Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive review: Not the killer storage upgrade it could be

Western Digital Black2 $300.00 The WD Black2 is faster than a mechanical hard drive, but it's not nearly as fast as a comparably priced 500- to 512GB SSD. Its SSD write speed is particularly disappointing.

Western Digital’s Black2 combo drive—an SSD paired with an HDD—is a great concept: SSD speed and hard-drive capacity in a single 2.5-inch package. But disappointing SSD write performance, a hefty $300 price tag, and the availability of much faster 512GB SSDs for just a few dollars more make the Black2 a difficult sell for laptop upgraders—unless you absolutely need its 1.1TB capacity.

The Black2 is essentially a 120GB SSD married to a 1TB, 5400 rpm hard drive. The package 9mm high, so it will fit in many, but not all laptops (most newer thin-and-lights can accommodate only drives that are 7mm high). The SSD and HDD share the same drive interface, but they’re treated as separate entities, and Windows will assign different drive letters to each of them.

The SSD appears automatically when you attach the drive and boot up, but you must install a software driver to access the hard drive. This makes the Black2 unsuitable for NAS boxes and RAID. It is also not supported on the Mac OS.

The hard-drive half of WD's Black2 provides respectable performance--for a 5400 rpm drive, that is.

The drive delivers decent performance in every aspect aside from its SSD write performance, which is disappointingly slow. It wrote our 10GB collection of small files at just 150MBps, and it wrote our single 10GB file at only 151.1MBps. That’s faster than most mechanical hard drives, to be sure, but we had to dig all the way back to an obsolete Corsair Force drive with asynchronous NAND to fine a slower-writing SSD. 

The Black2’s SSD read performance was a little closer to what we expected: 362.5MBps for our 10GB collection of small files, and 362.1MBps for our single 10GB file. 

The write performance of the WDBlack2's SSD drive, on the other hand, is among the slowest we've encountered.

Turning to the drive’s mechanical side, the Black2 wrote our 10GB collection of small files to its hard drive at 59.5MBps, and it read those same files at 81.2MBps. The dual drive wrote our single 10GB file to its hard drive at 112.2MBps, and it read it back at 85.5MBps. Those are good numbers for a 5400 rpm drive.

The WD Black2 is faster than a plain hard drive, but it lags far behind a state-of-the-art SSDs. Price per gigabyte--27 cents for the Black2, versus 60 to 80 cents for a good SSD--sounds like a good deal. But if you want the genuine wow upgrade experience that a real SSD can deliver, you'll be happier with a similarly-priced 512GB SSD, such as the Samsung 840 EVO or the Toshiba Q Pro.

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WD My Cloud review: A better, more secure alternative to cloud storage

I love the cloud. I depend on it. The cloud allows me to access my data from any device at any time; from anywhere I have broadband access. And I can share some or all of that information with other people: A boon to productivity when I’m collaborating with someone.

I’ve become so addicted to that flexibility that I’m willing to pay a subscription fee, even though I don’t trust the service provider to keep my information entirely secure. I never put anything sensitive in the cloud, such as my tax returns or other financial data. And I never rely solely on the cloud. I always keep backup copies on storage devices that I have complete control over.

WD’s My Cloud delivers the best of both worlds. It’s a hard drive that connects to my home network, so it’s as secure as I can make it. But I can access it from the Internet—from a PC, smartphone, or tablet—just like a cloud service. And I can create user accounts with passwords to allow family, friends, and colleagues to access specific folders, so we can share information (or media) and collaborate. I can also transfer files between the My Cloud and cloud-storage services, such as Dropbox.

Robert CardinWD's My Cloud NAS box delivers all the convenience of a cloud-storage service in a device that's completely in your control.

Hmm. My Cloud sounds a lot like WD’s My Book Live product line, doesn’t it? As it turns out, the My Cloud series is replacing the My Book line, and the new desktop and mobile apps WD is launching alongside My Cloud will also work with the older drives. But there’s one My Cloud feature you won’t find on any My Book Live: a USB 3.0 port that can host a digital camera for direct file transfers. Alternatively, you can connect a stand-alone USB hard drive into this port and expand the My Cloud’s storage capacity.

As with the My Book Live, you can also back up your PC to the My Cloud over your network. And the drive supports Apple’s Time Machine technology, so you can back up Mac clients, too. And unlike some NAS manufacturers that limit the number of free client licenses you get, Western Digital will back up as many computers as you’d care to connect to it (there are practical limitations, of course, based on the amount of available storage). If you’d like, you can mirror these backups on a public cloud service.

You connect a digital camera directly to the My Cloud's USB 3.0 port, or add an additional drive to expand its storage capacity.

WD offers mobile apps for the Android and iOS operating systems, which helps solve another problem many of us face: data fragmentation caused by having stored files on multiple devices. Install the apps onto your smartphones and tablets, and you can send all your media files over the Internet to your My Cloud. I just wish my digital camera was smart enough to support an app that could do that (yes, I should buy a Wi-Fi-enabled storage card).

