The Sting of the Scorpio

By Simon Strantzas, Product Specialist (procurement@loop.ca)

Looking for some extra "oomph" in your portable? Try Western Digital's new Scorpio Black line of 2.5" SATA drives. These will fit right into your Macbook or Macbook Pro, increasing the size and speed of what Apple currently offers, all for a very reasonable price.

The biggest thing to consider when replacing your portable's hard drive is just how hot it runs. Especially with Apple's current offerings, there isn't much room for excess heat. As it is, these things run so hot as it is that any significant increase can impact the performance of the hard drive, or worse impact the health of your machine.

The Scorpio Black drives run only slightly warmer than Apple's stock 5,400RPM drive, even though the Scopio Black is a 7,200RPM drive with a whopping 16MB cache. This is due to the WhisperDrive technology built into the unit, which also minimizes noise (something generally present only in other manufacturer's faster 2.5" drives). And, to top it off, Western Digital had engineered the drive to run on the same power as a 5,400RPM — more speed, same power. That's a godsend for those trying to minimize battery drain.

A higher speed drive means quicker access time to your files and quicker save time for any document you're working on. Plus, the drive also has SecurePark, which will park its head at low power moments, helping to protect your data should an accident befall your portable, as well as decreasing unnecessary wear on the mechanism.

Currently, the drives come in 160GB, 250GB, and 320GB flavours, and all are currently available and shipping. Installing the drives, however, will void your warranty, so it's best to let our Certified Technicians do the work to avoid causing any expensive damage to your machine. While our Loop technicians are there, they can also handle the transfer of data from your old drive to your new, so when the machine returns to you it looks just as it did when it left ... except it now writes and reads almost as fast as a drive on a desktop computer.

Contact your corporate account manager for help on getting your portable souped up to peak performance. Or email sales@loop.ca.

What is NAS? (Network Attached Storage)

By Mike Bevilacqua, Corporate Account Manager (mbevilacqua@loop.ca)

A NAS is a dedicated data storage device connected directly to an Ethernet network that provides centralized data storage and access. Network-attached storage consists of hard disk storage, including multi-disk RAID. Technically, most NAS devices are specialized computers with multiple redundant discs. The following example is based on a 4 disk RAID. Redundant disks work together so that if you lose one of the four drives, the other three take over until you can physically replace the bad one. The downside is that four drives provide only the storage capacity of three, since they're also providing redundancy. There are a multitude of benefits realized from this type of setup. NAS is effectively a server in itself, with all major components of a typical PC: a CPU, motherboard, RAM.
Multiple computers can access the drive over a network without the need of a server or a computer acting as a file share. Especially beneficial in a SOHO environment.
Unlike rackmounted drives, they are generally packaged in smaller form factors.
Email notification of errors.
Performance can be increased by NAS because the file serving is done by the NAS and not done by a server responsible for also doing other processing. It should be noted the performance of NAS devices, depends on the speed of and traffic on the network and on the amount of cache memory (RAM) on the NAS computers or devices.

One point to keep in mind is that a NAS, even one that is setup as a RAID, does not replace redundant backup. Please see Backup - Critical to Your Everyday Workflow.

Talk to your corporate account manager about Network Attached Storage, or email us at sales@loop.ca.