When Apple's MacBook Air first came out, I was woefully unimpressed. Sure, it was plenty pretty, but it lacked the thing I needed most: a big hard drive.
Well, a funny thing has happened in the past year. I've stopped using my hard drive.
Yes, I still install applications, all of which require hard-drive space. And yes, I still use Handbrake to rip DVDs to my hard drive to watch on long flights.
But I've also started keeping all of my e-mail on my company's Zimbra server. But it's not just e-mail: I keep all of my files in my e-mail folders, too. I work with a file long enough to edit it and then immediately delete it from my hard drive once I know it's safe on my e-mail server.
In fact, as I upload photos and just about everything else to remote servers, it's becoming less and less clear why I need much of a hard drive at all.
Maybe I shouldn't be loading up my e-mail system like it's a file system. Back in early 2007 Jeff Nolan wrote about poor performance with Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, quoting a Microsoft product manager who blamed the performance on people who were "misusing" an e-mail system as a file system.
As Nolan wrote, that product manager is completely wrong. Products, if their designers hope to have them endure, must live up to adoption patterns. At any rate, it's too late to go back: I like the freedom from my laptop that remote storage provides for me.
Or maybe I'll come to desire the security of my hard drive again. After watching a few friends struggle with dying hard drives, I'm not optimistic that this will happen.
So maybe, just maybe, I'm finally part of this whole "cloud" trend. I'm conservative and have never been very good at being trendy. This just happened to me. It started making more and more sense to store things remotely, because, well, they no longer felt all that remote.
You feeling the same?
Hard-drive manufacturer Seagate has a new series of drives called the Free Agent Series. Just one problem: They won't work with Linux. (Someone in Microsoft's marketing department is smirking at that one.) As the Inquirer writes:
The problem is to do with the power-saving systems on Seagate's latest range of drives and the fact that it is shipped already formatted to NTFS.
The NTFS is only a slight hurdle to Linux users who have a kernel with NTFS writing enabled or can work mkfs. But the "power saving" timer is a real bugger. It will shut shut the drive off after several minutes of inactivity and helpfully drop the USB connection.
Which is precisely what one wants from a hard drive, right? Regardless of whether one expects to run Linux today, coming out with a drive that doesn't support it means that buying the same drive for a Windows machine is a poor idea. Who knows what OS you'll be running tomorrow? Buying a drive that supports a wider range of OSes is a better idea.
As Jack Wallen writes, not supporting Linux is very early 1990s of Seagate. Time to join the new millennium.
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