First, there are currently two types of external hard drives in the market today. The first kind use laptop hard drives, which offer less storage and slower performance, but are physically small, light, and silent. The second type, which the V1 belongs to, use desktop hard drives. These offer much larger capacity and much higher performance than the first kind, but the tradeoff is that they are physically larger, usually more noisy, and require an external power plug in addition to a USB connection. The VOX V1 however bucks this generality. It is smaller than other external desktop drives (you can see a comparison picture in the photos), and also runs nearly silent. This is partially because the VOX V1 is a sealed case. There is no fan for airflow, and heat is dissipated through the walls of the enclosure. While I wouldn’t recommend putting the V1 in a desk drawer, this does mean that you generally don’t need to worry about available airflow where you place it as much as you would have to with a different brand.

The external hard drive market is very crowded, and vendors have to try to differentiate themselves from the competition. While the V1 supports all the standard things you would expect from a modern external enclosure, including an SATA connector, VOX also supplies a Windows-only backup software package. This software installs on Windows XP or Vista and allows you to push the (only) button on the V1 to initiate a system backup. This is a nice feature, and one really shouldn’t mind that this software is Windows-only as OS X has Time Machine, which is just about the best backup software for home computers in existence. Linux users are unfortunately left to find their own software solution for backups, although there are several solutions available for free.

As mentioned earlier, the VOX V1 includes both USB and E-SATA connectors. It’s nice to see the E-SATA connector as USB2 can’t supply data as fast as the drive can. Unfortunately, E-SATA was a standard that never really took off. It would have been better to include a newer SATA2 connector. Having said that, for whatever reason most modern laptops and desktops do not include external E-SATA or SATA2 ports, so either way you either need to purcahase an adapter card, or simply wait for the standard to catch on. What would have been really exciting was if the V1 included a Firewire 800 port, as those are much more common (especially on laptops) that any sort of SATA port. Regardless, this isn’t a problem just with the VOX V1, but with most external hard drives today. The takeaway here is that it is probably worth the investment for you to purchase an external SATA card rather than rely on the USB connection.

One additional comment is that, while the drive does come with a complete set of E-SATA, USB, and power cables, the included cables are on the short side. Even the power cable, which is typically the logest of the bunch, was under 6 feet long, including the power brick. This makes it a little annoying when using the V1 with a laptop, as you may not be that close to a socket (if the cord is 6 feet you need to be within 4 feet or less of the socket).

Another small note is that the manual said it was supposed to come with a screw driver and screw set, which mine didn’t. However, as there’s no reason to open the case, I don’t see why you would need one anyway. The only reason I mention it is because the manual said it should. Probably, they should just change the manual to not say that.

The above are relatively minor complaints however, and overall the V1 is a pleasure to work with. It is by far the quietest of the 7 other external drives I use, and 750GB of capacity provides a lot of space to use. The fact that it is more compact than my other drives is good (although it is a little bit taller), and the E-SATA port means that the drive will probably last me until my next computer. In fact, in several years or whenever it has reached the end of its lifetime, I’ll probably be able to upgrade the disk inside of it and re-use the case, which is a good thing.

Overall, the VOX External Hard Drive V1 USB 2.0 & SATA has a silly (but descriptive) name. More importantly, it does exactly what it says it does by providing a compact, quiet, and high performing external hard drive. The build quality is excellent, and I look forward to using the V1 for a long time to come.

The main problem with hard drives are that they haven’t been able to keep up with Moore’s Law. While computers have gotten faster and faster, hard drives seem to have topped out some time ago. At the same time, the total storage capacity of drives has continued to increase. What this means is that the performance/storage ratio has gotten significantly lower. It is so low, even, that it has started to put some significant strain on the average computer user.

Way back in 2000,  when drives were typically 20 or 30 Gigabytes, it wasn’t so bad to be able to access it at a typical 20-30 MB/s. This meant that you could copy an entire hard drive in about 17 minutes. Today, however, when drives are as large as 1 Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes), and they can only be accessed not much faster, it can take significant parts of a day to copy a disk! Combined with the fact that most people use USB to attach their extra hard drives, and the whole operation takes even longer.

