Google launched their Drive cloud storage service last week. We all expected that to be coming. There had been speculations about it for a long time. We’re all a little surprised that Google came onboard so late. With Google Drive, you get a generous 5 GB of cloud storage free of charge. At the same time, Google also announced upgrading of the free Gmail storage, which is separate from Drive, from 7 GB to 10 GB.

Wonderful. There are now several main cloud storage providers. Some are designed for specific purposes, like Flickr for photos. Others are truly “hard disks in the cloud”, and you can use them to store any thing you like. The ones that come immediately to mind are Microsoft SkyDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive. All three offer a free-tier of storage at no cost, and all provide paid options to upgrade storage capacity.

Google Drive was a little late coming to the cloud storage party. That’s probably because they were working to differentiate themselves. Google has integrated Drive with Docs, the latter being their web-based office suite. So, Google Drive is not just simply a cloud-based storage service, but also offers cloud-based creation and editing of office documents, presentations and spreadsheets. This is where it clearly has the upper hand over any other cloud storage solutions, including SkyDrive and Dropbox.

On the basic level, all three solutions offer the same storage synchronization feature. You designate a folder on your computer for synchronization to the cloud. Everything you put in this folder gets sent to the cloud. Changes you make to files in this folder is sent to the cloud. Anything that changes in the cloud is downloaded back to this folder. If that’s all that you do, then at the very least what you’ve got is a cloud-based backup of your folder.

But the true benefit of cloud storage is when you use multiple computers, and all of them have a designated folder setup to synchronize with the cloud storage. Then, whatever changes you make on one computer will get propagated to all other computers. A common use for this is to have your office computer and home computer synchronized, so that all your files are available on both of them.

If you’re not willing to pay for your cloud storage, the free-tier service from the three providers offers you the following storage capacity:

If the above is not enough, how much does it cost to upgrade your storage capacity? Oh, for the nitty gritty details, you’re best off going to the individual service providers to compare plans. But just for sake of comparison, let me put up a table for 25 GB and 100 GB capacity points:

So, it seems, Microsoft offers the cheapest cloud storage service. That’s assuming you don’t need all the features that Google Drive offers (i.e. the web-based office suite). Oh, for Apple users, there’s also iCloud to consider. But it’s not cheap ($40/year for 20 GB, and $100/year for 50 GB).

All prices above are in US$.

Of course, another thing to consider is the speed at which your cloud storage can be accessed. I’ve not really tested Microsoft SkyDrive, but it looks like Google Drive is a lot faster than Dropbox.

What cloud storage will you choose?

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This would be my second solid state disk. I finally got to the bottom of the occasional (but getting more frequent) problems with freezing that occurs a few seconds after resuming from sleep on my MacBook Pro. After a fresh installation of Mac OS X Lion and replacing all other hardware, the only thing left to suspect was my OCZ Vertex 2 SSD. It was somehow locking up. So I’ve sent it in for RMA. Sadly it would take about 4 weeks to get a replacement.

I couldn’t wait 4 weeks without an SSD. So, I started scouring for solutions, and decided I would invest in another SSD. It seems the market has gone toward SATA3, and SATA3 SSDs are awfully expensive. I have no use for SATA3. So I limited my search to SATA2 devices, and with capacities of at least 160GB. Although SSDs have dropped in price, they are still quite pricey. After almost a year since I got my OCZ Vertex 2, it seems the choices have not changed much: the OCZ Vertex 2 is still in the market, and now joined by the Intel SSD 320.

Should I go with OCZ or Intel? The OCZ Vertex 2 has very good specifications. On paper, the Intel SSD 320 wasn’t superior. Rated read/write performance was slower, and there is no garbage collection. The latter would benefit Mac OS X Lion since it was no built-in support for TRIM on non-Apple SSDs. Real world benchmarks, though, show that the Intel is both superior in some cases, and yet inferior in others. There are some comments that the Intel is more reliable. I wouldn’t mind trying the Intel too, but was worried about its performance.

When I got down to Sim Lim Square, Intel or OCZ became a non-issue. No one had stock of the OCZ Vertex 2. So I came back with the Intel SSD 320.

The Intel SSD 320 is packaged in a clunkier box than the OCZ Vertex 2. It’s still a 2.5″ notebook-sized form factor, of course. The disk enclosure itself, however, looks more like a hard disk than the OCZ Vertex 2 does. Installation was straight-forward. I’ve done many disk swaps on my MacBook Pro, so I’m pretty well-experienced.