Installing the My Cloud is pretty much a plug-and-play affair: It even detected my double-NAT’d router and configured itself to work under those circumstances without any intervention on my part. (I’m in a double NAT situation because there’s no retail alternative to AT&T’s U-verse gateway/router combo). When the Lab benchmarked the My Cloud, it delivered very fast file-transfer performance, reading a 10GB collection of files at 29.9 MBps and writing it at 21.4MBps. It performed equally well with a single 10GB file, reading it at an impressive 79.4 MBps and writing back to the drive at 62.1MBps.

The WD My Cloud delivers excellent file-transfer performance.

Moving beyond backup services, the My Cloud has an onboard DLNA server and iTunes support, so it can stream media to various entertainment systems in your home that also support DLNA or iTunes (I’m talking about smart TVs, network-capable AV receivers, and media-streaming boxes such as the Roku or WD’s own WD TV Live). Unlike Microsoft’s discontinued Windows Home Server 2011, the My Cloud cannot stream media to a client over the Internet. WD doesn’t provide BitTorrent support, either.

The My Cloud is very reasonably priced: The 2TB model reviewed here goes for $150, and WD offers a 3TB model for $180 and a 4TB model for $250. Relying on a single-drive NAS for backup or storing critical data is a little risky, however, since you stand to lose everything if the device fails.

WD mostly solves this problem with a feature it calls “safepoints.” A safepoint is a snapshot of the drive that can be stored on another storage device on your network or on a drive attached to the My Cloud's USB port. Should the drive fail, you can recover all your data—including all your backups of your client PCs and Macs—from the safepoint on a healthy drive. And once you’ve created a safepoint, the My Cloud can be set up to automatically create new ones at specified intervals.

WD plans to offer two- and four-drive units down the road. If the drives in these models can be configured as RAID 1 (where data is automatically mirrored), it will add another layer of data security. There is, however, one shortcoming to both of these solutions: No amount of redundancy will preserve your data if both your original and your backup(s) are in the same physical location that location is devastated by fire, flood, earthquake, or some other disaster.

The My Cloud Dashboard provides a at-a-glance update of the NAS box's status.

The thing is, very few other NAS manufacturers offer a solution for this problem, either (the new Drobo Transporter 2.0 is supposed to be capable of backing up to another Transporter 2.0 via the cloud, but the company has yet to send one for review).

And considering everything that the My Cloud does do, that criticism becomes a small detail. If you need storage that’s available from just about everywhere, and you don’t want to rely on a third-party cloud service to provide it, WD’s My Cloud is a brilliant solution.

Michael manages PCWorld's hardware product reviews and contributes to TechHive's coverage of home-control systems and sound bars.
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Review: IDriveSync secures cloud storage

IDriveSync Basic IDriveSync offers both storage and security in one, and it does so with an added level of security that its rivals don't offer.

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Cloud storage and security are two concepts that many people think are exclusive. But that's not the case with IDriveSync, a cloud storage tool that puts the user in control of security.

Once you add files to your IDriveSync folder, they are automatically encrypted and synced to your cloud-based storage space.

IDriveSync bills itself as a "sync and share solution,"and it's a good description. This software-and-service combo allows you to sync files across multiple devices, including Macs, PCs, Android, and iOS devices, and lets you share files with friends and colleagues. It also is accessible via the Web.

Once you install IDriveSync on your desktop, it adds an IDriveSync folder to your computer—and I like that it allows you to select the folder's location. You simply drag files to that folder in order to save them to your IDriveSync account, where they will be synced across all of the devices that you use to access the service. I also like it that IDriveSync saves the 30 most recent versions of each file, so you can go back and see what changes have been made.

IDriveSync has some handy features that anyone looking for a cloud storage service will appreciate. I like the different views that IDriveSync offers when you're browsing the content you've saved. You can browse by folder and file name, or you can use the Timeline view, which allows you to browse files chronologically, by the date they were updated. And with any photos that you've saved, you can choose to view them individually or using the Gallery view, which arranges them on a black background for a better look.

I also like the "Out of Box" feature, which allows you to save files to the cloud without first transferring them to your IDriveSync folder. This feature allows you to save files or folders directly to the cloud, where they will be stored until you need them—not synced across your multiple devices. This feature is handy for any data you don't need to access or update frequently.

IDriveSync makes it easy to share files, and encrypts everything you share.

But where IDriveSync really distinguishes itself is on security. All of the data you store in your IDriveSync account is automatically encrypted, and you can select the level of encryption. By default, IDriveSync uses 256-bit AES encryption for storing and transferring data. If you want to go above and beyond, you can opt for private encryption, where you set the encryption key yourself. With this option, IDriveSync does not have access to the key, which offers an extra level of security—but it also means that if you forget your encryption key, your data is gone forever, as the company cannot help you recover it.

You select your encryption level when you set up your account, and you cannot change this option once it's selected, so it's best to choose carefully.

The security offered by IDriveSync will appeal to users who have concerns about services like Dropbox, which has suffered from well-publicized security pitfalls. And IDriveSync's offering is more complete than what you get from Boxcryptor. That service lets you add an encrypted folder to a cloud storage service you already use, like Dropbox or Google Drive, but it's not a storage service on its own, and it doesn't offer the private key-level encryption that IDriveSync does. IDriveSync offers both storage and security in one, and it does so with an added level of security that its rivals don't offer.