Corporations and users with more demanding needs try to get around this issue with RAID. Originally, RAID systems (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) were designed to provide better reliability than individual hard drives (data is kept in multiple disks, so data isn’t lost if a disk breaks). Increasingly, however, RAID systems are being used to provide improved performance. The idea is that if you have two hard drives you can access both of them at the same time. Therefore, you can read or write twice as fast as if you only had one. Companies like EMC and NetApp take this principle to the extreme. What if you can read from 15 disks at once? Or from 1500?

Unfortunately disk performance doesn’t really scale in real life as well as it does in theory, and so  even high end RAID products don’t perform too much better. Two disks are not twice as fast as one. The more disks you add, the smaller the incremental benefit. Even if it did help more, adding disks ad infinitum is not a reasonable solution for home users.

So what’s the solution? It’s getting to the point where this is a real problem. It now takes me a few days to shuffle my data around when I get a new disk drive.

Newer technologies are on the horizon, but who knows when they’ll get to market. The ones you read about in the paper are still years from hitting the market as a finished product. Flash drives were promising, but in real life use, they seem to be the same or even worse performers than traditional disk drives.

If something doesn’t give soon, we are going to cross a critical threshold where some drastic design decisions need to be made on future PC’s, or the benefits of faster CPU’s and RAM will be hidden by the glacial speed of the system’s long term storage.

Why? I’m 29 now. I have files on my hard drive that include BASIC software I wrote when I was 13, short stories I wrote when I was in high school, and projects I worked on in college. I’ve got an iTunes library that took 10 years to build, and gigs upon gigs of photographs of me and my wife. If my house were to burn down today, my biggest loss would be my hard drive, because it is literally irreplaceable.

And so while I started using Apple’s Time Machine recently to keep local backups, I was looking for a second way to do it — preferably one that is off-site and automatic, so I don’t need to worry about it. Essentially, something like Mozy.

Mozy is an online service which provides backups for your home computer. There are plenty of reviews (both good and bad, as well as indifferent) which describe Mozy’s pros and cons, so I won’t go into super detail on that. Basically, there is a little program that runs in the background and backs up your files every now and then to their servers. If you need to restore a file, you can do it through their web site or else through the program you download.

This is a great service for me, because I can count on Apple Time Machine to provide most of my backup needs (like, “oops, accidentally deleted a file”), while Mozy provides a second layer of protection (like “oops, my baby nephew tried to make all my USB drives bounce on the floor”).

The cost also makes a lot of sense for me. For $60/year, I get unlimited backups. Since I am looking to back up around 500 GB of stuff, this is cheaper than purchasing a new hard drive, like I need to do for Time Machine.

So, about 2 weeks ago, after giving all this thought to signing up for Mozy, I decided to go for it. And quickly ran into my first problem. After paying them through their web site, I found out that the Mac client isn’t available! The weird thing is that it was still listed on their site as a download … which just went to an error 404 page. After contacting tech support, I was told that “this is a known issue, and it should be available again shortly.” There was no message of any kind on their web site. Nevertheless, I tried again the next day, and was able to download the client.

At this point, I was a bit on edge. Not because they took the Mac client offline, but because they made no attempt to notify their clients! Backup companies should have a full-disclosure policy. If I am counting on them to keep my files safe, I need to know if there is a problem. What happens if they simply don’t mention that they lost my latest backup, and I decide to wipe my computer and restore it from them at that time? This is obviously unacceptable.

However, if that were the only issue I ran into, it would have been OK. After all, the Mac client was marked as “beta,” and I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that this was a one-time oversight.

So, I used the downloaded client to start creating a backup. I should note that creating a 500 GB backup takes quite some time, even over Verizon FIOS. Mozy seems to limit their incoming bandwidth to around 100 KB/s, at least for my client. I know from other things that my connection is capable of at least 10 times that.

About 40 GB into the backup (about two days), the Mozy client gave me an error. It said “ServerError11.” Not very descriptive, so I looked at the log file, which said “Server Error. Disconnecting.” Also not very descriptive. Despite multiple reboots and retries at this point, I could no longer get the Mozy client to continue its backup.

