External Hard drives

Personal storage devices are decreasing in size but increasing in capacity. Starting from high-capacity DVDs to small USB Flash drives, there is a plethora of choices to choose from. While optical media requires a special writer to be installed on the machine of use, the other options just connect to the standard USB port. Also, unless you use re-writable media, optical disks can be written only once, unlike the other options, making the USB based options more lucrative.

Though the USB Flash drives score over the others because of their extreme portability, their biggest hindrance is that they become exorbitantly expensive after about 1 GB. Thus, for higher capacities you are left with the good old hard drive. 

This need for high-capacity portable storage has made HDD manufacturers introduce external hard drives. Since a HDD has lots of small moving parts, bearings, etc that can be damaged if the drive falls, manufacturers have bravely come out with mechanisms to minimize these effects. 

How we tested The test bed comprised of an intel915G motherboard, powered by a Pentium 3.2 Ghz LGA processor, 256MB RAM and a 7200 RPM HDD. All the external drives were connected to the system through USB 2.0. We used Winbench 99's disk tests, which include the following:  Business Disk Winmark: This measures a drive's throughput when running day-to-day office applications like office suites, web browsing, etc. Of course, you're not going to install applications on these drives and run them. But the applications in the benchmark mostly use small file sizes, which gives a good idea of how the drives will be able to peroform with them High End Disk Winmark: The measures a drive's throughput when running high-end multimedia applications like Adobe Premiere, SoundForge, and even some software development packages. This test gives you the actual throughputs for specific applications, most of which use large file sizes.  Disk Access Time: This affects the overall performance of a drive and its exlained under the “performance” section of this article.  Transfer Rate (Start/End): Unlike the business and high-end disk winmarks, this checks for the raw throughput capabilities of a drive from the beginning of the drive to its end. i.e. it sweeps across from the drive's inner circle to its outer circle, and checkes how well can the drive sustain its throughput. Usually, a drive's throughput reduces as the head moves from the inner circle towards toe outer circle. A good drive will try to sustain as high throughput as possible during this sweep.  2 GB Data Backup: This test was put in to see how well can the drives backup real world data. We used a mix of MP3s, movies, executables and pictures and measured how long it took to transfer them to the drive. We used the software that came with each drive.

We reviewed seven external hard drievs, which were split in two categories. The first category was 'Portable Drives' that included 1" to 2.5" drives, with capacities ranging from 5GB to 40GB. The second category was of 'High Capacity Drives' that were greater than 150 GB, and focused more on backup software, extra features and cost per GB that the drives offered. They are primarily used for taking regular data backups, storing office documents or multimedia content and even transferring it to another PC. 

And then we had the iPod, which was not in either category, but we couldn't resist testing it because of the huge data portability function that it offers along with its superb music player function.

Let's move to what kind of features to look for in external hard drives, some of which we've also used to rank the drives. We used the Brown-Gibson model to arrive at the

weightages. 

Features



Portability: The higher capacity drive you go in for the larger and bulkier it becomes. e.g. one Seagate drive included in the shootout is about 2.5" in diameter and can store only 5GB of data. Its USP is portability. If you want more capacity, then you have to sacrifice portability. In case you want to take regular backup of your data and keep it to yourself, then the higher capacity, bulkier drives are the ones to go in for. We considered this feature when comparing the smaller drives, because that's where portability really matters. 

Power Supply: There are two ways in which an external hard drive can derive its power. Either directly from the PC through the USB port or through an external power supply. The lesser capacity ones such as the Seagate and Transcend take their power supply directly from the USB port and do not require an external power supply. On the other hand the drives with higher capacity such as the Maxtor require an external power supply. And then there are drives like iomega that require an external power supply to copy data to the drive and not while reading from it. This feature was also considered while comparing the smaller drives only. All the larger drives anyways came with an external power supply.

Connectivity: Almost all drives support USB 2.0, which is much faster than USB 1.1. Some drives even support FireWire connectivity. If you are using a Mac then you may want to have a look at the FireWire option, which is available in most of the high-capacity drives. 