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Review: Open Drive turns cloud storage services into one big file sharing network

Open Drive If you are looking for a document or a template, you would normally Google for it. But a lot of people keep these things on their cloud storage services, and are willing to share. Open Drive indexes them...

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You can keep your Google Drive files private, or you can use it as one huge file sharing network. Many Google Drive users allow public access to their files, which means that if they have a certain type of file that you also need, you can request a copy...if you can find it.

Ironically for a company whose core business is based around search, you cannot directly search for anyone else's files within Google Drive, nor can you look effectively for them using regular Google search either. Mcom Multicartes created Chrome extension Open Drive to provide a search interface for these public files so you can find them more easily and efficiently.

Open Drive's search can be slow, but its thoroughness more than makes up for it.

What's more, using Open Drive, you can also simultaneously search other cloud storage systems (such as Dropbox, SkyDrive, Evernote, and Box) and have those files sent to your Google Drive account. Depending on how many cloud services you are searching across, searching may take a few moments for the results to come back, so be patient.

Once you get your results, you can then do one of the following: download it, send a copy to your Google Drive, get a shortlink to the document (for say emailing, or sending to someone via IM), or simply open it and see what is there.

If you can't find what you're looking for, you can join Open Drive's Google Plus community and request what you need. If another member of the group has it, they can send it to you.

As with any search engine results, there's some dross mixed in with the gold. However, there is still a high success rate in finding relevant files. Searching across so many cloud services at once in the same interface, saving time and mouse clicks is so convenient it borders on amazing.

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome Web store, where you can install the latest version directly into your Chrome browser.

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Yahoo’s New Flickr App Comes With A Terabyte of Free Storage

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Review: SafeWallet makes password storage pretty easy

I love password managers. When they work well, they make browsing the Web easier, faster, and more secure. And SafeWallet does, indeed, work well. It's not perfect, but SafeWallet has become my new favorite password manager.

SafeWallet makes it easy to access the details on the account logins you've stored.

To get started, you simply create an account by entering your email address and selecting a password. You then setup a safety question, enter your birthdate, and you're good to go. SafeWallet works as an extension for the Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer browsers and you can choose which ones you'd like to add during the installation.

The installation didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped. While the Firefox and IE extensions were added automatically, I had to manually locate the Chrome extension in Chrome's Web store and install it myself. Luckily, that process was easy.

Equally easy is surfing the Web with SafeWallet. It automatically detects most login pages and forms that you fill out and asks you if you'd like to remember that information in your SafeWallet. You can access your SafeWallet either by clicking on the icon that appears in your browser's toolbar or by launching the program from your computer's start menu. Both of these steps will open up the SafeWallet interface, which is attractive and easy to understand. All of the Website logins you've saved are listed there, and you can drag and drop them to categories such as "Business" and "Personal." You also can mark some as Favorites, which makes it easy to find those that you use frequently.

Overall, the layout of SafeWallet is easier to browse that LastPass's Vault, which is a bit too text-heavy for my taste. Still, I do like how LastPass lets you create your own categories for sorting all of your logins (something SafeWallet lacks).

SafeWallet recognizes most login pages and offers to remember the information for you.

And SafeWallet did hiccup a few times on multi-page logins, as do most password managers I've tested. But unlike LastPass, which managed to identify the second page of a two-page login system that my banking site uses, SafeWallet didn't recognize either page. I had to manually add the site to my SafeWallet myself, which is simple.

I was able to forget about that minor flaw when I saw how seamlessly SafeWallet handles multiple accounts for a single site or service. I have a personal Google account and a professional Google account, and SafeWallet made it a cinch to store and use both of them.  SafeWallet's interface lists both the name of the site and the username, making it easy to see at a glance which is which. LastPass's Vault lists only the name of the service, making me click on each Google entry in order to see which one contains the information for my personal or work accounts.

Similarly, when you browse to the Google site, LastPass fills in the username and password fields with the login you most recently used; you have to go back to your vault in order to find the other one. SafeWallet, though, lets you select the login to use right on the Webpage itself, with a handy drop-down option that lets you make the switch. It's incredibly handy.

So, too, is the fact that SafeWallet is now free. In a change from earlier versions, the company has decided to offer it free of charge. That includes the mobile versions, which run on iOS and Android devices. LastPass offers mobile versions, too, but only as part of its $1-per-month Premium service.

If SafeWallet fails to recognize a login page, you can enter your details manually.

I wish SafeWallet worked more seamlessly with multi-page logins, but the rest of its features are enough to make me overlook that issue. From now on, I'm storing my logins in my SafeWallet.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Liane Cassavoy is a veteran technology and business journalist. She contributes regularly to PCWorld and has written about business issues and products for Entrepreneur Magazine and other publications. She is the author of two business start-up guides published by Entrepreneur Press.
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What’s the Fastest Cloud Storage Service?

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Iomega StorCenter ix2-dl Review: Network-Attached Storage Can Be Used for Video Surveillance, Too

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Iomega StorCenter ix2-dl Review: Network-Attached Storage Can Be Used for Video Surveillance, Too

The Iomega StorCenter ix2-dl is the company's least expensive two-bay NAS (network-attached storage) product, and a notable step up from its more consumer-oriented Home Media Hard Drive. At $200 without disks, it's a good performer for reading back data, and Iomega's software features are solid, only a notch or two below Synology's and QNAP's.

