These days you can never have enough storage.  Everything we have seems to consume large amounts of space on our computers and therefore it is essential that we have lots of storage.  This Western Digital My Passport pocket hard drive does the job for me.

For a while now I have backed everything up to my Apple Time Capsule (500Gb) which has worked really well. However I have always thought that I should really have an off-site backup. I mean what if the worse was to happen and the house burnt down I would of course loose my computer, but I would always have the backup?  Wrong as the backup is also in my house.

This is the reason that I carry around this little 320Gb pocket drive to keep a reasonably up-to-date version of my files on so that I always have a couple of backups to fall back on.

In one of the recent Mac Format magazines that I have received through my new subscription I came across a review of this Hard Disc Drive Enclosure that looked just like a Mac Pro.

Now I grant you that at close to £50 it is rather expensive for what it does.  It can take any SATA hard drive and it a USB 2 interface and mains powered.  However I thought it looked so nice, a miniture version of a Mac Pro that I just had to have one.  I happened to be on the look out for an external enclosure to turn my spare 500Gb drive into a USB drive that I could store all my videos on.

I have been encoding my DVD collection into iPhone movies that I am now storing on the external drive that this enclosure mounts. Works really well plugged into my Time Capsule so that it acts as a wireless drive and also looks really cool on the desk!

These days it seems that we all need more and more storage on our computers to store those necessary memories and files. Files are getting bigger and bigger, hence the demise of the floppy disc from shops.

Well it seems that there is going to be a new wave of super big storage devices out soon and the race is on. Hitachi are bringing out one of the first commerically available 1 tera byte discs which is the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes – pretty big I am sure that you will agree.

The other option on storage for the future is the development of flash memory. Currently the largest sizes that flash memory can be built in are about 30gb. That is usually fine for your average laptop user who uses the Internet and office applications. However for a serious gamer or movie/music down-loader these kinds of sizes and just not big enough and flash memory falls down. However flash memory has so many advantages over the hard drive. The number one advantage is that it runs at lower temperatures and with heat being the enemy this is excellent. Also in a laptop data is less likely to be lost of dropped with flash memory. Maybe this will be the future as sizes of flash memory increase further.

So lets say you have bought yourself one of these 1 terabyte hard drives. You have saved all your massive amounts of data on there. If it was me I wouldn’t want to loose that data. So does this mean that I have to buy two of these discs? One to use and one to back up on? Well no, because Seagate (very good make by the way) have an idea. They have a disc that is 1.5 terabytes but actually is 2 x 750gb disc. Everytime you do something it copies everything to the second disc, like a mirror copy. Therefore you never have to worry about backing up as it is done in real time. Sounds like a good idea.

If you are wondering I have a mear 160Gb hard drive in my Mac, and I have a 400gb firewire backup drive to backup data to. All this kit suits me fine and serves my needs. Maybe in 5 years my 400gb disc will turn into a 1 terrabyte disc? Who knows!