The first magnetic media I used to run a computer was cassette tape in a mono-cassette player. The big boys were already slipping in their enormous floppies, but it was several more years after that before I had a hard drive, first PC I bought for business back in 1990 had an enormous 40 megabytes of storage capacity. Yes, that’s right, 40 Mb, enough to store a couple of RAW files from my digital SLR these days.

Moore’s Law is both curse and concern. It’s what drives the information industry, doubling the number of transistors that can fit on a chip every 18 months means double the processing power. But, that can mean double the file size. Bigger files means we need more powerful computers and the spiral rises ever upwards. It’s a good thing, in some ways, but also means we are all trapped by the perpetual and increasing demands of our computational overlords.

During 20+ years as a professional science writer I seem to have accumulated rather a lot of virtual cuttings, archived news snippets and images. My weekly backup gets ever bigger, although I do it iteratively using SyncBackPro and DropBox, but nevertheless still need plenty of external storage capacity and the means to access it quickly. One of the spin-offs of Moore is that hard drives have got smaller as they’ve got bigger and connectivity has improved substantially from the audio connection of a cassette player to the USB3 port on my new Verbatim external hard drive. It’s a 1 Terabyte model supplied in glossy black with its own USB 3.0 cable (which doubles as the power supply as you’d expect these days).

Doing a full back up to the drive is a breeze, takes a fraction of the time of my clunky old 350 Gb external drive. Checking “properties” in file manager populates very quickly (faster by far than my laptop’s internal drive) even though it now has well over 100 Gb taken up by tens of thousands of files.

Technically, data transfer can occur at ten times the speed of USB 2.0 at 4.8 Gbits per second. Of course, it’s back compatible with USB 2.0 (presumably 1 as well!) it works with Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7, Mac OSX 10.1 and Linux (Kernel 2.6.31) as you’d expect.

The press release that accompanied the drive talks of neon colors including Caribbean Blue, Eucalptus Green and Hot Pink (but I’m happy with black). Whatever color you choose the drive is green having built-in energy-saving spin down.