That said, the ix2-dl's write performance for small files and folders is weak, so this is not a box for backing up more than a couple of networked PCs. Inside, the StorCenter ix2-dl is powered by a 1.6GHz Marvell 3282 CPU and 256MB of memory.

A basic black box, the ix2-dl features only power and status lights on the front panel, plus gigabit ethernet and a single USB 2.0 port on the back. The USB 2.0 port works with external storage drives or printers; or you could plug in a USB camera and use the drive for video surveillance.

The surveillance capabilities are available with the free MindTree SecureMind Surveillance app; you can also use the drive with the Axis Video Hosting System service and application, or with Iomega's own LifeLine Client. I took the first of these, the SecureMind app, for a spin; it's very easy to use and may be controlled locally or via the Web.

Beyond surveillance, the ix2-dl provides interfaces to social sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube; DLNA and iTunes media serving; bitttorrent downloading, iSCSI, and printer serving; plus integration with Amazon S3, Atmos Backup, and Mozy. The unit also provides its own backup routines as well as access via Iomega's portal-based Personal Cloud service.

For basic home media and storage use, this Iomega StorCenter is a full-featured NAS that will serve you well. Where the ix2-dl lags is in business-related applications such as email, Web, and VPN hosting.

While a decent reader, writing lots of smaller files and folders is the ix2-dl's weakness. With our 10GB mix of files, it wrote at only 20.2MBps—not the worst we've seen, but close to it. Write performance improved to 41.2MBps with our single 10GB file. If you're backing up PCs to the ix2-dl, you should opt for images rather than plain file backup for better speed. The ix2-dl read our 10GB file mix at a competent 35.5MBps and the large 10GB file at a healthy 86.5MBps.

For the average home or SOHO user, the ix2-dl is a two-bay NAS box that is easy to configure and use, and it won't cost you a fortune. Performance is fine for the price, and the features are all that most users will need. But small businesses should take a look at Synology's DiskStation DS212j or QNAP's TS-212, both of which offer cost-reducing server features for about the same price. (Our roundup from earlier this year can tell you more about some current NAS products.)

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Paragon Software Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional Review: Storage Tools Wrapped in a Middling Interface

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional ($100 as of June 1, 2012) is as comprehensive a toolset for hard drives as you'll find. It has full backup, imaging, and partitioning capabilities, and it also supports virtualization software such as VirtualBox and VMware by allowing you to create virtual machines for those programs.

The Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional interface is relatively straightforward, but the dialogs could stand some improvement.HDM hasn't changed a whole lot since the last version; it was already so comprehensive, however, that Paragon simply didn't have that much to add. The short list of partition functions includes creating, moving, formatting, deleting, backing up, burning to CD, converting the file system, and wiping. You can do the same things with entire disks, as well as convert them from MBR to GPT. You can also back up and restore individual files and folders.

Included in HDM 12 Pro are all the features offered in the company's Virtualization Manager: You can convert a partition to a virtual machine and back, convert a Windows 7 backup image to a VM, and restore from a VM to diverse hardware. The program also handles dynamic disks, merges images, manages multiple backups in archives, and performs a host of other tasks I don't have the room to discuss here. A features list comparison between the professional edition and the less expensive suite version is available at the company's website.

I love the everything-under-one-roof concept of HDM 12's interface. It's far more convenient than jumping around between modules, as with other programs such as Acronis True Image and Disk Director. I also like the fact that you define a series of actions, and then set them in motion using the Apply button. However, I don't see why the program needs to instill even a slight hint of paranoia by asking if you really want to apply the changes when all you're doing is backing up. (On the other hand, you can set several backup jobs to go off consecutively using the define/apply methodology.) On top of that, while the interface is fairly straightforward, I'd rather see standard Windows file dialog boxes, which are to my mind easier to use than Paragon's custom boxes.

For version 12, Paragon is touting a new imaging engine with better performance. Normally I dismiss claims like this as overblown before I've even tested them, and usually I'm correct in my assumptions. In this case, though, I found HDM 12 to be not only fast but also noninterfering. In fact, I wrote the majority of this review with the program humming away in the background, and I forgot that it was running.

One feature that is missing from HDM 12 is the ability to mount an image as a virtual hard drive that you can peruse in Windows Explorer. R-Drive Image and True Image do this, and I've found it to be a handy way to quickly pull a file or two out of a backup. HDM 12 lets you connect to an image to perform partition and other operations on it, but doesn't mount it.

Backup, virtual machines, partitioning, conversion--Hard Drive Manager 12 Professional is a powerful toolkit. At $100, it is a bit pricey for the average user, so be sure to check out the aforementioned $50 suite version to see if that will cover your needs.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you must register to download the latest version of the software.

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Sony Walkman Z Series Review: A Solid Multimedia Player With Limited Storage

Walkman is a familiar name in portable media players, going back several decades. Sony's Walkman Z Series ($210, as of June 1, 2012) is basically an Android phone without the phone, and with a strong emphasis on media playback and gaming.

