For time machine and other local data needs I really like a drop in design for an external disk. When drives were cheap it was so nice just to drop them into the ‘enclosure’ and go on.
I ended up buying and liking the BlacX ones from Thermaltake. Slight cheap electronic stench when you open them. 1 out 5 that I bought ended up not working. But the price was really right.
Unfortunately the love ends with larger than 2TB drives. It seems to say somewhere in the specs for the device. The model I have is old too.
But it is still a bit of a let down if a 3.0 Tb drive only shows you 801.57 GB in ‘Generic External Media’ in Disk Utility under OS X.
I remember having spent hours at a client in 1987 trying to get their whopping 30 Megabyte hard drive to work with the limitation of the initial FAT16 allocation table.
There have been countless problems caused by an “oh this kind of system will last for sooo long” engineering attitude since then. “Nobody will want to have so much space, speed, insert-thing-here.”
People seem to have a hard time estimating how long something will be around – and in what kind of world things might have to fit in.
Doing those underlying things ‘right’, making them easily extendable for instance, creates tremendous value.
If Amazon actually manages to continue to fully implement their SOA approach then we might be hearing from that for quiet a while. They are currently one of the few companies that positively surprise me when I interact with them.
We will see. And I wonder what kind of size limit the new drive enclosures have that I just ordered.