Backup and Restore: A lot of these drives are also used as backup devices for the PC, especially the high capacity drives. Just make sure that your drive gives you an easy option to facilitate the same. For instance the Seagate (160GB) has a button on the drive, which when pressed, automatically takes the backup of either the entire drive or the folders that have been specified.

Shock Tolerance: This is an important factor to consider in external hard drives. For instance Seagate calls it tolerance mechanism G-Force, which includes methods like bigger bearings to counter the dents that can be made if the drive falls as well as an intuitive head parking mechanism. By using this mechanism the head parks away from the disk when the drive is not being used, so that it may not strike the disk and damage it when it is in a stationary position. Similarly the Western digital drives park the head at the center portion of the disk that is not being used for data storage. So, external hard drives aren't ordinary hard drives plugged into a box. They provide better shock protection as well. 

For larger drives, we also considered the volume, weight, any extra features like a built-in USB hub.

Performance



Two major factors come under performance measurement. These are access time and transfer rate. 

Access Time: A lot of drive manufacturers quote the seek time instead of the access time in the specifications. Seek time is the time taken by the head to come into position to read the data from the disk. But access time includes seek time as well as latency, which is the time taken by the disk to rotate to the right position so that the head can read the data. Access time also includes the time that is taken after the two things come into position and actually start transferring the data. The access time is quite critical when you are transferring a lot of small files from the disk. Lower transfer time is better.

Transfer Rate: The other important thing is the transfer rate. It calculates the amount of data that a drive can transfer in a second to the computer. See the “How we tested” sectio n of this article for more information on this. Here, higher transfer rate means better performance.

Price



Here, we checked for the cost perGB offered by each drive, instead of price alone.

By Ankit Kawatra, Sudarshana Mishra

Portable Hard Drives

Iomega 40 GB USB 2.0/FireWire Portable HDD  The winner in its category, Iomega portable

HDD, provides the best of performance, price as well as features. This 40GB HDD runs at 4200 rpm and has 2MB of cache buffer. One drawback is that itis not completely free from external power. The drive has read capabilities when connected to the PC through the USB port, which means that you can access the files stored in the drive and even copy then onto your PC. But if you want to write onto the iomega drive, you have to supply it with external power. 

The drive performed the best in four out of our five test, clearly making it the performance forerunner. Besides the default backup software, the drive also comes with a bunch of Norton products, which include Norton's Ghost, Internet Security 2003, Personal Anti Virus and Personal Firewall. Costing the least

(Rs 8,100 + one year warranty) of all the drives in the category, giving the best performance and coming with extra software, the Iomega drive deserved its position at the top.

Contact: Neoteric Informatique, Delhi. Tel: 35239087, E-mail:

ashok@neoteric.co.in RQS# E50 or SMS 131250 



to 9811800601 

********************************************************************************************* Seagate 5.0 GB USB 2.0 Pocket Hard Drive The Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Hard Drive is a round palm sized stylish external drive. Being just 2.5 inch in diameter and having a retractable USB cable makes it very convenient to carry around in pocket. But this cord is a little too small, and could be inconvenient if you have an inaccessible port or a bigger tower cabinet.

Its rubberized legs cushion it from shocks while the drive is in use. All these make a perfect fit between the small USB flash drive and a larger capacity portable drive. But, with 2 MB cache buffer and 3600 rpm spindle speed, the drive's performance isn't all that impressive. The drive took about 20 minutes to backup 2GB of data, which was almost five times the time taken by the other drives in its category. The only plus point about the drive is its portability and style. 

The drive ships with the Seagate Toolkit software, which let's you password protect it in addition to taking regular backups.

The drive is priced at Rs 10500 (+ one year warranty).

Contact: Seagate Distribution India Liaison Office, Delhi. Tel: 26286678. E-mail: response.india@seagate.com RQS# E51 or SMS 131251 to 9811800601

********************************************************************************************* Transcend StoreJet 20 GB  This 20 GB model is a little more portable than Iomega's drive. Plus, it draws power from a USB port, and therefore doesn't require a separate power supply. Even though it scores over the Iomega drive in portability, it looses out on cost per GB. This drive's performance was average in its category, being higher than the 5GB Seagate and lower than the 40 GB Iomega, despite having the same spindle speed and cache buffer as the Iomega drive. The drive took 3 min 30 sec to back up 2 GB of data. 