I contacted tech support again, and told them the problem. They said that there was probably a “lock” on my account, and they would have it cleared within 24 hours. They didn’t tell me what a “lock meant.” 24 hours later, it still wasn’t working. This was on a Thursday. I gave them the weekend, and contacted them again on Tuesday. Again, I was told the same thing, and that they must escalate the issue to a developer, and it would be cleared within 24 hours. OK. Again, 24 hours go by, and the issue hadn’t gone away. I contacted tech support a fourth time. When I mentioned that I had been told twice that it would be fixed within 24 hours, the guy told me “there are other people with the same problem, and they haven’t been helped yet.” Ouch.

So, what’s the conclusion here? It has now been more than a week since I haven’t been able to back up. In fact, since signing on to Mozy I have not been able to complete a single complete backup. The staff seems unable to resolve any problems in a timely fashion. What’s much more important than even those issues, however, is that Mozy seems unable or unwilling to freely communicate with its customers.

Mozy, I understand that you may be going through some growing pains with all the press coverage you’ve gotten lately. That’s OK. But, as a backup company, your name and reputation DEPEND on being reliable. Reliable doesn’t mean you don’t ever have operating issues. What it does mean is that you disclose those issues when you do, so that people who rely on you can adjust their plans and expectations accordingly.

Until the issue of communication with customers is resolved, I would need to recommend for people that they steer clear of Mozy. You wouldn’t want to rely on a backup company which may or may not be functioning as advertised, and which you can’t trust to even tell you which is the case.

If someone from Mozy wants to contact me, and address this issue, I would be happy to update this blog post. Given their track history so far (when I was chasing them for info), I’m not holding my breath.

* Update *
Within hours, I was contacted by David Dreyer, Support Operations Manager at Mozy. David is working to resolve my issue, and says that there is a general Mozy software update coming this weekend which should resolve similar issues for other users. David was very aggressive in addressing this problem, and that of notification I mentioned above. Sometimes it’s nice to be proven wrong I’ll have another update once my problems have been resolved.

Read on for the 45-day update.

You can permanently attach the Monsoon hard drive to your computer for storing extra music, video, and photos. The Monsoon is also small enough that you can carry it with you so you can share your files with your friends. While its not as small as an iPod, this version I got is 320 GB, which holds 4 times more than the largest iPod. Accessing your files will also be much faster due to the high-performance 7200 RPM disk.

There are lots of hard drives out there, and only a few things which differentiate them. The main factors which should cause you to choose one over another are the included accessories, and the build quality (of course, price helps too).

The EZQuest comes with both USB and Firewire data cables. There is a plastic stand which you can use if you want to stand your drive vertically. They include a Quick Install Guide / product catalog. We have the hard disk itself, and the power brick. Finally, they include a quick instruction card for Windows users, which we’ll talk about in a bit.

This is a pretty complete set of attachments, and there isn’t anything else they could have reasonably provided. If you plan on using firewire, you’ll notice that there is a firewire pass-through port. This means that you can connect up more drives through this one. Suprisingly, not all external drives support this, and its a nice feature.

One thing you’ll notice is that the drive is heavy for its size. The case of the Monsoon is made out of aluminum, and is much better quality than the cheaper plastic cases sold by some of their competitors. Aluminum also transmits heat much better than plastic, which means that the Monsoon doesn’t need an active fan. Consequently, the Monsoon runs much quieter than a plastic drive with a fan.

Inside the Monsoon is a standard ATA hard drive. The one I received was a Hitachi Desk Star, but you may get a different one depending on what production run you get. Because it is a standard ATA disk, you can upgrade the drive in the future. Please note, however, that opening up the case will void your warranty.

An interesting thing about the EZQuest is that it comes formatted for Macintosh computers. Most disks come formatted for either Windows or Mac, and I think its a shame that they it that way. If you have a Windows PC, you’ll have to reformat the disk so that you can use it. This doesn’t take long, but Windows will only let you format it in a Windows-specific way. If you want to be able to use your Monsoon on any computer (Linux, Windows, or Mac), you’ll need to format it as Fat32. You can find instructions to do so for OS X, or Windows.

Overall, the EZQuest Monsoon drive is a compact, high performance drive. It has good build quality, runs quietly, and can work with any sort of personal computer. If you are looking for an external hard drive, this one should be on your short list.