How do I feel about the Intel SSD 320′s performance? I don’t have the benchmark numbers from my OCZ Vertex 2. Objective time measurements show that it’s faster than spinning disks, of course. Subjective feeling, however, is that the OCZ Vertex 2 is definitely much faster than the Intel SSD 320. Once my RMA OCZ Vertex 2 is back, it’s going back into my MacBook Pro, and the Intel will move to my desktop.

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Since then, I’ve been convinced that SSDs are about the best upgrade you can get for a notebook. Conventional disks are slow, particularly so on notebooks (typically spinning at 5400RPM versus 7200RPM on consumer desktops), and it’s a pain waiting for programs or data to load from disk. You can add RAM to a computer so that more things can stay in cache and speed things up a bit, but eventually you’re going to have to read or write something to disk.

With an SSD, everything happens pretty much instantly. Alright, maybe not literally, but it’s really blazingly fast compared with using a conventional disk. I remember, one day, when I accidentally launched Adobe Photoshop by mistake, something that happens from time to time, I was cursing silently thinking about how my notebook was going to lock up for an eternity while it struggled to start the application. But lo and behold… Adobe Photoshop was up ready to use in like just three seconds. That was simply amazing. From that point on, I had no qualms loading “heavy” applications.

Using a device that “responds” instantaneously makes interacting with it so much more enjoyable. This is what everyone expects of their smartphones, their tablets, their networked DVR, etc. So why not computers as well? I am slowly progressing to the type of consumer that expects things to “just work”, and also to “work beautifully”. Yup, waiting for Adobe Photoshop or whichever Microsoft Office app to load is not fun at all.

I know the OCZ Vertex 2 is already superseded by the Vertex 3. But for those of you who are thinking of replacing the spinning disk on your notebook that has only SATA2 interfaces (probably there aren’t SATA3 notebooks at this time), know that the Vertex 2 already sort of saturates the SATA3 bandwidth. That’s at least in terms of the rated specifications (285MB/s reads, 275MB/s writes). If you do some Google digging, you’d learn that the Vertex 2 is spectacular because it’s SandForce 1200 controller has been specially blessed with the performance of the enterprise-grade SandForce 1500 controller.

Nowadays, SSDs are getting more commonplace. Apple’s MacBook Air product line now offers only SSD configurations. Servers are commonly offered SSD options, and in fact, when I recently asked for some quotations, SSDs were automatically included for the operating system drive even though I did not ask for it.

You’re probably not going to get an SSD as big as you’d like… at least not as big as you might have gotten with a spinning hard disk. So the trick is that you’ll have to learn about space management. What to keep on your fast SSD, and what to move out to an external storage. External storage could be thumb drives, portable hard disks, or even a cloud-based storage. Cloud-based storage could be awfully slow… but hey, some people move their photos and music to the cloud. These are the chunking stuffs that would eat up lots of your disk space.

So… if you’re thinking how to soup up your notebook… go for SSDs!

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Then, rotating hard disks are going to get demoted in the storage hierarchy, to be used for backups, offline storage, external drives, etc. It’s like how hard disks have become so cheap that they are already replacing tape backups in data centres.

SSDs will have the important benefit of being more robust and shock resistant, important features for components used in a mobile device. It should also consume less power, although real world results are somewhat varied at this time. But when they do sort out the power efficiency matters, it will mean longer run time for mobile devices too, without having to be tethered to a power supply. Notebooks, netbooks and whatever-pads are going to get a lot more useful than it has ever been.

The last problem with mobile devices will be power. When will we get wireless power?

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For so little money, it seems like it doesn’t really matter which hard disk I get. After all, my PC isn’t anywhere near “cutting edge”, surely any of today’s hard disk would be more than good enough for it. Still, it’s good to do a little bit of research.

A couple of friends tell me to avoid Seagate. Considering that the failing disk is from Seagate too, I tell myself to avoid it too. So apart from Seagate, the main choices for 1TB disks aredown to Western Digital and Hitachi. I’m not very impressed with Western Digital, and I actually haven’t thought much about Hitachi either. But it seems like Hitachi disks are quite well received, and they are actually descended from IBM’s storage division when Hitachi bought them out earlier in this millennium. The Deskstar hard disks from IBM then were quite well known (first it was bad, but later it was better).

So it was the Hitachi hard disk that I was going to get: the 7K1000.C model. Apparently the “7K1000.C” isn’t printed anywhere on the disk itself, and fortunately I noted about it and remembered the actual number used: HDS721010CLA332. Why? It turns out the shops in Sim Lim weren’t any helpful either knowing exactly which Hitachi hard disk they had. The first shop, Fuwell, simply showed me the disk and I determined it was the older generation 7K1000.B model. When I did find the 7K1000.C at another shop, they didn’t know about the difference either or how to tell them apart. Good thing for the little bit of homework.

