data in real-time – without the need for any software on the host computer.

The only feature on my personal wish list is to have these drives act just like floppies. That is to say, it would be nice to be able to tell Retrospect to begin a backup of a huge hard drive, and to have it ask for a new 60bg “blank disk” when the first one fills up. Apparently because of the way MacOS X handles external volumes, Retrospect is not able to tell the FireVUE to eject one disk and to then mount another. However, I will keep hammering on these people to try to make this work. Should they accomplish this feat, there would be no need to buy a tape drive for large data backups, as one could just buy five or ten humongous hard drives and let Retrospect just cycle through them for a backup.

Bill Davies
MacNexus
Sacramento CA