Editors’ Picks: Digital Discoveries
Tuan Nguyen, editor in chief, and Zak Storey, deputy editor, consider a cornucopia of computing conundrums
I’m a sucker for storage, ludicrous amounts of storage. This is why I’ve decided that the batch of 12 5TB hard drives in one of my NAS units isn’t worthy of my decadent hardware obsession any longer. I’m going to upgrade them to Seagate’s new IronWolf Pro 12TB drives—all 12 drives. That’s 144TB of storage in one NAS.
Seagate’s IronWolf line is designed for the demanding 24-hour operation that’s required of a NAS-focused hard drive. There’s no rebooting or shutting down, and up time is everything. What’s more, the IronWolf Pro series is designed to go even further, which makes its five-year warranty worth the price premium. The hardware on the IronWolf Pro is also made to both last and endure punishing workloads. Seagate rates the drive at an average of 300TB of I/O per year, and the firmware on the drive is tuned for multiple simultaneous users.
In terms of raw speed, the IronWolf Pro is as fast as any 12TB spinning disk can get, with a 250MB/s transfer rate. Although this isn’t as fast as a SATA SSD, it’s fast when it’s set up as a RAID in a 12-drive configuration, and piped through a 10-gigabit Ethernet connection. Raw random access rates aren’t important, just total sustained throughput. Yes, for me, only the most ridiculous hardware will ever suffice. $500, www. seagate.com Christmas is a-coming, and that means gifts. Now, call me oldfashioned, but I like to put a little thought into the presents I give to the people who are closest to me. I rarely ask people for their lists, because I’m not that kinda guy. Don’t get me wrong, Amazon and lists have their place, but when it comes to my old pops and ma, nothing beats something handcrafted and tailor-made.
Which is why I do a lot of my Christmas shopping at Etsy. With small-scale businesses selling handmade goods, Etsy is a marketplace not too dissimilar from Amazon, but it’s the differences that make it infinitely more valuable in my eyes. Firstly, it’s a global marketplace—you can buy from and ship to anywhere the seller accommodates—and, more importantly, most of the merchandise is handcrafted by folks who care about it. You’ll struggle to find any of the big brands selling on Etsy, because it’s designed for handmade and unique goods. For example, to celebrate old Papa Storey’s 50th Christmas, I’ve gone ahead and invested in a custom-made Viking mead horn, with his initials engraved on the side of it. It should fit the bill nicely, I reckon. I’m kinda jealous. Varies, www.etsy.com