The differences between the 7K1000.B and 7K1000.C models are small. The B is the 2nd generation, while the C is the 3rd generation. If there is no cost difference (the 7K1000.C I bought was actually cheaper from the other shop that carried the 7K1000.B), why not get the latest generation? For the 1TB capacity drives, the 7K1000.C has greater media density (352Gb/sqin vs 244Gb/sqin), greater media transfer rate (1589Mb/s vs 1406Mb/s), more cache (32MB vs 16MB), consumes less power at idle (4.4W vs 5.2W), and is quieter (2.4db vs 2.7db). Oddly enough, the first generation 7K1000 has 32MB cache, which is more than the 2nd generation 7K1000.B.

Installation of the hard disk was a no-brainer. These are commodity components anyway, so for a person familiar with fixing up a PC, there’s nothing really to write about.

I installed Fedora 12, and I thought the installation went a lot faster than it ever did for other versions of Fedora I installed. Of course, the improvement could either be due to a better optimized Fedora itself, or well, the disk is really making a difference. No time to do a real objective benchmark. Nevertheless, I’m pleased that the rather old PC I have (5 years old perhaps) supports SATA2, so I am benefitting from the 3.0Gbps interface speed.

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Our branded hard disk, in a branded rackmount server, bought from a brand name company, was in fact a Certified Repaired HDD. In other words, it was a used, or refurbished hard disk! Wow!

Now we see that it is no wonder that the hard disk failed. Well, of course, even a refurbished hard disk would have been subject to properly quality checks and in should work pretty well too. I guess we just wanted to blame something for the problem. Furthermore, we’re just so surprised about getting a refurbished hard disk when we bought a brand new computer. I don’t think anyone would be very pleased about this at all.

You can see from the photo. This is a Seagate hard disk from an IBM eServer xSeries. It’s “date of manufacture” is a pretty long time ago.

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It sounds so unexciting, that’s because external hard disks are commodity items. The backup programs that come included with the Maxtor drive are probably something “interesting” to PC users, but for a Mac user like me, Leopard’s Time Machine makes such programs irrelevant. Time Machine does everything for me, automatically.

I’m actually quite familiar with this drive. That’s because I bought the 1TB Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus last year. That is a big brother desktop version of the Mini. It has a Firewire port, in addition to USB. That’s about as much different as they go.

That the desktop external hard disk is clunky and needing a power supply is not a problem. It is “fixed” and not carried around. For the Mini, if I needed to carry it around, it can never be too small. Yeah, it would be lovely to have a 320GB USB thumb drive (which of course I’m sure will come not too far away).

Ps: We will definitely see more solid-state memories. We are already having SSD drives in notebooks and servers now.

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This is a typical external 3.5″ hard disk, so it requires its own power supply. This makes it not very portable of course, but that’s okay for me because I really just want to leave it on my desktop. The sides of the casing is a nice brushed metal, and the rest is black plastic. It comes with 1 USB 2.0 port and 2 Firewire 400 ports, all located at the back of the casing. The only button is the “one touch” button on the front, which is lit up by a white LED when the hard disk is powered up and also doubles up to indicate hard disk activity. The LED backlight doesn’t look very nice actually, because it doesn’t actually light up the entire button area.

I planned to use this external hard disk for two purposes. First, for the Time Machine backups of my MacBook. 1TB is far more than enough for that. So the second purpose is to serve as extra storage space for all my data, particularly photos and videos, as well as backups of other stuffs I do on my Linux box. I want to be able to connect the OneTouch to both my MacBook as well as my Linux box.

The OneTouch comes pre-formatted with NTFS. Mac OS X doesn’t write to NTFS, and Time Machine requires HFS+. When I plugged the OneTouch into my MacBook, an installer pops up and immediately offers to reformat the entire drive to HFS+. When formatting is done, it will proceed to install the rest of the Maxtor tools, like the Maxtor Manager program that is used in conjnuction with the OneTouch button to do backups of your hard disk.

I chose not to go the path with Maxtor software. Instead, I fired up Disk Utility and formatted the drive into two partitions: one with HFS+ and the other with MS-DOS (FAT). Time Machine worked with that HFS+ partition. When I plugged in the OneTouch to my Linux box, although the disk itself was recognized, Linux could not find any partitions.

Ok, I did a bit of Google search and found that Mac OS X by defaults creates disks with a GUID partition map. The other option is the Apple Partition Map. To work with Linux (and Windows too), the disk must be formatted with the old Master Boot Record format. In Disk Utility, after selecting the disk, then the Partition tab, setup your volume scheme. The partition to be used by Time Machine must be formatted with HFS+. Partitions to be used by other operating systems should be formatted with MS-DOS (FAT). Before you apply, click the Options button which will bring up a dialog giving you the choice of partition formats. Make sure to choose Master Boot Record. Then apply the changes.

