Gwebs Cryptographer

I just read an review of a new 64 gb flash drive from Samsung on ComputerWorld.com and it got me thinking about the best way to distribute resources on a laptop. Here are some excerpts from the article, and my comments:

The no-moving-parts characteristic is, in part, what protects your data longer, since accidentally bumping your laptop won’t scramble your stored files. Samsung says the drive can withstand an operating shock of 1,500Gs at .5 miliseconds (versus 300Gs at 2 miliseconds for a traditional hard drive). The drive is heartier in one other important way: Mean time between failure is rated at over 2 million hours, versus under 500,000 hours for the company’s other drives.

….

Other specifications are equally “small”: power consumption is just 1 watt when the system is active, 0.1 watt when idle, and .06 watt in standby mode. (Equivalent power consumption figures with hard drives are 2.1, 1.5, and .2 watts, respectively.)

Flash drives will be the next big thing in laptop computing. The simple fact that they are three times more durable then platter drives is enough to make me want to lay out for one (data integrity is much more important to any business user then his/her screen, which can be replaced with minimal effort). Add to that the fact that they reduce energy consumption (thus increasing battery life), and it becomes a no-brainer for a non-media dependent person to use a flash HD.

On the other hand, many of us use massive amounts of storage for digital imaging, music, and video. These users require platter HDDs because you cant buy a 250 gb flash drive yet. (but with Moore’s law, we will have 256 gb flash drives in no time…)

Now there are two solutions to this problem (best practices) - if you are using your laptop as a digital video/photography production system, you can buy a dual hd system. Put your system on one partition (which you ghost after setting up your ideal system config) and your important word docs and the like on another (encrypted) partition on the flash drive , and then put your media files on your 250 gig platter drive (all of which you have backed up of course.)

The other (not so good) option is to carry around a minimal dataset on your laptop that is to say keep your images and video in highly compressed format for the laptop, and have them in RAW your whatever you use for uncompressed storage on some NAT drive or server (but don’t forget the sys partition and ghost… it will come in handy in the future).

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Encryption is extremely important, but its overuse can also lead to problems.

Five to reasons to use Encryption:

1) You are dealing with important government, company, or personal data – especially on laptops, flash drives, or portable hard drives.

The news these days is riddled with stories of public servant or big company data theft, often due to laptop or hard drive loss. If big companies lose their data that often, little companies and individuals must do it all the time (more often, probably, because they don’t have encryption mandates) – they just don’t make the news. If you encrypt your data properly, data theft is virtually impossible. Note too that encryption doesn’t preclude data loss - you should back up your important data as well. Read more…

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