Keep in mind that there are some items for which a large number of similar products is okay. A perfect example is in USB flash storage. There are dozens of products available, and they’re all basically the same — about the same size, the same range of storage, roughly the same speed, and even the same price, give or take. Just about the only thing you can really choose with a USB flash drive today is the color. This sort of market is generally known as a “commodity.” If you think about it, you can buy [and sell] USB flash storage about as easily as you can buy and sell just about anything. The individual products are completely interchangeable (and undifferentiated).

Then there are near-commodity products. These are items which are commodities, but don’t necessarily have to be. The only thing preventing one product from “breaking out” of the pack is a lack of innovation. Look at USB hard drives. They’re nearly identical, except for capacity. One brand is as good as another. But what if one company decided to put a headphone jack on theirs, and let you listen to any MP3′s you had stored without needing a computer? What if one came with bluetooth support, or wi-fi? For an extra $30 or so, that would be a pretty cool product, and I’d be likely to buy it instead of a “plain” one. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be many companies who make USB hard drives with any imagination. I’m not sure what their executive management meetings are like — probably something along the lines of “Hey, these things seem to sell well, let’s sell some.”

There will always be commodity items, and near-commodity items, and that’s a good thing. Its what drives prices down. But let’s talk about the breakaway hits. Like, say, the Apple iPod. The iPod is really good for a bunch of reasons. It plays your existing music and movies. It provides a store where you can buy movies, music, and tv shows easily. You don’t feel like the iTunes store is trying to trick you or deceive you in any way — if you buy something there, you can watch/listen to it on your devices. The iPod itself is nice — good quality, small, and light.

There are certainly a lot of other personal music players out there, but the iPod sells better than its competitors because it is a better product — it was the definition of innovation when it was first released, and it continued to add new features as it went along (like video). Now, along comes Microsoft looking to compete with the iPod. So, they decide to develop a product now known as the Zune. Up until its launch, Steve Balmer has touted the Zune as an iPod-killer. In other words, “better than an iPod.” In fact, Matt Jubelirer , the Microsoft project lead for Zune development, talked at length about how innovative the Zune was. Microsoft spend millions upon millions of dollars in advertizing, got retail stores to feature it, and raved about their online store, and how the face of personal music players will be changed forever.

Then the Zune was released. Without making any judgments on how good the Zune is or whether you should get one, it only had one feature that was new: wi-fi support. OK, that sounds innovative. I can imagine lots of cool things I might be able to do with my music player over wifi! Yet, the only thing you can actually do is share a “preview” of your music files to people in the area, which expires after 3 days or 3 plays. And, even though the Zune sports this single, although crippled innovation, there are a multitude of things which it doesn’t do, many of which even “me too” music players can: It won’t play your existing music, even if you bought it from Microsoft (!). It won’t let you subscribe to podcasts. It attaches DRM to your existing music. It’s bigger and heavier than most compareable music players. They have an online store which is difficult and confusing to use, with DRM rules which are not straightforward, and leave the user with the clear impression that they do not control the items they buy.

The strange part? After the Zune was released, Microsoft’s tune suddenly changed. Instead of touting how revolutionary and outstanding their new product was, Bill Gates was calling it a “modest competitor” to the iPod. So, did management really have no idea that their product wasn’t really anything special? Most probably, of course they did, but they were hoping that if they pushed it hard enough, they would be able to sell anyway. And probably, it did sell better than it would have if they didn’t push it so hard. However, the thing that really starts hurting the manufacturer is that the next time they release a product (like, Zune 2.0), no one is going to pay attention to their marketing, even if it really can do what it advertises.

Even though Microsoft seems to be aware of the problem, at least in theory, it hasn’t stopped them from releasing a long line of unremarkable products (any version of office or Windows, or the MSN search site, for example). So, why do things like this happen? Why do companies release “me too” products, when they themselves want to bring innovation as much (or probably more) than consumers want them to?

The real answer, of course, is complicated. Internal politics (Manager A wants Wi-Fi, but Manager B doesn’t. The compromise — Wi-fi goes in, but is limitted in scope). Counter-intuitive interests from business partners (Warner Music/RIAA, anyone?). Adversity to taking risks (“what if they don’t like it?”). Senior management who doesn’t understand the product or the target audience (cough, Steve Balmer).

The reality is that there are all some of the ungainly aspects of how big companies work — including at the “innovative” companies like Apple and Nintendo. The successful ones, however, are able to move past these issues, and focus on the one thing that differentiates them from their competition: What is it that the consumers want?