The disk should now be usable by both Mac OS X as well as other operating systems like Linux and Windows. Linux and Windows will, of course, only see and use the MS-DOS (FAT) partition.

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Now, I’ve dealt with dying disks on Linux systems many times before. I’m familiar with various tools in Linux. This would be the first time I’m trying to do on Windows. Had this been Linux, I would be quite happy dd’ing the disks. But this is Windows. Okay, I could simply plug the disk into my Linux box and be done.

Anyway, I started to think about tools like Norton Ghost. Ok, Norton Ghost is not free. But hey, there is also a Ghost-clone called Ghost for Unix, which is Open Source and free to download and use. Cool. I downloaded the ISO image, burnt it to a CDROM, and booted up the desktop from the CDROM.

Ghost for Unix offers cloning of entire disks as well as of individual disk partitions. You can also clone the disk directly to another disk, if they are already both attached to the computer. You can rip the disk and store the image onto a FTP server, where you can later fetch it and write it into a new disk. You’d need a FTP server to do this of course, and, obviously the FTP server had better be on your LAN otherwise you’re going to take forever to get the image transferred over.

There are some compression options to reduce the among of space the image takes (if you are going to rip it to a FTP server). Ghost for Unix also skips empty sectors, meaning sectors that contain NULL values (which is not the same as a sector that is not used to store any useful data).

The cloning and ripping is not terribly complicated. My 80GB disk took about 1 hour to clone. It took over 4 hours to save the image a FTP server. I did the save-to-FTP-server as a backup as well, just in case something went wrong.

An interesting thing is about cloning disks of different size. You know how it is, that when your old disk is dying, it is highly unlikely that you’d buy a new disk that is of exactly the same size. Either they don’t sell disks of that size anymore, or it just isn’t good value for money to buy disks of that size.

Fortunately, cloning from small disk to bigger disk is simple. The cloning process gives you an exact replica of the old disk onto the new disk. Assuming the new disk is bigger, it will be filled up exactly up to the size of the old disk, and leaving the rest of the new disk empty. The rest of the empty space can still be used if you create new partitions in there.

Just to give an example: Old disk is 80GB. New disk is 250GB. After cloning, the new disk has the exact replica of the old 80GB disk. The remaining 170GB of the new disk is empty. You can create a new partition here.

In my old 80GB disk, I had a 30GB primary partition, then a 50GB extended partition containing a 50GB logical partition. After cloning to the new disk, the remaining 170GB had to be filled up with a new primary partition. This works well in Windows XP (and presumably Vista too). Long time ago, you could only have one primary partition. So if you’re not comfortable with having two primary partitions, you’d have to create a new logical partition, but the problem is that the extended partition did not extend to the remaining 170GB. Okay, you could delete the extended/logical partitions and recreate them, but then you’d have to backup your data first. Troublesome.

At this point, you’d probably want to use a repartitioning tool like Partition Magic. Not free. Again, thanks to Open Source, we have GParted which is free to download and use. Downlond the Live CD ISO and burn it to a CDROM. With GParted, I can now easily repartition the new disk the way I like.

It’s funny that although I play with lots of Open Source software and technologies, I’ve never actually tried out Ghost for Unix and GParted prior to this. Thankfully they work as they were supposed to do and didn’t present new problems of their own.

GParted runs with a GUI, so it is quite intuitive to figure out. It isn’t very different from how other disk partitioning software work. Ghost for Unix is slightly more difficult though. It is command line driven. Although the commands are pretty straightforward, and the documentation on the web is clear and provides simple examples, the command line interface may indeed be a challenge to some people. But if you are familiar with UNIX, this shouldn’t be an issue.

After note: I just learnt that there is also Ghost for Linux. This is a ncurses-based interface (text-based menu system), so it will probably be a lot more friendly to use than Ghost for Unix. I’m done with ghosting for this time around, so maybe I’ll try it another time (but touch wood, hopefully not because of another dying disk).

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I bought a Seagate hard disk today. It is not unusual to find a label stating the country of manufacture affixed somewhere on the product, or perhaps printed directly on the product somewhere. There was something more to the Seagate packaging though. A label pasted across the opening of the anti-static bag declared “The content is made in Thailand.”

The fact that this hard disk is made in Thailand is so important that they made sure you’ll see it before you open the anti-static bag. It’s almost as if the “Made in Thailand” label has become a danger sign. Like saying: “Danger – Hazardous material within.”

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