Design

The Z Series' 4.3-inch, 800-by-480-pixel-resolution screen is big enough for good video playback and an enjoyable gaming experience and yet small enough for the device to feel comfortable in one hand. The player weighs 0.34 pound, which eventually felt a tad heavy, but was fine for casual use.

The sharp edges and button layout make it a little less friendly for one-handed use, though. I have small hands, and my thumb can almost make it to the top corner on the far side, but the Z Series' sharp corners and edges make the stretch uncomfortable. Three capacitive buttons sit on the bezel below the screen for Back, Home, and Menu.

When held in portrait orientation, the power button is on the left side of the top edge, out my fingers' reach when I held the player in my left hand. The volume rocker and the Walkman button occupy the right edge--a location that made them much easier for me to press.

The headphone jack and proprietary charging/data connection port sit on the bottom, and the mini HDMI port is on the bottom of the right edge. The left side has nothing. On the back are the tiny speakers and a reset button. The back is not removable, meaning that the battery is not user-accessible, and hence that the reset button is necessary.

The purple-blue plastic on the back of the Walkman provides a nice contrast to the shiny black of the rest of the device. The design has gentle curves near the top and bottom, which makes the device a pleasure to hold in two hands in landscape orientation.

One feature omission is a camera. The Walkman focuses on media playback, but I would have appreciated having a rear- or front-facing camera to take pictures and videos, or handle video chat.

Performance and Specs

The Z Series runs Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread, and packs a dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 processor and 1GB of RAM. Thanks to these specs, multimedia playback and gaming worked well. The unit comes with a demo version of Riptide GP, which played smoothly and showed crisp, clear graphics. Every video file I tried--from the included Spiderman trailer, to a 720p rip, to an Avengers trailer on YouTube--played without a hitch.

The screen is bright and clear, with enough resolution to make games and videos look good. It's not a 720p screen, but at this screen size, it looks good.

On the wireless side, since the device doesn't include a phone, there is no data modem. You do get Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth with A2DP and AVRCP. The built-in FM radio uses the headphone cable as an antenna, so it works only with the headphones plugged in.

Headphones are essentially the only way you'll want to listen to music from this player. The built-in stereo speakers on the back produced disappointingly weak and muffled sound.

Regrettably, Sony chose not to include a MicroSD card slot with its player. The Walkman comes in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB sizes, but a sizable chunk of that space will be unavailable from the get-go: On the 8GB model we had for testing, only 4.58GB were free for user storage.

Sony promises 5 hours of video playback, and the battery seemed to hold up well in my informal testing. The standby times are great too--enough to let me to enjoy several days of casual use without needing to recharge the battery.

Software and Extras

Sony's customization of the Android home-screen launcher and its inclusion of a convenient music playback widget are pleasing. And each of Sony's custom apps has a similarly designed icon, which gives the bottom navigation bar filled with these apps a more unified look.

Sony provides several custom apps for media management and playback. One app is designed to help you use DLNA to listen to music and to view pictures and videos from your home network. Another, the Sony music player, is clean and well-organized. The stock Android music app is available too, but Sony's offering is both more attractive and more functional.

You get additional options for sorting your tracks, including by release year or by folder. In addition, the player's SensMe channels can organize the music in your library on the basis of such themes as Energetic, Upbeat, and Relax. It took the Walkman Z Series about an hour to analyze the 500MB of sample music that I loaded on it and to sort the files into SensMe categories. Sony also includes a five-band equalizer and a handful of other Sony-developed audio enhancement technologies like virtual surround sound.

A link to Sony's Music Unlimited service enables you to stream music from Sony's collection and to manage personalized playlists. The link on the homescreen goes to a Web page that explains the service and provides links for downloading the app. Basic service costs $4 per month, and premium service runs $10 per month.

Sony doesn't preinstall much beyond its custom apps. In particular, I didn't find any productivity apps besides Google's Gmail and Calendar; but with full access to the Google Play Store, you can add anything you might need.

The most annoying thing about using the Z-Series Walkman involves its proprietary cable for data transfers. Part of the beauty of an Android player is the openness of the Android ecosystem; but being stuck with a proprietary cable is regressive--and a tremendous annoyance in practical use.

Sony's included earbuds offer full, rich sound. They aren't especially comfortable to wear, though, and they stick out rather far. They're joined together in that annoying (or endearing, depending on your taste) Sony way where they don't split in an even Y shape. The cord to the left bud is significantly shorter than the cord to the right bud, so that the main cable that connects to the player runs off the left side, leaving an extra loop of cable to run over the right ear.

Media

Sony's experience with audio playback really shows. The built-in speakers may be thin, but the audio quality through a good set of headphones or speakers is strong. Sony calls its audio-processing software S-Master Technology, and it yielded full, rich sound through my Bose desktop speakers and through several test pairs of headphones. And Sony offers a ton of equalizer options that you can tweak if the straight sound is not to your liking.

The Walkman supports MP4 and WMV video, as well as AAC-LC, L-PCM, MP3, and WMA audio; the competing Samsung Galaxy Player 3.6 and Samsung Galaxy Player 4.2 support far more video codecs, plus FLAC, Ogg, and WAV audio.

