Hard drive, Turbo Stick offer “Tera-riffic” Storage and Fast Surfing on the Go

This week's "playing with and writing about" involves a cellular phone device that brings the web onto the road with you and a new and supposedly "green" hard drive meant for Enterprise applications. So if you're in charge of Star Trek's starship, this might be for you!

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First the Turbo Stick. Wi-Fi isn't available everywhere, though it's becoming more common all the time, so if you're on the go and need high speed Internet access you'll need a way to get the Web to your portable computer regardless of where you are. And that's where a cellular modem comes in. I played with one recently, the Canadian-spec Novatel wireless U760 USB modem for Bell Canada's 3G network, and it's pretty cool. It's a little USB plug you stick into an available slot on your PC – and it comes with a dongle/extension data cable, carrying pouch, lanyard and instruction manual – everything you should need. Your mobile carrier's technology and packaging may differ, but the concept will remain the same: for a fee (which, if you're travelling for business, you can probably either write off or expense to the company), you get virtually instant access to high speed Internet and e-mail service right from your mobile computer regardless where you are, as long as you're in the coverage area. Installation was a breeze. The manual walks you through the process, but even that wasn't necessary – I just plugged the USB stick into my notebook and its built-in software installed beautifully on its own. Once it was finished, it was ready and rarin' to go. Getting rid of the installed software isn't easy, which proved quite annoying when it came time to send the unit back: I couldn't, and still can't, get the darn software scrubbed from my notebook because it refuses to cooperate with Windows' uninstall utilities! This shouldn't be an issue for people who are going to use such a system over the long term, but it sure bugged me after my demo period was over. Anyway, the U760 weighs less than an ounce and is just over two inches long – the latter of which means you should be careful not to knock it or bend it when you're using the computer. Bell says it's compatible out of the box with Windows XP or Vista (I used it with Vista Ultimate), Mac or Linux. It also sports its own integrated microSD slot that's supposedly capable of storing up to 8 gigabyte worth of files, including music or videos (though the card itself doesn't come with the unit) and it has an advanced internal dual band diversity antenna system to help it perform in fringe areas. In use, I found the U760 a little slower than I like – slower than my high speed cable Internet connection, anyway, but I don't mind sacrificing a little bit of speed for the superb convenience of being able to take the web and my e-mail onto the road. That means I found the U760 is perfectly adequate for its purpose. Your cost for having and using such a modem will vary depending on your provider and your plan. If you can justify the expense, it's a heckuva convenience. Contact with your mobile provider (and its competition!) for more info. Hard Drivin' Man… The "green" hard drive is Western Digital's new two terabyte "Enterprise Class" RE4-GP, which the company claims features "next generation Greenpower" technology. Western Digital says this new generation of drive's improved performance, lower power consumption and higher capacity allows it to provide even lower cost of ownership to large data centers. I don't know about that; I’m just a guy with a PC – but two terabytes in a drive that fits into an ordinary computer is awesome. Heck, my first hard drive, circa 1982, held four megabytes, cost four grand and was about the size of my entire PC today. Yeah, I know. I'm old. But two terabytes! That's enough space to keep me going for a couple of years without forcing me to organize my files and delete/back up the stuff that's old and no longer necessary – like I should do regularly but never seem to find time for. Needless to say, when Western Digital offered me a sample (which is actually aimed at more robust organizations than at the SOHO market in which I reside), I jumped at the chance. It took a while for the drive to show up, but once it did I stuck it into my PC and presumed I'd be off to the races. Installation of the hardware, by the way, was as straightforward as any internal hard drive is. The RE4-GP combines an "industry-leading 64 MB cache" with dual processors and increased density, to yield "twice the processing power, resulting in as much as 25 percent performance improvement over the previous generation," according to the company's press release. WD's GreenPower technology platform is "The first 3.5-inch hard drive platform designed with power savings as the primary attribute." WD claims the drive and its siblings "reduce average drive power consumption by up to 50 percent over currently available competitors' drives and are ultra-cool and quiet, all while delivering solid performance." Great, though I haven't noticed my electrical bill plummeting… WD cites "IntelliSeek" (which they claim calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration), "IntelliPark" (which disengages the read/write channel electronics and unloads the recording heads during idle time), and IntelliPower" (a balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms) as innovations that reduce the drives' power consumption. Enterprise installations for which the drive is really intended may not have the same problem I did, but once I had mounted the thing in my desktop PC (running Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit), I could only access half of its capacity! I partitioned the disk into two, one terabyte sections, the way Windows wanted me to, then discovered to my chagrin that one of the partitions steadfastly refused to be formatted. I asked my son to help bail me out – as he's done so often in the past – but to no avail. He theorized it could have something to do with my motherboard, as did Western Digital when I contacted them for help. And that's where it stands as of this writing – I have a lovely, fast and supposedly green hard drive on my system and am only capable of using only half of it. A terabyte is still a lot of storage space, but the unit's $329 retail price is a little steep for a single terabyte… Western Digital says the drives are designed for storage-hungry applications, such as "cloud-computing infrastructure, large-scale data centers, data archive and tape replacement systems, commercial video surveillance and digital video editing houses", and maybe those folks will have better luck accessing the whole nine yards, er, two terabytes than me. If so, they'll have a nice hard drive on their hands.