News Seagate demos 500GB wireless USB 2 drive

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/01/07/seagate_future/

 

It looks like wireless got a whole lot faster, USB2. Wonder what kind of range to expect.

 

any ideas on the range? I bet once you get more than like 5 feet away its super slow - who cares - its a really good idea

 

I see the drive gets its power over the air too. Where the hell is it plugged in? Something running through the table, perhaps?

But yay, definately. Though I question it for a lot of uses, anything that would need to be plugged into the wall I think it's a great idea. That's only because I'd worry that some other computer picks up on my USB key's signal, or something, and security can go out the window as easily as the thumb drive it's on. Chances are your wireless hard drive isn't going to be randomly picked up by some other comp; or at least you'd know it's possible, as you'd have to scout out a mains power socket first.

I'll assume, for my sanity, that you can program in something akin to a wep key, and that you need that to access the contents of the device.

 

just give me cheap 500gig sata drives!!

 

... and the moon on a stick, and a rabbit called fluffy

Give it time, prices always drop

 

Ah good, booting off one of those means you can hit the computer without worry of a head crash.

 

how fast it was at boot?

 

Hey guys, sorry for the delay, just got back from the show.

To answer a few questions:
1) Range: The drive was tested by my own hand, so no tricks (I have some pull with seagate, so I got to do some fun monkeying with it)...it seemed indifferent to ranges between 0 and 10 feet, after about 10 it started taking a bit longer as the signal broke down.
2) Power: Firehed is right, there is a mains power connector, similar to your standard AC adapter. The marketing director wanted it removed to illustrate that the drive is really wireless.
3) Security: At the moment, there is no security on the signal. However, it is already being hammered out, there is just not a need to to compliclate the signal any more than necessary at the moment, since there are only like 5 WUSB2 cards in the world right now. Seagate had a few details on it, that it would be similar to a WPA2 style signal encryption currently (who knows what it will actually end up as). Part of the beauty of integrating the WUSB2 into the chipset would be the machine being able to choose the drive at boot based on drives in proximity, and require password or other authentication before you can boot off the drive. Then all signals would be encoded via rolling algorithm.
4) Speed: As fast as any USB hard drive...I noticed almost no difference at boot from an internal drive.

Hope that helps, I'm off for a bit as I'm jetlagged as hell.

 

i never booted from usb since my motherboard doesn't support it ( )
but if it is as fast as an internal, that's nice!

have you maybe tryed some loading of something? (games, app, etc)

 

I've been looking forward to diskless PCs (coffee shop, library, etc.) where you simply connect up your USB device and it has your apps, data, etc. on it for about 2 years now. Looks like it's finally getting close!

However I didn't anticipate wireless. Now, if you have three machines right near each other with three wireless hard drives, how does one machine not talk to 2 drives at the same time? Or if you had two drives could it? And how does it know which one to boot from since if it had 3 drives within 5-10 feet would they not all answer?

Overall I really like the idea but I can see a few technical issues still remaining.

-G

 

As it stands right now, the problem you're describing is quite real. But as addressed above, in the future it would be similar to a WPA2 type of security. It would boot from the drive you give it the password to on bootup, after searching the area for compatible devices, similar to how a router chooses which wireless computers are on a network. Then you would initialize the second drive within windows, for example...or maybe even over bios, but that stuff hasn't been hammered out yet.

 

Very impressive innovation, unfortunately like most concept devices it will take quite some time before it becomes commercially viable. NEED all the the same though