It comes with a useful software pack called StorJet utility. This can take backups of your email, address book, Internet Explorer favorites, and everything in the My Documents folder. This can be useful if you want to transfer this data from one PC to another, as well as keep a backup of all this data. This is also the only drive that comes with a software-compression utility, which can compress files upto 2 GB but the compression ratio depends upon the file-type. 

At Rs 9,500, this HDD also comes with a two-year warranty; this is a bonus over the others which come with a one-year warranty. 

Contact: Mediaman Infotech, Mumbai. Tel: 23828100, 23828200. E-mail: sales@mediamangroup.com RQS# E52 or SMS

131252 to 9811800601

*********************************************************************************************

High-Capacity External Drives

Maxtor One Touch II External HDD 300 GB The winner in this category. With the maximum capacity (300 GB) , this HDD gave the best price per GB. It was marginally behind Seagate in performance, as well in the features, but the per GB cost of Rs 54 per GB saw it through. One factor that surprised us though was its performance. Despite having a 16 MB cache buffer (double of other drives in this category), the drive's performance was average. Going deeper it scored better on access time and disk transfer test (which tests a drive for its raw throughput). However, it gave average scores in the other benchmarks. On the features front it has all the regulars in the form of pushbutton data backup and Password protection. And the enormous capacity provides enough space to store videos, photos, graphics, music etc. Using the backup software, you can back up most of the local drives files such as MS Outlook e-mail, address books and Internet favorites. Plus, the drive boasts of a one touch disaster recovery feature, using which you can backup an entire system. The button can be customized to backup specific data as well. At Rs 16,300 (+ 1 year warranty), this is a great buy if you are looking for a low cost solution and are ready to take a small dent in the performance. 

Contact: Esys Distribution. Delhi. Tel: 51811694, E-mail: yogi@maxtor.com RQS# E53 or SMS 131253 to 9811800601

********************************************************************************************* Seagate 160 GB External HDD This HDD was the most consistent performer of the lot. Despite having 8 MB cache buffer, it beat Maxtor's drive in some tests. It was also the fastest in backing up 2 GB data, taking only a min and 50

secs. One place where it lost out is on cost per GB, which is the highest in this category at Rs 72 per GB. Dimension wise, this drive takes up the most area of the three drives, but is still the lightest in terms of weight. Seagate also emphasizes on a G-shock rating, which claims 350 Gs of non-operating shock resistance. Plus, the drive can be placed vertically to save space, or horizontally. If you put it horizontally, the rubber ring on its top let's you stack multiple such drives on top of each other. The HDD has a one touch push button backup option, which works in conjunction with the bundled software. When you press the button, the backup software lets you conveniently perform back-ups of several drives or selected folders/files automatically. At Rs 11,500 (+ 1 year warranty), this HDD is meant for the performance freak who can pay a little more for that extra boost in performance.

Contact: Seagate Distribution India Liaison Office, Delhi. Tel: 26286678. E-mail: response.india@seagate.com RQS# E54 or SMS 131254 to 9811800601

********************************************************************************************* Western Digital Media Center 250 GB External HDD This HDD races ahead in features but loses a bit in performance. It offers an eight-in-one memory-card reader and a USB hub. It accepts CompactFlash Types I and II, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, SD, MMC, SmartMedia and Microdrive cards. The USB hub would expand the number of available USB ports in your system. For this the drive has an extra port each at the front and back. This 250 GB HDD runs at 7200 rpm and has 8 MB cache buffer. Like the others it also offers single-button backup. Also, as it comes with a stand, you can fit it upright, economizing on desk space. It has three control buttons for automatic backup (scheduled backups), backup on demand (immediate backup) and safe shutdown. This HDD gave the best score in high-end disk winmark as well as access time, but was lowest in the other benchmarks. This HDD loses out to the Seagate in performance and to Maxtor in price (it is priced about Rs 18/GB more than the Maxtor). The Western Digital is priced at Rs 15,500 (+ one year warranty). 

