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back to article Iomega's flashy SSD clones your PC

Iomega has a line of pocket-sized external flash storage devices using a USB 3.0 interconnect. Should we call them USB slab drives? "Stick" seems a little too small. The External SSD Flash Drive has a 1.8-inch form factor and comes in 64, 128 and 256GB capacities, all with built-in 256-bit encryption. We don't know if it is …

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  1. dave 46
    FAIL

    Utterly pointless product

    You can clone your whole system onto a 256GB SSD?

    Very niche, perhaps if you only had a 256GB SSD in your system, no large data drive (unusual in itself) and wanted to backup as quickly as possible (how long would it take to backup < 256GB on a normal hard drive anyway?).

    I'm sure most of the benefit of the SSD will be scrubbed off by the USB3 anyway (and god help you if you have USB2, like most of us).

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    1. Chris Judd
      Reply Icon
      Coffee/keyboard

      untitled

      I thought it sounded quite handy - I have a smaller main HDD, with a 1TB media drive. I could have my OSs and files backed up and sync'd, and just leave the media drive.

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      1. Tom Chiverton 1
        Reply Icon

        Ummm

        Why back up the O/S ? Surely it's your media files you need to backup, you can put the O/S back in an afternoon from the install media...

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        1. Steve Coffman
          Reply Icon
          Thumb Down

          So you DON'T have to waste an afternoon...

          Most of us that back up our OS drive do so in order to avoid having to spend a large amount of time reinstalling... while it may be true you can reinstall your OS in an afternoon, installing patches, updates, drivers and all of your applications & utilities that you use can be majorly time consuming - that's why I have a mirrored array for my primary boot drive (in case one drive physically fails) and I occasionally back that up to an external drive (because if you experience data corruption on the primary boot device that keeps your OS from loading, having a mirrored array won't help because more than likely the corruption is present on both drives...been there, done that.) So the last time I had to rebuild my system due to a HD failure it took a better part of a weekend to get my system back to where it was originally - which is why I now back it up! All of my media and other data is stored on a RAID 5 array and most of my applications, games, etc. are installed on a secondary partition on the mirrored array so I don't have to back up all of that just to back up the primary OS partition (which is only 50GB in size, so it doesn't take too long.)

          However for most people this particular unit wouldn't be the ideal device to do backups - you'd be better of with an external eSATA drive to do backups for a lot less money and still probably have better transfer rates... USB 3 devices generally still aren't anywhere near their theoretical throughput.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Epic Fail!

    As most machines don't have SSD drives inside then you'll be waiting for "old clunker" to read before the SSD can write.

    As you are limited to old clunker speeds anyway then you may as well just have an old clunker external HDD for 50 quid to do your backups at pretty much the same speed!

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    1. Cliff
      Reply Icon

      Good point!

      I'm sure the faster USB write will help (reads are faster than writes, usually), but I wonder if it's going to be *that* much faster in practice?

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    What other question...

    ...but does it work with Linux?

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  5. Bassey

    Sounds awesome

    I can only assume those above don't actually "work" in IT or have no imagination. If this actually works as it suggests (no reason to assume it does) it could be brilliant. Take the 64GB version (no need for anything bigger) clone the master Admin machine from the corporate BCM solution and every member of IT can carry around a fully working BCM Admin PC that can be plugged in to whatever is available when the shit hits the fan. It would need hardware encryption on board but this sounds like a dream come true.

    The big BCM problem for most firms is that BCM centres are nearly always shared resources. It's fine to have a few hundred virtual PCs for the plebs that can be restored down from backup to dumb terminals but you always need that one "proper" PC to kick the whole thing off and deal with the problems as and when they arise.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      WTF?

      There's more to IT than meets the eye

      Before slagging off everybody as non-IT or unimaginitive, take time to consider there may be more to IT than what appears to be your tiny portion of it. I have been active in the field of IT for 40 years and have absolutely no idea of what you're babbling on about when you say "BCM Admin PC".

      Furthermore, anyone who is capable of waxing enthusiastic about an Iomega product has obviously not been in IT long enough to recall the infamous 'ZIP' drive.

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  6. Michael C

    twice as fast...

    ...as a device limited by the bus speed of USB 2. That same 7200RPM drive on Firewire 800, or better yet eSATA? likely the same speed! USB 3 is fast, but any device I can name that needs more than USB 2 speeds should be on eSATA anyway, and in that case USB 3 is simply getting in the way and adding unnecessary costs.

    USB 3 is nice for large capacity thumb drives, 128GB or so, but that's only typically needed for speed reasons when doing a backup and then you;re limited by capacity for that backup, so why really? USB3 is a nice speed improvement over USB, sure, but it's still crippled by USB hub architecture and multicast and will never be as fast as dedicated drive technology like SATA. I can't think of a single consumer device other than mass storage (which should be on eSATA), that requires USB 3 speeds to operate. As an internal bus spec, maybe, but again USB is a multicast bus, no dedicated channels, so it can be unreliable or unpredictable in heavily used systems.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Great

    Love it

    These things will surely revolutionize the speed it takes to manually transfer files. Zoom zoom!

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Pointless comparison

    Comparing the SSD speed to a 7200 RPM drive is like comparing the speed at which your horse drinks petrol with a car.

    Compare the ST32000641AS (which claims 600MB/s) with this SSD.

    (http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/desktops/barracuda_xt/#tTabContentSpecifications)

    As the SSD claimed "twice as fast", it must surely be doing 1.2GB/s over an interface that only does 4.8Gb/s (note little and big B's)

    Even Sandforce SSDs are only doing around 300MB/s.

    (Yes I know sustained transfer rates will be significantly lower for the spinning disk but maybe I'm only interested in small data bursts, maybe that's how my application works. Who knows...)

    Come the Reg, we're all techy types, you can't get away with this sort of vague hand waving lack of facts/figures. Find out how fast it is for us please. That's what journalism is about, asking questions that people don't want to answer. (As opposed to regurgitating marketing BS, which is more like advertising than "journalising")

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  9. Steven Jones

    A better idea

    How about this for a better idea. You put a 256GB SSD into your PC where you get the benefit all the time and you back it up to an external HDD with a 2.5" drive. Doing it the other way round is, frankly, bonkers. Maybe if you are super-rich you will have SSDs in both, but in that case, do yourself a favour and do it with eSATA which is going to be a whole lot better than USB with it's big driver and protocol overheads.

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  10. Neil 6
    Stop

    No! (just for Bluesxman)

    " For sure it should be a whole lot quicker."

    This is the kind of sentence I would expect to hear from an Italian racing driver during a post race interview.

    Unless English is a second language to you, STOP IT.

    "I know with certainty", "I am positive" or "I am sure". Pick one, any one.

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  11. E 2

    Just brand it "Apple"

    ... double the price, and you'll soon be richer than Avarice!

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  12. Nigel 11
    Linux

    Back to front?

    Surely you want the SSD on the inside of the PC, to hold the O/S and software for rapid booting and loading? If one needs to store many gigabytes, they can go on a USB or (E)SATA disk drive inside or outside the PC, with an external HDD for backup.

    Of course, Win 7 is so excessively bloated, that an internal SSD has to be rather large and therefore still rather expensive. Sigh.

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