This little piggy went to market as Storage Central SC101 from . It sells for around $100 from discounters. What you get is an empty box, which doesn't sound too good, but when you stuff it with disk drives, sold separately, you've really got something.
Storage Central has two drive bays, so you can use one or two disk drives. Using two brings the price up, to be sure, but not as much as one would think. Disk drives are cheap these days, and you can buy two, in large capacities like 150 gigabytes each, for around $100 each. So, fully stuffed, the box would cost around $300.
Storage Central takes Parallel ATA drives, any capacity. ATA stands for "Advanced Technology Attachment," and the "parallel" part just means they have parallel connectors.
New computers often have sockets to connect directly to ATA disk drives, but most older computers do not. Ours don't, and they're only a year old. But despair not, this little piggy connects to the computer with an ethernet cable, the same kind you use for a high-speed Internet connection. The cable comes with it.
Because it connects through an ethernet cable, the box is ready for a network when you plug that cable into a router. The software lets any of the computers on the network use the Storage Central box for, well, central storage. The software handles all that and also offers a choice to mirror the drives if you want.
This means that one of the drives will always have an exact copy of whatever is on the other drive, right up to the last split second. If one drive fails, the other drive has the same information, and you can switch to it and keep going as if nothing has happened.
We've never had a disk drive fail, but we've heard from others who have, and it's awful. Mirrored systems can save their bacon, so to speak, and keep working. The failed drive can be pulled out of the box, dumped and replaced.
The Storage Central box itself looks strong enough to drive a truck over it with no damage. It works with Windows XP and NT, and you can take a look at a short, boring video at the company Web site at www.netgear.com .
The place we're going is called , and it's where you can hatch your video for all to see. You start by going to another Web site, at www.typepad.com . There's a 30-day free trial, and after that it's $5 a month.
The VideoEgg publisher can understand dozens of video formats as well as capture video directly from a camcorder, webcam or video phone. Simply log on to the Web site and go to your "My Documents" folder or "Explorer" in Windows and drag the title of your video onto the site. Your video is available for viewing.
There are other sites that let you upload video, but we don't like them as well. and are both free, for example, but have advertisements that show alongside your video. charges $5 a month, same as VideoEgg, but doesn't compress the files, which means long upload times. VideoEgg, on the other hand, compresses a file by 10-to-1.
This takes care of a major problem with sending out videos: that they're just too big. Video takes a long time for the recipient to download, and many people feel it just isn't worth the bother. If you use VideoEgg or a similar site, you get a link that recipients can use to view the movie. They won't need external players like QuickTime or Windows Media Player.
This is cache, read story here