Contact: WD India, Mumbai. Ph: 30936050, E-mail: ajay.kapure@wdc.com. RQS# E55 or SMS 131255 to 9811800601

********************************************************************************************* iPod 40 GB Surprised that we are comparing an MP3 player with external drives? Don't be. The music player packs in a 40 GB

HDD. We have kept ther iPod out of the rankings as the rankings would not do justice to the capabilities of the device. In the portable category, its performance was second only to the

iomega. It had the best access time of the lot at 17.5 seconds, but lost out a bit on other performance tests. 

The iPod does a lot more than just storing data. It can play music in seven formats and store 10,000 songs at 128 kbps AAC format. It has a revolutionary click-wheel for navigating through songs. While connected to your computer it draws power from it to charge its battery. A fully charged battery can last upto 12 hours. The audio playback is impeccable. Thus, if you want to shake a leg while carrying your other data around, nothing can get better than the

iPod. It's priced at Rs 27,400 (+ one year warranty). 

Contact: Apple Computer International, Bangalore. E-mail: indianinfo@asia.apple.com. Tel: 25550660 RQS# E56 or SMS 131256 to 9811800601

*********************************************************************************************

Graphs depicting the Start/End Transfer Rates of the Drives

Hard

DSisks Features   iomega

PHD40-C Apple

iPOD Seagate

Pocket Disk  ST650211U-RK Transcend Maxtor

One Touch II Seagate

External  Hard Drive Western

Digital Media Centre WD2500B012-RSH+H1:H3 Capacity

(GB) 40 40 5 20 300 160 250 Interface USB 2.0/IEEE

1394a (FireWire) IEEE

1394a (FireWire) and USB 2.0 USB 2.0 USB 2.0 USB 1.1/2.0/

IEEE 1394a  (FireWire) USB 1.1/2.0/

IEEE 1394a (FireWire) port USB 1.1/2.0/

IEEE 1394a(FireWire) port Buffer

MB 2 N/A 2 2 16 8 8 Size 17.5mm x

89.9mm x 150.1mm 102 Hx 61.8

Wx19.9 L mm 2.5"

diameter 95x71.5x15 mm 41 x 140 x 220

mm 178.125 D x

162.5 W x 56.25 H mm 44.2(H)x218.75(L)x154.43(W)

mm Weight 230

g 158

g 75

g 118

g 1.38

kg 1.285

kg 1.375kg Spindle

speed (rpm) 4200 N/A 3600 4200 7200 7200 7200 Backup

s/w Iomega

Automatic Backup software iTunes Seagate

Utility Toolkit StoreJet

Utility & ExBoot Express Dantz

Retrospect Express BounceBack

Express. Dantz

Retrospect Express Power USB+External USB USB USB External External External Warranty

(years) 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 Unique Portable,

comes with Norton Ghost,Antivirus, firewall & Internet Security MP3 Player Fits in pocket Portable, LED

indicators One touch

backup button LED, push

button backup 8-in-1 Flash

card reader, push  button backup, USB Hub Price

in Rs. 8100 27,400 10500 9500 16300 11500 15500

Test Results
tests/models	iomega PHD40-C	Apple iPOD	Seagate ST650211U-RK Pocket Hard Drive	Transcend StoreJet  20 GB	Maxtor One Touch II	SeagateExternal Hard Disk	Western Digital Media Center 250GB
Business Disk WinMark99 (thousand bytes/sec)	7050	4060	1620	4010	12300	13300	13100
Disk Access Time (Milliseconds)	19.5	15.4	25.7	21.2	15.1	15.2	13.9
Start Disk Transfer Rate (thousand bytes/sec)	28800	18300	8450	11200	30600	30400	24900
End Disk Transfer Rate (thousand bytes/sec)	16300	10500	5360	11300	30700	30000	24900
High-End Disk WinMark99 (thousand bytes/sec)	19100	11,000	4430	9920	30500	28600	31700
2GB backup time min:sec	2:17	4:35	20:05	3:30	2:30	1:50	2:45