This is the Intel Core Duo 1.6Ghz Mac mini. This is the latest Mac Mini available as of today. The product line can be a little confusing — be careful about which reviews you read, as earlier Mac Mini’s were based on the PowerPC chip, and later on single-core Intel chips. The current line is significantly faster than those earlier models.

Some other improvements from earlier versions are that it now has 4 hi-speed usb 2.0 ports, in addition to a Firewire 400 port for connecting additional devices. Since you can’t really upgrade this computer, you’ll use these ports to connect any addon devices. While there are plenty of ports, I am a little disappointed that the Mini does not yet include a Firewire 800 port, or an external SATA II port. Since the first thing people will add is an external disk, the faster interfaces would have been a nice addition. Still, for the Mini’s target audience, the supplied firewire and USB ports are completely sufficient.

While I would consider myself a “power user,” I’m using 3 external hard drives, a wireless keyboard and mouse, and an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid to watch HD TV. I use the external drives mostly for DVR video storage and music. I have a single 500GB drive (on Firewire), and 2 250 GB drives on USB set up as a RAID Stripe using OS X’s built-in software RAID. I was a little bit skeptical about using software RAID over USB, but it works flawlessly. Moving the drives to different USB sockets doesn’t affect the RAID. Another interesting drive tidbit is that the Firewire port is much faster than USB for disks. If you have a choice, use that.

So, what has it been like using a Mac? One thing I found surprising coming from the PC world is that most of those apple ads are actually true – most things “just work.” Its something that you can hear, but not really appreciate until you try it. For example, menus and configuration choices for almost all programs are a lot simpler than they are on the PC. It isn’t that they are less capable, its just that things don’t need to be tweaked as much as they do in most PC applications. It’s definitely been a pleasure to use, and I’m looking forward to when I have to replace my next laptop – it’ll probably
be with a Mac.

While this was the main reason I bought it, I was happy to find that the Mac Mini makes a perfect Home-Theater PC. One reason is that it can attach to a lot of different outputs. With a small adapter, it can use VGA, DVI, svideo, or RCA, although it only supports one output at a time. No matter which inputs you have free on your TV, you’ll be able to connect your Mac Mini to it.

Another great aspect of the Mac Mini is that it’s extremely small. That’s probably why they call it “Mini” . For example, it’s only marginally bigger than my external hard drives. It’s even smaller (although slightly taller) than just about any laptop, and easily fits into a component shelf in your TV stand. It can also be mounted behind your TV, and there are companies which sell brackets to do so. The Mini is also virtually silent, an important aspect of a device going into your entertainment cabinet. If you put your ear to it, you can just barely hear the fan. I’ve never been able to hear it from the couch, even with the TV off.

The final touch for the home theater PC case is the software: Apple Front Row. This application is driven by a remote which comes with your Mini. The remote is attractive, in classic Apple fashion, and quite useful. Using Front Row, you can browse everything in your iTunes collection right from your couch – including Music and Videos. If you have an Ipod, this’ll be very familiar to you, as they’re almost identical.

The Mini has lots of other software too. You can download a free office suite called “Neo Office,” which is a version of Open Office adapted to run on the Mac. If you haven’t tried Open Office or Neo Office yet, you absolutely should. It is basically a free clone of Microsoft Office. It provides almost the same exact functionality as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint but is completely free.

For web browsing, there is Apple’s native browser called Safari, or of course, you can download Firefox. The Mini also comes with Apple’s creative suite called iLife, which has applications for making movies, DVD’s, cartoons, and music recordings. iLife is what I use, for example, to make my video reviews.

About the only thing that the Mini doesn’t do so well is play the latest PC games. First of all, most games will only run on Microsoft Windows anyway. However, one of the ways they got the Mini to be so small is by skimping on the graphics hardware. It’s plenty fast for HD video editing, but it’s terrible at any kind of 3d game.

Overall, I’ve found the Mac Mini to be an exciting introduction to Apple’s computer products. If you’re still not convinced you might be glad to know that you can install either Windows or Linux on the Mini. After using it for a few days, however, you’ll probably find that you have no reason to.

And you know, the thing doesn’t even come with a demo disk? I’ve got nothing to play for another couple of days