Stuff Geeks Want

Dan Benjamin raves about the NewerTech Voyager Q in his latest review, and that’s enough for me to want one. Especially since I’ve had to rebuild my computer three or four times in the last three months due to data problems. Ugh.

It’s a “dock” for your drives… internal drives are almost always cheaper than external drives and their enclosures. It supports USB2, eSATA, FireWire 800, and FireWire 400, so you can be sure that it’ll work for a long time as newer hardware and newer interfaces come down the pike in the future.

It doesn’t support IDE, instead supporting only SATA I and II drives, and while that’s bothersome for some, for the most part, IDE drives are gone, and SATA drives are here to stay. The cool thing is that it supports 3.5″ drives and 2.5″ drives and it’s hot swappable.

What a great tool for my backup needs

You can pick one up at OWC for $99.

Pick one up, then grab a few 1TB hard drives, so you have plenty of storage sitting around:

Samsung SpinPoint 1TB 3.5″ drive for $110.
Seagate 1TB 3.5″ OEM drive for $96.
Hitachi 1TB 3.5″ OEM drive for $88.
Or choose from a few others.

Thumb drives are the new floppy. Everyone needs one. What everyone doesn’t know is that they need one that’s secure, and that can’t be hacked.

That’s where the IronKey comes in.

Military grade hardware and software encryption. Not only that, but it includes a full copy of Firefox for insanely secure and private internet browsing, no matter whose computer you’re using. And it’s just there, in your pocket, ready for you to use anytime.

Store anything you want on it: password lists, pictures of your girlfriend, pictures you don’t want your girlfriend to see, movies you don’t want the RIAA to discover for whatever reason, the source code you’ve been working on for months that will make you a millionaire, etc…

The details:

• Fast 30MBPS Read, 20MBPS Write
• Drive contents encrypted with AES CBC-Mode Encryption
• Onboard IronKey Password-manager keeps all your internet passwords safe
• Secure version of Firefox included that encrypts all your web-surfing traffic
• Encased in a potted metal case, not plastic, making it one of the strongest USB keys around
• Exceeds MIL-STD-810F military waterproofing standards
• The encryption chip self-destructs if an invasive attack is detected
• If your Ironkey is lost, you can restore from a secure backup to a new Ironkey in minutes
• Dual channel SLC NAND Flash for high-quality and read/write speeds
• Works great in Windows XP and Windows Vista, Linux and Mac OS X. Linux and Mac support requires Windows initialization, first.

Watch the demo here.

Comes in four sizes:

1GB from Amazon.com ~$65
2GB from Amazon.com ~$90
4GB from Amazon.com ~$130
8GB from Amazon.com ~$280

If you want a computer monitor, there’s a list the size of a football field to choose from.

If you want a computer monitor that looks good, the list is about as long as the kicker’s toe.

There’s Apple’s Cinema Displays and… not really much else. But there are good efforts being made in this area, like Dell’s 22-inch Crystal Display.

The Crystal is neat and geek at the same time, with its clear facade and exposed wiring. It has a 1680×1050 resolution, built-in camera, and speakers. Other specs like contrast ratio (2000:1) and response time (2ms) are all high-end.

And so, too is the price: $699 after $300 in instant savings. That makes it $200 cheaper than Apple’s 24-inch LED Cinema Display, which has a higher resolution (1920×1200) but lacks speakers. Of course the Apple display only works with new MacBook models, so while it would normally be our first choice, if you want something versatile and cheaper, the Crystal is the way to go.

$699 + tax + shipping at Dell

Verizon today announced that it’s bringing 4G wireless networking to between 25 and 30 U.S. markets next year. Why do you care? Because Verizon claims peak download speeds of 50-60Mbps in its trials… which is about 10x faster than most cable modems (and about 50x faster than 3G).

If you can’t wait for that and happen to live in Baltimore, Sprint already offers 4G broadband in that city, with plans to roll it out in many more over the next 12 months.

The only issue with Sprint is that their 4G network is relying on WiMax, not LTE (like Verizon). What’s this alphabet soup mean? It means that Sprint’s 4G speeds top out at 2-4Mbps, not quite as fast as Verizon will be able to provide, but still a decent boost over 3G.

Of course, I’ll believe Verizon’s 50Mbps 4G speeds when I see it and it doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars a month (Sprint’s 4G plan is around $80/mo.).

Drobo has been getting a lot of press in the last year, but only recently has it deserved any.

That’s because the company that makes the stupidly simple and stupidly overpriced 4-bay storage solution finally came out with a FireWire 800 equipped model, instead of just that poky USB 2.0 connection.

Two things separate Drobo from the regular drive enclosures:

• 1) You can expand it on the fly by adding drives. Drobo intelligently moves data around to add the additional drive to the array.
• 2) If one drive dies, replace it and your data will be restored.

In essence, Drobo is a self-contained external RAID5, which is nice since most computers don’t come with RAID5 hardware or software (Mac OS X doesn’t have any support).

This convenience doesn’t come cheap: at about $500 retail a real geek could build their own 10-bay RAID5 tower running Linux.

But simplicity rocks, and so do street prices: after $50 rebate Amazon has the Drobo for just $374.95.

Buy now for $374.95 after rebate via Amazon (rebate expires 2/28/09)