Bottom Line

The Sony Walkman Z Series combines a powerful processor, a good screen, and great audio processing. But if you're prepared to deal with a proprietary connector, a sealed battery, and an absence of expandable storage, you may want to check out the iPod Touch. That said, the bigger screen and Tegra 2 gaming options may sway some buyers looking for an Android alternative to Apple's hegemony.

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Navigate Your Cloud Storage Services With Otixo

Cloud storage is exploding. Old standbys like Dropbox and SkyDrive keep getting better, while new competition like Google Drive keeps things interesting. But with this glut of high-quality online file storage services, a new need arises: A way to tie all services together, find where you kept what file, and transfer files between services without having to re-upload them. Otixo is a $10-per-month service (or free plan with limited bandwidth) that tries to do just that.

Otixo lets you connect to numerous file storage services and browse them all using one simple interface.I've tested Otixo's free plan that allows up to 2GB bandwidth usage per month and is otherwise identical to the paid plan. To use Otixo, you must trust it with access to all of your file storage services, so I connected it to my Box.net, Dropbox, Picasa, and SkyDrive accounts.

Otixo is a webapp, so there's nothing to download. The interface is straightforward: A tree on the left shows all connected cloud services, and lets you drill into each service. To the right of the tree, a large table lists the files in the folder you are currently browsing. It's the same setup as Windows Explorer and most other classic file managers, really. One thing missing from the UI is a usage gauge: Each service has a different quota, and Otixo doesn't make it easy to see how much free space I have left in Dropbox or SkyDrive (for example).

Copying a file or folder between services is as easy as drag-and-drop: I clicked a folder in my Dropbox and dragged it over to my Box.net account. The transfer was not instantaneous, but it was smooth. Otixo shows a progress bar in the bottom-left corner explaining what is going on, and at the end of the process, I had a copy of the same folder in my Box.net account.

Speaking of "not instantaneous," that's something that could be said about the Otixo experience in general. When you first click a new folder, it comes up blank with a large watermark that says "Empty." Only after you wait a few seconds does the folder's content appear. So while the interface itself is reasonably responsive, this per-folder delay makes things feel slow, not to mention momentarily harrowing.

Otixo's other highlight is cross-service search, the idea being that you can type something like "*.jpg" into the search box and get a listing of all JPEG images you have stored across all cloud services. This did not work well for me: When I searched, results came up only from Dropbox folders I've already browsed. Not so useful, because if I already browsed the folder, I am probably aware of its contents. This is a Dropbox-specific issue and will be remedied soon, Otixo says.

While Otixo supports a wide range of cloud-based storage services, it doesn't support everything. For example, I use CrashPlan to back up my entire computer to the cloud, but Otixo doesn't offer a CrashPlan connection. Still, if you use more than one cloud storage service and are sometimes not sure which files are where, Otixo can come in handy.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use latest version of this Web-based software.

--Erez Zukerman

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Symform Offers Free Peer-to-Peer Storage

Much as large computing projects can make use of your free CPU cycles, Symform leverages your free hard drive space and that of others into a secure, encrypted online storage service. Quite clever actually, and even better--it's free (except, of course, for the electricity and storage space you contribute). You can be a leech and simply use the 10GB of free storage offered, but up to 100GB of online storage is available if you contribute. You can up that to 200GB by referring friends.

Symform's configuration wizard is modern-looking, well thought out, and easy to use.Setting up Symform is easy. Basically you tell it what you want to store in shared space, how much space you're willing to contribute (nothing, or 10GB to 150GB), and how much bandwidth to use. You can also define when transfers are to occur. One caveat: You need a relatively fast connection--64KBps upstream and 125KBps downstream. This is well within the capabilities of the average DSL or cable connection.

Unlike many online storage programs, there's no system tray app to remind you that Symform is running. It simply starts three services and stays out of the way. If you want to change settings, or see the status of your backup you simply run the setup program again.

What's not quite as easy to understand, perhaps, is that Symform is a synchronization program in its purest form. After you've set up relationship between a local and online folder to synchronize, the folders are truly and automatically synchronized. Local folders are locked, so you can't delete them from within Windows though you can delete files with them. If you get smart and rename or delete the folder using a boot disk, then it will be restored automatically next time you boot normally. Syncing continues until you remove the mapping, or uninstall the program.

Another feature of Symform is hot restore. Basically, this is a local backup that you can restore from more quickly than from online. There's also a turbo seeding feature in which you encrypt the files to a local disk, then upload them. This allows faster uploads and less CPU usage during the upload. You may also sync multiple PCs using the same account.

Obviously, Symform is relying somewhat on its users to be responsible and polite. However, data is replicated in many different locations so that it should always be available when you need it. In my limited testing, it found my data every time. Each folder being synced will have sync information placed in it, though it's in a hidden folder.

One place I believe Symform will make great inroads is in NAS. QNAP has already added Symform to its backup capabilities and other vendors are likely to follow. NAS boxes are largely hands-off, frequently have capacity to spare, and are generally available 24/7--the perfect storm for peer-to-peer backup.

