Digital Boomerang Singapore 

In the great new world of mobility, we remain tied to our computers. Your work sits in your desktop at the office and your precious personal data stays in the one at home. Laptops are slightly more mobile, but burdens you with extra kilos. Their fragility also means having to take extra care when moving around.Perhaps that is the whole problem. Computer makers think that mobility means designing an entire computer system you can carry around. But in reality, no one really cares to do it. What concerns you and me, is being able to carry your data and if necessary, your applications, around.

To the busy executive, it means being able to work on the same Word, Excel and massive Powerpoint documents at home and in the office. For the creative designers, its megabytes of audio, video and image files.

So far the solutions have been compromises. Lug your laptop around or invest in removable storage drives and transfer files back and forth. Removable storage drives are great but only if you have the application you need to work on, such as Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Freehand, Microsoft Office, installed at both your home and office.

Iomega has come up with a drive system that it hopes will address these problems. The new Peerless drive system is a portable hard disk system which you can take with you. (Read our News Report). It comprises of a base station and a 10GB or 20GB cartridge that slides into the base station.

Capacity
Because of the large capacity of 10GB or 20GB, you can install your applications and save your data in your Peerless drive. Take your entire Microsoft Office application and documents home.

In fact, Peerless ships with software that will allow you to back up your entire hard disk and migrate all your windows settings to another computer.

Speed
But aren’t removable storage drives always so much slower? Yes they can be.

At best, current removable drives can give you up to 8MB/sec transfer rate. That’s slower than your internal hard disk. Recognising the need for speed, the Peerless has a transfer rate of 15MB/sec when used with FireWire.

Running multiple music videos and other huge multimedia files off your Peerless drive is actually faster than doing it off your internal hard disk. That is because your internal hard disk is busy running your operating system.

Portability
Drop your laptop and disaster is imminent. Panic because you know your hard disk could be irreparably damaged. With the shock-resistance features, you can afford to mishandle Peerless. It passed the drop test and is rated for 400Gs non-operating shock.

Moreover, the Peerless disks or cartridges weighs only about 135g. The base station is 170g. One of the lightest in the the market today.

Because it is based on IBM’s Travelstar 20GN 2.5″ notebook hard disk drive, it is also compact to carry around.

Peerless is also designed to deal with the dust and contamination on the road. There is no shutter on the disks. It is completely sealed up. To do this, Iomega built the read/write heads directly into the disks.

Frills
The entire Peerless system spots a very trendy design. Iomega has moved away from the boring and dull designs of removable drives. Like the ClickDrive, it’s something you will be proud of carrying around.

The LCD screen on the base station makes the entire package more attractive. It displays the transfer rate so you know how fast it’s really working. When connected to a MAC, a gauge also shows up on the LCD to let you know how much disk space is left.

Another very neat feature is the security protection which allows you to lock your entire hard disk and protect all your data from prying eyes.

Drawback
Is Peerless the answer to mobility? Not entirely. It’s definitely an extremely good solution. The only major drawback is the need for a base station at every computer you want to connect your hard drive to. You can carry your base station around with you, but that means much less mobility.

In addition, for 15MB/sec transfer rate, you need to connect through FireWire. A USB connection will only allow up to 1MB/sec. FireWire interfaces are only available on the latest computers.

The USB 1.1. Peerless drive system will be available in Singapore from 15 June 2001. Systems bundled with a 10GB disk will retail for S$679 while those with a 20GB disk will retail at S$749. Individual 10MB disks cost S$275 and 20MB disks cost S$345.

The FireWire option is not yet available and is expected to ship by August this year. The SCSI and USB 2.0 interfaces are still in development.

- First published on IT AsiaOne, News

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