Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes - E.W. Dijkstra
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There's a drive glut going on
I'VE BEEN THINKING a lot about disk drives. Last week, I grabbed 500 GB of drive (Western Digital My Book Home) on an impulse buy. Cost me $140, pre-tax, and this was the model that had the triple-play interface of USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and eSATA. It’s a shame that Firewire has gone passe’ because it does make a difference when it comes to shuffling around data. Bonus points for WD for throwing in a Firewire and a USB cable.
At CES, I won a Seagate 160GB Freeagent Go (Would have preferred the $10,000 in travel money). It’s petite, a little smaller than a paperback book, has a nice pretty yellow light on the side to indicate activity, costs around $100 depending on the sale of the week. As a face-up disk drive, it does what it should, but it has two annoyances. The first one is the dual-headed USB 2.0 connectors, one for power, one for power and data. If you don’t have a laptop with a pair of side-by-side USB ports, you’re out of luck for a direct connection.
Secondly, I’m not really a fan of the included software load. Ceedo is supposed to let you duplicate your work environment onto another computer, but if you don’t have the stock MS Office load in mind, you have to go load it onto the drive and shell out some more money to load more apps onto it. Euh. The drive syncing utility only seemed to want to my whole desktop; trying to get individual folders setup and autosync’d just didn’t work.
OK, now having trashed the code load, ignore it and just think cheap, portable storage. Stick it in a coat pocket and you’d barely notice it; you could easily lose it in a large suitcase or bag. By the end of the year, these little things will migrate from Big Box shelves and into the local supermarket once the list price drifts down to $50. Western Digital 160GB pocket portables are around $100.
And the prices are coming down. Ten weeks ago, the WD 500GB with the triple interface was running for $220. Today, $140. And it’s not like they’re in short supply, either; Best Buy has them salted throughout the store in various places. Terabyte pricing is not as silly, but getting close. Last week’s WD terabyte drive deal was $230; this week Hitachi’s 1 TB drive with USB 2.0 is $230.
The best deal this week is the Iomega Minimax 500GB external drive. It’s at $140, but includes three USB and three Firewire 400 ports. Just the ticket for the Mac laptop user or expansion-minded PC guy.
Adverts are down to pitching colours, as if having a cute case will make a difference. “Style and Storage for Her,’ with a choice of white or pink. Simpletech wants to say that paying an extra $30 for a “Signature” Dark Blue Blueberry colour is worth it. When the best feature companies are pitching is pink or blueberry, you know there’s something wrong with this picture.
Fortunately for drive manufacturers, buying an external drive on the cheap looks to be the quickest and most efficient way to move around the gobs and gobs of video people are starting to collect from their camcorders. If you want to give the grandparents the latest video of the grandchildren, a DVD might be cheaper at a buck or two, but you can take multiple years of recordings and stick them on a drive for $100. About the only thing that’s missing is a pack of stickers so the kids can decorate the drive before it gets wrapped up and sent off. µ
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I have a 120 gig Seagate FreeAgent Go drive that also came with bundled software. I didn't bother with Seagate's sync software. For syncing, good old fashioned copy and paste is good enough for me.

The Ceedo software is another matter altogether, though. Sure, you have to shell out another few bucks for a license for Argo, Ceedo's application installer, in order to install your own software on the drive. However, when you consider the benefits of doing so, it is definitely worthwhile.

Let me give an example here. I have several PCs at home. Doing things the Microsoft way, each and every single piece of software I want to install on all of my PCs will require a license for each installation. Ceedo allows me to have a single installation of each of the applications I use on a daily basis and then hook my drive up to whatever PC I am going to use and fire up any of my applications. 

One drive - one application installation - many PCs. The $19.95 I spent on Argo saved me literally thousands in additional software license costs.

In addition to this, I can hook my Ceedo drive up to any Windows-based PC (Windows 98 and Millennium excluded, of course), be it a friend's computer, the computers at my local library, a computer in an Internet Cafe, etc, and use my own applications instead of the applications installed on that PC. When I disconnect my drive, all traces of my presence leave with me. Nothing is left behind. When I walk out the door, I take my files, my applications, and my privacy along for the walk.

I no longer have any need to lug a heavy, bulky laptop any more. I don't have to worry about some low-life trying to steal my laptop and use my information to steal my identity for good measure.

Ceedo has saved me money, ensured my privacy, given me portability, also made computing fun again.

Mr. Mohney, I'd really suggest that you take another look at Ceedo. Make it a good, long look. You might find that this software is extremely useful, and save yourself some mohney in software licensing fees.
2 things:

1st - I had a similar dual USB 2.5" drive that not only took up the two required ports, but also - when bus powered - sucked in performance. Is that true to ALL hard drives that are bus powered?

2nd - I wonder why no-one's come up with Dual USB Bus hard-drives, ie: using 2 usb slots to drive 480+480Mbps to the PC (same applies to flash disks, if Flash is relatively slow, then why not create Flash arrays on USB)?
I think (not that anyone cares) that when the main differentiator is color, hence design, that is a good thing. I couldn't explain the difference between esata and usb and firewire to my mother if a spent a hundred years. RPMs and cache size are just numbers in the wind. This means that computer peripherals are becoming sort of like cars and kitchen thingys. You buy them more because of the looks than anything else. I may be an untypical male, but I don't know how many horsepowers my Mitsubishi has. Enough. I mean sure, I'd love some 500 hp beast with a gazillion in torque and a Porche logo but I can't afford that so I bought the Mitsubishi because it looked nice and the price was right. And when my mother tasked me to get her a laptop I bought a celeron, to run Vista. It certainly is pathetic but it's fast enough for internet explorer and My Pictures and it's all it'll ever run. As geeks we have to face the facts, everybody uses computers now and they are more prone to buy one with a nice box than for any other reason. And it's cool. It means that for the tasks that most people use them for they are good enough. Me I want a Skulltrail, for Lightwave, and AfterFX, but what would Joe Average do with it: Listen to the fans spinning uselessly?

"What is it?

-Oh, just the new aircondition, it has a screen and runs Windows.

Cool."