Special Offers – Week of January 25th

Good afternoon all, hopefully everyone’s managing the return from the weekend at least reasonably well. For those who aren’t long-time readers, we generally do a post about what we have on special offer on a Monday afternoon, with the intention of having it up on the blog as early in the week as possible… it gives you guys as much of a chance to have a bit of a think about whether or not you’d really like something before it goes out of our Special Offers next Sunday.

This week, we’ve got some nice bits and pieces on offer, so we’ll get straight into them.

Netgear Stora:

Netgear’s Stora is a network attached storage (NAS) setup, for those of you who don’t know what a NAS is, don’t worry, it’s not complicated, and it’s unusually useful.

Click through to check out our page for Netgear's 1TB Stora 🙂

Essentially, a NAS box is a device that houses some storage and sits attached to your network so that the volume is accessible to all of the machines connected. It’s a relatively simple concept, but it tends to be one of those things that a lot of users simply haven’t encountered. Netgear’s Stora boasts a 1TB drive, with space for another 1TB drive if you feel the need to expand it.

For those who haven’t used a NAS before, it’s an ideal way to keep media (whether music or movies) on a centralised drive that’s accessible to every machine on your network. Moreover, as long as you’re not too fussed about having all of your media accessible when you’re out and about, it’s also an excellent way to keep your PCs’ drives free of clutter.

Thanks to the fact that the drive is easily accessible via your local network, you’ll also be able to run backups of your notebook via your wireless network (software permitting), which is probably the closest you’ll get to a totally hassle-free backup experience.

You can also use the option to add another drive to the mix to make your backup that bit more reliable. Since the Stora offers RAID1 support directly, you can generally rely on your backup (or whatever you care to store on it) to be very well looked after indeed, unless there’s some totally catastrophic failure… or a fire.

Netgear’s Stora is down to €164.32 this week, with a 1TB hard drive already in there.

If you’d like to throw in an extra 1TB hard disk, then you could always pick up Samsung’s SpinPoint F3, which will set you back around €77.

Special Offers – Christmas Week

Good afternoon all, it might be a little too late to order for delivery and get things in time for Christmas, but the show must go on, so we’re still here and writing away to make sure that we have a post up detailing our special offers for this week.

For those ordering for pickup, your orders will still arrive in time for Christmas as long as you get in before 1300 tomorrow, so you guys will be able to take advantage of some of our offers this week, if you’re so inclined.

Packard Bell Carbon 1TB:

Packard Bell’s Carbon is one of the few drives that we see giving Western Digital’s Elements 1TB a serious run for its money when it comes to people shopping for external drives to act as a backup or just as media storage.

Click through to see our page for the Packard Bell Carbon 1TB 🙂

Generally, the Western Digital wins that fight on the basis that it’s a few euro cheaper than the Packard Bell, but this week we have the Carbon knocked down by 7%, which makes it that bit cheaper than the Elements. It’s one of those cases where every little counts, and it’s hard to argue with something as simple as the Carbon being cheaper and the two being practically equal in every other respect.

The Packard Bell Carbon is, as well you may have guessed, a 1TB external drive. It’s mains powered, so you should to be aware that wherever you’re using it you’ll want to have a plug nearby. Remember, a hard drive isn’t just for Christmas… it’ll be months before you need to consider deleting anything again.

As we said earlier on, there’s nothing like giving someone the gift of an external backup for Christmas, for two reasons. The first is that if, and when, their machine falls over, you’ll be the one who gets some of the credit for making the backup possible. Second… you’ll get to sit around and look a bit smug, because you’re the only reason their system is still intact 😉

Still, 1TB for €71, you can’t really say fairer than that.

All We Want for Christmas

Over the next few days, we’ll be posting a single blog post from each member of the Komplett.ie staff that details a single item they’ll be giving this Christmas, and one that they’ll be hoping to receive. It’s a simple enough plan, and today we’re starting out with Shelton from RMA, we’ll continue on to Ryan tomorrow

It’s something that works a little better than a recommendation, if only because we’ll be genuinely trying to pick out gifts for other people that won’t break the bank… and genuinely hopeful about what we might be bought 😉

From Shelton:

Shelton didn’t tell us just who he was buying for, but when we asked him what he’d be buying for someone this Christmas he managed to get a link to me nice and fast, so it seems as though he’s put some thought into it at least.