With mainstream online backup vendors' free options beginning to fade from the scene, Symform is a great service to have around. It's easy to install, easy to use, and allows you to give something back. I see no downside whatsoever. Use it.

--Jon L. Jacobi

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Network-Attached Storage: Today’s Best Boxes

Synology's two-bay DS212+ NAS drive is a full-featured speedster with an outstanding operating system.The network-attached storage (NAS) box--an external storage device that attaches to your network router rather than directly to your PC--has become an essential tool for any home or small business that deals with shared data and media.

And the breed continues to evolve: Capabilities now extend far beyond simply serving and streaming files to PCs. Today's top NAS boxes also handle backups in conjunction with online storage services, link to mobile devices for sharing, act as video surveillance controllers, and even work as Wi-Fi hotspots.

Since it uses network protocols to transfer data, a NAS box is operating-system-agnostic: Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs alike can use the storage without special drivers. Usually, the connection relies on wired ethernet, but some boxes can connect wirelessly. Most NAS boxes have two to eight hard-drive bays and use RAID for data redundancy. Modern NAS boxes run a full-blown server OS--in most cases Linux, but occasionally Windows Storage Server 2008. Either way, remote management takes place via a Web browser or client software.

The high-performance QNAP TS-459 Pro II earned top ranking on our chart of NAS boxes with three or more bays.To see how far NAS technology has come in recent years, we tested five two-bay NAS boxes and six three-or-more-bay units, and examined their feature sets. Our ranked charts for Network-Attached Storage Devices: One or Two Bays and Network-Attached Storage Devices: Three or More Bays summarize what we found.

The USB 3.0 ports on some premium models are the main outward sign of change. Hardware features tend to vary with the price of the box, but they commonly include USB 2.0 and eSATA ports for sharing printers or backing up to external storage; solo or dual ethernet jacks (dual for connection sharing or redundancy); and direct copy buttons for copying the contents of thumb drives and other storage attached to the NAS box without the need to access the box's HTML interface.

Inside the box, faster CPUs and chipsets, and more memory, have improved performance significantly. Pricier, high-end boxes for small business can now read data at rates up to about 110 MBps and write it at about 100 MBps--almost twice as fast as most internal or direct-attached drives. The jump in performance, however, has yet to fully trickle down to the next tier of consumer-grade NAS boxes from vendors such as LaCie and Buffalo; though far more affordable, these models lack the punch of top-of-the-line products.

In the next year, updated hardware from many vendors should level the playing field again. And few home users need more speed than even the slowest box in this roundup can give them right now. If you only occasionally back up one or two PCs, or stream media, any of the boxes we tested will meet your needs. On the other hand, if you regularly back up multiple PCs in an office, deal with large amounts of data, or stream to multiple locations, you need all the speed you can get, and you'll likely find that high-end performance is worth paying extra for.

Synology's two-bay DS712+ NAS drive can connect to a five-bay expansion unit to grow with your business.Though hardware has evolved gradually, software--including the code than handles RAID functionality--has grown by leaps and bounds. In addition to supporting standard RAID levels (0, 1, 5, 1+0, and so on), some vendors--such as Netgear and Synology--now automatically configure drives into the optimal array, even implementing data redundancy. In most cases you don't have to use like-capacity drives either, though doing so is still optimal.

Software features that were highly advanced two years ago are now considered standard: DLNA-certified media serving, iTunes serving, website serving, and remote access to the NAS interface and files via HTML, FTP, Webdav, and other protocols. Newer features include backup to online storage services, access to files from mobile phones and tablets, and remote backup and synchronization across local networks and the Internet. Being able to easily sync two boxes in two different locations provides offsite backup without your having to pay for online storage.

NAS software interfaces have improved, too. Confusing sets of basic and often ineptly designed HTML pages have largely morphed into stylish, well-organized, easy-to-navigate interfaces. Synology's latest 3.x and 4.x OSs are able to function as windowed operating systems in a browser.

If you're not using a NAS box to manage your company's data and online presence, you're missing out. Feature-rich NAS boxes can save you money in the long run by rendering software services that you formerly had to farm out. Our top pick among two-bay NAS boxes is the Synology DS712+; the top-ranked box with three or more bays is the QNAP TS-459 Pro II.

For complete review of each of the 11 NAS boxes we tested for this article, click the appropriate links below.

Two Bays

• Synology DiskStation DS712+

• Synology DiskStation DS212+

• LaCie 2Big Network 2 2TB

• Western Digital My Book Live Duo 4TB

• Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo 2TB

Three or More Bays

• QNAP TS-459 Pro II

• QNAP TS-879 Pro

• Iomega StorCenter PX6-300d

• LaCie 5Big Network 2

• Western Digital Sentinel DX4000

• Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 (RND4000)

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Report: Google To Launch “Drive” Cloud Storage Service

Never one to  let others hog the spotlight, Google is getting set to launch a new cloud storage service, putting the search giant on a collision course with the likes of Dropbox and SugarSync.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the new service, which is simply called Drive, would allow users to upload and store their music, video, and other files to Google’s servers where they can later be retrieved from any web-connected device.