Desktop Search Tools

Desktop search tools are now here to locate files on a PC. Is Google leading the race? We compare five desktop search tools to find out which scores where

The increasing demand for specific data or information on the Net lead to a boom in search engines. Once these search engines had more or less stabilized their presence on the Net, they started looking around for fresh challenges (like anyone else!), and set their sights on an unlikely target-your local hard disk. Unlikely, that is till you consider the following: hard-disk capacities have ballooned in the recent past, and so has the plethora of multimedia and other file formats in which you can store data in those disks. E-mail, chat, digital photos, videos, music, spreadsheets, PDFs...important nuggets of information can today be stored in any of them. Finding that particular mail with the photo of that new prototype or that particular document which listed the cellphone number (now was it a .doc or a .pdf? Again, are you sure it was not an .xls?) from amongst a thousand others can be quite a pain.

This is what has led to the virtual explosion of interest in desktop search, and in the creation of tools or services that have the capability of locating a particular file, mail, contact and video on your PC, based on any number of associated parameters. It is not as if desktop search is a new phenomenon. What shook up the market is the entry of some of the majors into the arena.

Google, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo... all of them have plans to search your hard disk.

While some of them still remain in the realm of plans, others have become products. Here, we test the famous and some not-so-famous desktop search tools.

Copernic



This utility from Copernic Technologies efficiently hunts down files and e-mail on local drives. Just like the others, it too has separate tabs for finding different kinds of files such as music, videos, pictures, mail, instant messages and contacts.

Copernic's interface lets you refine your search and also displays a preview of the contents of the file

Copernic desktop search is free and can be downloaded from www.copernic.com. Copernic works by first creating a searchable index of your data, and then updating it every time you add or remove files. A search box on the Windows taskbar lets you type in a keyword. Or you can search from the full interface. On the interface, a left-side search column allows simple keyword queries or more refined searches. Results can be organized by date, folder or file type and size. A preview pane shows you the contents of the file, with the search term highlighted, even if you do not have the associated program or reader. 

While installing, you can specify the folders you want to include in the search. It can also search on the Internet from the same toolbar. The limitation is that the e-mail searches are only for Outlook and Outlook Express, and the contact search is limited to Outlook and Exchange contacts. Copernic searches are very fast, and it does a real-time sorting of files as you keep typing in your search query. One drawback, however, is that it cannot do a search on metadata, such as search for documents authored by or photos sent by a particular person.

X1 desktop search



Unlike Copernic, X1 does not have the option of searching files category wise such as pictures, video, music and contacts. X1 has options in the form of three tabs on top of the interface.

With X1 you can locate the selected file on your disk with a single click

These are 'Email', 'Attachments' and 'Files'. After making a primary selection of what you are looking for, ie, a mail, attachment or file you have various options to search. For example, if you are looking for a file then select the Files tab on top of the interface, which will show you a directory listing. As you type the file name in the search bar, files meeting those criteria get highlighted across all the file identifiers (size, directory, path, size and date) that you have chosen to display. Alternatively, you can limit your search to any one of the above identifiers by typing in your search string in the query box on top of that column. As you keep typing, X1 will keep showing the preview of the currently highlighted file on the right pane of the interface. 

X1 also works by indexing all the files on the PC the first time it is opened, and from then on it periodically keeps on checking for files that are added or removed from the PC. You can specify the amount of time after which X1 should check for added or removed files. This can be done by clicking on the top right corner of the X1 interface and then on Files tab in the resulting window. Unlike the Copernic or Google desktop search, in X1, you can search in mail using Eudora and Netscape Mail. 



X1 is not free; it costs $74.95, though a 15-day trial version is available for download.

Filehand 



Filehand searches only documents, and not images. It requires the .NET framework to be installed on your PC, and in case you don't have it then Filehand's setup will automatically download and install it for you, all 23 MB of it! 

Lookout is a plug-in for Outlook, that can index other documents on the PC as well

Filehand is a simple tool with a very simple user interface. The file formats that it supports include PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Word Perfect, Text, MP3 and HTML. Filehand gives the option of sorting the search by the words or phrases within the document, the type of document and the date at which it was modified, etc. When compared with other search tools, it has no extraordinary features.