Click through to see our page for the WD TV Live Media Player 🙂

Shelton’s pick as a gift is something that we’ve seen a bit of a rush on over the last couple of months, Western Digital’s TV Live Media Player, usually shortened simply to WD TV Live Media Player.

For those not familiar with Western Digital’s TV line, they essentially allow you to play media directly from an external hard drive to your TV, without any bother. For those who have already use the lighter Media Player that WD makes, the networking options really do give this one a bit of a bump.

As the customer review on the product itself says, “All drives connected to the player are easily accessed from any PC/Laptop in my home network.” It’s always nice to be able to say that the customer review on a product is a five-star review.

Western Digital’s WD TV Live Media Player is €125, which isn’t bad at all considering what it does.

DiamonDisc DVDs to Last a Millenium

The average writeable DVD only lasts between two and five years, but for those looking for a little more permanence, it seems help is on the way from Cranberry in the form of a disc that should last 1,000 years.

While there are all kinds of reasons you might not particularly care that a writable DVD only has a shelf life of around half a decade, it seems as though the folks at Cranberry have gone the extra mile to make sure your backups are available several lifetimes after you’re gone. It’s certainly an interesting claim, and one that’s making waves among data longevity enthusiasts, but it’s not quite as simple as all that.

Windows 7 Upgrade Killing Some Machines

The launch of Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 7, has seen the company drive for in-place upgrades over clean installs, but now it’s looking like some of those upgrades aren’t working out quite as planned.

According to TomsHardware, the upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7can fail fairly catastrophically, leaving users with hardware that’s effectively unusable. According to a post on the Microsoft support board for Windows 7, one user ran into an infinite reboot cycle, interspersed with a message to inform him that his upgrade had failed.

Amazon’s Cloud Accessible by Post

One of Amazon’s Web Service’s stranger services is the ability to backup a practically unlimited amount of data to its own storage. While you’ve got to pay for it, it’s one of those moves that brings a fully cloud-based future a bit closer to reality, so naturally we’re all very impressed by it. Now though, you can access all that storage through the post.

When I first saw the diagram, I thought it might be a joke...

The problem with having a massive amount of storage available off-site is that, using the conventional old modern-day internet, it can take an awfully long time to actually upload it all. For a while now, Amazon has been offering to backup from a storage device you send them, physically. It might seem strange, but in an odd kind of way it makes perfect sense. Now, they’re offering exactly the same process, but in reverse.

Product Spotlight – Western Digital ShareSpace Network

For anyone who hasn’t seen one before, every Thursday we do a nice and quick article on a single piece of hardware we’ve either bought ourselves (as in, a member of staff) or had our beady little eyes on for a while. All that means is that you guys can be absolutely sure of the recommendation; if nothing else, we like it enough to buy it ourselves.

Click the image to follow through to the main page for the ShareSpace 🙂

This week’s product spotlight is on Western Digital’s ShareSpace Network, which is fundamentally just a really fantastic NAS setup. While it’ll set you back a pretty penny at €699, it boasts fully 4TB of storage, which for your nearly €700 might not seem that much, but the option to throw it into RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 5 means that it’s attractive for anyone a bit paranoid about one of their discs failing on them.

As you’d reasonably expect, it’s network ready and all that. In reality it’s mainly for people with a very small business or a large home setup that they’d like to keep centralised (datawise) or well backed up without having to worry about the hassles of setting up your own server and installing FreeNAS on it.

As Shleton from our RMA department put it, “There’s an 8TB version too, but for extra cost, but you can even just buy the 2TB one, and when it gets full take out the HDDs, stick them in your computer (easy) and then upgrade the new drives to 4 or 8TB for substantially less money.”

You can grab the 4TB Western Digital Sharespace Network here for €699.

You can find the 2TB model here, for €499.

Backup Dropped From Windows 7 Home Premium

Microsoft has put together a comparison of what we can expect to see from the various different versions of Windows 7 and the news isn’t great. Perhaps most shocking is the revelation that Windows 7 Home Premium won’t feature its own automatic backup software.

We’re not really sure what the logic is behind this movie. While we understand that businesses usually stand to lose a tremendous amount more than home users in the event of a drive failing, the fact is that most businesses won’t be trusting Windows 7’s automatic backup utilities to run backups for them. Indeed, it seems far more likely that the people most likely to see the need for an automatic backup utility are home users, where a third party backup utility might seem like a costly extravagance, at least until the inevitable event that would normally mean you’d want to have been keeping a reliable backup.