I recently did a review of some of the data storage devices available for students at our college, specifically regarding reliability and what you storage capacity you get for your dollar and thought some members might like to see the comparison. The prices are in Aus dollars for the products bought locally (cut the price in half for US$ prices) $1 TDK 80 MIN CD-R80 gold, 40x with case. upside: 700Mb data, multiple session writes dependant on hardware. Cheap, most computers have CD roms Downside: Fragile, easily scratched and damaged by heat. cost per Mb 1.25c $187 USB Zip disk & media $169 USB zip 100Mb $18 zip disk Upside: rewritable, small size. Downside: damaged by magnetism, high level of unreliabilty of both external drives and media, few computers have Zip drives. cost per Mb 18c (per disk, including a drive $1.87) $331 USB zip 250 $299 USB zip 250 drive $32 zip disk Upside and downside as above. cost per Mb 12.8c, (per disk, including a drive $1.32) $392 Panasonic LS240 SuperDisk 240MB USB Drive $29 Imation LS-240 Upside: support for 240MB, 120MB, 32MB & 1.44M floppy disks Use 240MB disks or backward compatible with 120MB & 1.44MB floppy disks. Can write and read 32MB to any standard HD floppy disk. high reliability (much more than Iomega Zips, the copy of the LS-240 superdisk) downside: susceptible to magnetic damage, few computers in Australia have LS-240 drives. cost per Mb 12c, (per disk, including a drive $1.63) $229 - portable USB2 hard drive $169 laptop 20G hard drive + $50 case Upside: very small, very high data capacity (up to 120 Gb), USB self powered USB2 and USB 1 downside: susceptible to magnetic damage, susceptiple to damage from being dropped. single unit - unable to 'copy' and send to people (though data can be transfered to CD for transfer or copying) Cost per Mb 0.13c $479 X'S DriveII with 30G hard drive http://www.xs-drive.com/index.htm Upside: small, very high data capacity, self powered through Li-Ion battery doubles as card reader and accepts downloads from variety of data cards fast USB2, redundantly supports USB1 transfer rate, native to XP and OS-X downside: requires external power pack to charge (woop-de-do!) susceptible to magnetic damage, susceptiple to damage from being dropped. single unit - unable to 'copy' and send to people (though data can be transfered to CD for transfer or copying) cost per Mb 0.19c I personally have a 20G portable USB drive like this: http://www.kenarservices.com/auctfoto/USB20HDDCASEBLUE.JPG and up until seeing the X'S drive would have recommended this sort of portable drive as being the best value on the grounds of reliability, small price per meg of data storage and small size but given the specifications of the X'S drive and it's extremely usefull card dumping facility for photographers, the X'S drive wins hands down! Karl .