MS Lookout



Lookout, a search tool from Lookoutsoft, integrates with Outlook (and not Outlook Express). As of today, Lookoutsoft has been taken over by Microsoft. Just like Filehand, MS Lookout requires the .NET framework to run and if you don't have it, Lookout's setup will download and install it for you. While, Lookout is a free, add-on search tool for Outlook, it can be configured to search through other documents also. But it needs Outlook to be running for it to be active. Configuring Lookout took a bit of doing, though. We had to first remove the Outlook search to include a full drive search. It is convenient for someone who relies heavily on Outlook to schedule appointments, enter contacts, and send e-mail. 

Linux: Beagle Beagle is a Linux-based tool for indexing and searching local data. It uses the Lucene.NET indexer to index information. A few software are a must have before installing Beagle, namely Mono, gtk-sharp, gecko-sharp, dbus-sharp and inotify enabled kernel. Apart from searching regular formats such as PDFs, doc, pictures and music, it supports OpenOffice documents (sxw, sxi, sxm) and source code, it supports Java, C, C++, C# and python. Beagle is still in a very early stage of development.

Lookout installs as a toolbar within Outlook. One of its key features is its ability to build the search criteria as well as restrictions criteria and save them for the future. Thus, you could have a search expression that looks for, say, the word 'buy', within attachments in e- mail from a particular user, searching only in e-mail received within the last 48 hours. You could save this search and run it again and again. Lookout's biggest drawback is that it lacks a file viewer-a feature that is there in other desktop search tools, such as X1 Search and Copernic. File viewers are helpful when identifying between two similarly named files. It also cannot handle pictures, other than by their file names.

Results
Tool	Pros	Cons	Rating
Copernic	Fast search. Shows previews	Cannot search in Mozilla/Thunderbird	5-Apr
X1	Scheduled indexing. Supports Netscape and Eudora mail	Only commercial tool	3.5/5
Filehand	Simple interface	Does only documents and not pictures	2.5/5
MS Lookout	Very good with e-mail in outlook	No preview. No built in PDF filter.	5-Mar
Google desktop search	Integrated search across Web and local hard disk	Less number of file formats supported. No preview	5-Mar
Apple Spotlight	Metadata search	Not available for PC	Not rated

Google 



The Google desktop search interface is similar to the online Google search. Once you have downloaded and installed Google desktop search (it is free), then whenever you open google.com it will show an option to search your desktop as well. The tool, just like other desktop search tools maintains an index of your files, documents and even e-mail messages. 

Google shows previews of cached Web pages, but not of other document types

It supports Outlook, Outlook Express, Word, Excel, as well as text files and Web surfing history. You can customize the indexing and choose which items to include, and also exclude specific documents, paths or URLs. To start searching, just type your keyword in the browser-based interface, which runs locally and not on the Web. Clicking on any of the search results will open the file with the default application, or in case of e-mail provide you with a text overview. 

Google desktop search cannot handle e-mail clients other than Outlook and Outlook Express, and instant messengers other than AOL. It does not search PDFs or pictures and cannot show a preview of the resultant file. However, it can give you preview of a cached Web page.

The key feature of the Google desktop search is its ability to integrate a search on the Web as well as your hard disk. Once you choose this option in the settings, any search you do at Google will include in the results and information from your hard disk. It is also the only one that indexes instant messenger logs on the PC. 

Apple: Spotlight Apple's Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger', comes with a new search technology called 'Spotlight'. This desktop search engine can find e-mail, contacts, images, presentations and office documents. The special thing about Spotlight is that it indexes metadata of the files and documents, ie, details about the files such as the kind of content, author, edit history, format, size and many other. This makes it easier to refine the search further and look for things such as all files and e-mail.

Conclusion: What we are seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. Desktop search is still in its infancy and the tools are yet to mature in capabilities including, file formats to search and the usage of metadata in enriching and refining the search results. We expect the desktop search market to see major changes in the near future. Till then, Copernic Desktop Agent is the winner in this mini shootout.

Ankit Kawatra and Krishna Kumar