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Tiny Oyen drive solves gigastorage problem
April 4, 2008
I got a tip last fall from a video producer friend. He shoots HD video with one of the new tapeless cameras, and he routinely exceeds the capacity of his computer hard drives. When that happens, he copies segments of video to small portable hard drives made by a company called
Oyen in St. Paul, MN.
I bought one of these drives to see if it would work for me, and to compare the performance of this drive to other removable drives in my collection. In past years I have invested heavily in removable cartridge drives made by
Granite Digital. These are nice, but the base unit has unnecessarily noisy cooling fans. I hate the noise, so I tend to avoid the system; it’s off most of the time.
The Oyen drives are silent. You can’t even tell when they are running except for the tiny LED indicator. The company makes a variety of sizes and connection styles. At just over $100, mine is the slowest, a USB drive that gets its power from the USB cable. Other, most sophisticated drives from Oyen include FireWire and SATA drives that run much faster than mine. These lilliputian devices are extraordinarily well built. They have nearly indestructible cases, and they will run in any orientation in virtually any environment.
My tiny Oyen portable hard drive is 4.75 in. in length (120mm). This model uses USB for both power and data transfer. It's slow, but it works well. Faster FireWire and SATA versions are available, providing more productive transfer speeds. The case is sturdy, and the device seems to be "bullet-proof."
For simple file transfers, the USB drives are nice. For anything more demanding – video or prepress documents – I would move to the FireWire version immediately. Mine is a portable repository for mountains of data. Its capacity is 150GB, and it is a tiny thing – so small that I worry about losing it. I have accidentally dropped it three times – no damage – and it continues to run reliably and silently. When I travel, I carry on this drive a back-up of every conceivable file I might find necessary. I put it in my bike bag when I ride over to the university. It’s almost always with me, and I have come to be reliant on it (though I never have data on this drive only – the risk of loss is too great).
To simplify things, I have a duplicate USB cable on both my home computer and my university computer. That way I don’t have to transport the cable. This has a bonus, too. It’s a standard USB miniature plug cable, which will charge my cell phone, and will transfer digital photos from many consumer digital cameras.
The little memory devices people call “pen drives” are great, but they don’t have enough storage space. They usually top out at four GB. For slightly more than the cost of four of those, I have 150GB of reliable storage that fits in my pocket.
These little drives are the perfect tool for the graphic designer who needs to move a large amount of prepress information to a printing facility. High-resolution files are of no consequence; huge PDFs don’t matter – with these tiny drives, there is room for almost any printing project.
Posted by Brian Lawler on April 4, 2008 | Comments (1)