The service, the Journal says, will feature a smartphone and tablet app for mobile users, similar to those offered by the aforementioned Dropbox, SugarSync, and to a lesser extend Apple’s iCloud. Apple’s service is currently only available to iOS 5 users. In the report, the Journal cites sources familiar with Google’s Drive as saying the service will make it to market in the coming weeks or months.

Drive will in all likelihood offer users a certain amount of storage space for free. Users looking for more space will probably have to cough up some cash. The interesting thing here is that Google already offers some form of web-based storage for photos, videos, and documents via Picasa, YouTube, and Google Docs. What makes Drive special is it will be the first time Google allows its users to storage all of their files in one place.

Since cloud storage and mobile computing go hand-in-hand, we’re curious to see if Google will integrate Drive with its Android operating system. Could a cloud-ready Ice Cream Sandwich be on the horizon? We’ll just have to wait to see.

via The Wall Street Journal

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USB 3.0 Storage Drives Compared

We’ve picked four of the fastest, sleekest portable hard drives of 2012 from some of the industry’s leading manufacturers and evaluated them based on price, design, selection of utilities and most importantly, speed. Though each drive supports USB 3.0 and features at least 750GB of storage space, not each device is created equal. Which of these drives offers the perfect combination of speed, design and price? Read on to find out.

Last January, Buffalo released the MiniStation Stealth, an unassuming portable hard drive that featured the fastest file transfer speeds we'd yet seen. Now, having released the MiniStation Extreme, Buffalo hopes to create a drive that is not only faster than the Stealth but features shock-resistance as well. Read on to find out if Buffalo succeeded.

Read Our Review of Buffalo MiniStation Extreme

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Riverbed's Granite Speeds up WAN Storage to Drive Consolidation

Riverbed Technology plans to make enterprise data centers look like local storage at branch offices with Granite, a new accelerator technology the company is announcing on Wednesday.

Granite is designed to carry out block data transfers across WANs (wide-area networks) without the many back-and-forth exchanges that make such movements time-consuming now. Granite can essentially achieve the same thing with blocks of data that Riverbed's Steelhead appliance does with applications, slashing wait times at branches and letting enterprises centralize their storage, executives said at a press event earlier this week in San Francisco.

Granite will play a major role in a plan by international law firm Paul Hastings to go from 16 data centers to four, said Searl Tate, the firm's director of network engineering, who spoke at the event. Paul Hastings has been working with the product since the alpha testing stage. "The story of consolidation is compelling," Tate said.

In addition to moving large files around the world at LAN speed, Granite will let remote users boot up virtual desktops over long distances, a process that often takes 30 minutes or more and in some cases is not even possible, said Eric Wolford, executive vice president and general manager of the company's products group.

The technology is set to ship by the end of March and will be available both as a standalone appliance and as software on a Steelhead appliance. Granite is a major initiative for the company, "the next Riverbed inside Riverbed," Wolford said. Riverbed made its name with WAN application acceleration that helped enterprises centralize their servers in many cases, and Granite will address some additional situations, he said.

When servers have to remain at the remote site to run certain applications, Granite allows IT departments to at least house the data centrally. Retrieving it to the Riverbed appliance for local use is quick thanks to the new technology, according to Riverbed.

"This is going to help project whatever disk is in the data center out to the edge, so that the edge can think the disk is actually local," Wolford said.

When a server needs to retrieve data from a storage array, where it usually resides in many different blocks, typically the server requests the bits from each block in sequence. Over a WAN, that process can take a long time because messages and data need to travel over a long distance. Using its awareness of the file system, Granite allows the remote server to retrieve all the required blocks of data in one round-trip transaction, Wolford said.

By eliminating "chatty" transactions that are delayed by the latency of distance, Granite allows enterprises to take advantage of the speed of current available WAN connections, which are now available at multiple gigabits per second.

In a demonstration, Riverbed showed 200MB of files being copied to a remote server from a data center in a few seconds, and booting up a remote system from a Windows 2008 OS stored in the data center in about 40 seconds.

Granite initially will use iSCSI for block storage transfers across the WAN, but the company plans later to add Fibre Channel capability. It can bring that data to servers using Microsoft NTFS (New Technology File System), with Linux EXT (Extended File System) coming later. Enterprises will be able to get started with Granite for less than $12,000, according to Senior Product Marketing Manager Miles Kelly.

Granite can be used for centralizing resources in three key cases that Riverbed's other products were unable to address, Wolford said: custom applications, write-intensive applications, and the need to keep working at the remote site if disconnected from the data center.

"There are still a lot of enterprises that have a lot of infrastructure at their remote sites," said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Bob Laliberte. That creates IT headaches because of the need to back up data at those sites, which raises security issues, and to devote IT staff time to managing those sites, he said. If non-IT staff manage all the technology at a remote office, it's harder to maintain proper procedures, he added. In addition, storage and other resources at remote sites also are usually not highly utilized.

"All those things start adding up, so the more they can bring back, the more they can consolidate, the more they can take advantage of those economies of scale back in the data center," Laliberte said.

At Paul Hastings, consolidation over the next three to five years should cut down on big spending for storage gear at the company's 20 offices, according to Tate. "It would really be nice to leverage our SAN resources and those assets just in the hub locations, and kind of get off that train," he said.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

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