Top five Thunderbolt storage devices: Performance meets capacity

The Thunderbolt technology can be applied to a lot of things, but currently, the most popular use is in storage products. In this regard, it's similar to USB 3.0 but offers about twice the transfer speed, and you can also daisy-chain as many as five storage devices together using a single Thunderbolt port without degrading the data rates.

Despite the fact that now Thunderbolt has gone multiplatform, most Thunderbolt storage devices are geared toward Macs. And their pricing, while progressively getting lower since Thunderbolt was first introduced a few years ago, is still quite high when compared to USB storage devices. The good news is now most, if not all, Thunderbolt storage devices on the market come with a Thunderbolt cable included, which would cost another $50 if you had to buy one yourself.

That said, if you own a Thunderbolt-enabled computer -- especially a
Mac -- and need a superfast storage device for professional needs such as video editing or backups, Thunderbolt storage is worth the investment. The following are the top five storage devices of this type, designed for desktop use, that I have reviewed, sorted with the most recently reviewed first. This list will be updated on a regular basis as I review more of them.

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LaCie 5big Thunderbolt
Introduced at
CES 2013, LaCie's 5big Thunderbolt is the first five-bay Thunderbolt storage device that doesn't offer RAID 5. Instead, it's just a JBOD device that relies on Mac OS's software RAID to manage its internal drives. This is similar to the Pegasus J4 and hence offers only RAID 0 and RAID 1. Since this is a five-bay device, the best use of it is a dual-RAID configuration with two drives in RAID 1 for important data and the other three in RAID 0 for fast access.

The trade-off for the lack of RAID 5 support is the fact that the 5big Thunderbolt is comparatively affordable, with the 20TB version costing $2,200. The RAID 5-capable Pegasus R6 offers just 12TB at the same price.

In my testing, the 5big Thunderbolt offered excellent performance, making it one of the fastest storage device on the market. The 5big Thunderbolt also comes in a 10TB version that costs $1,200. Read the full review of the LaCie 5big Thunderbolt.

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WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo
The My Book VelociRaptor Duo is the second Thunderbolt drive from Western Digital, the first being the WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo. Unlike the Thunderbolt Duo, which uses energy-efficient WD Green hard drives, the new My Book uses two of the latest 1TB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 0 as its storage. In case you haven't heard, WD VelociRaptor internal hard drives are arguably the fastest and most reliable on the market. The result: the My Book VelociRaptor Duo is by far the fastest dual-bay Thunderbolt drive I've tested. This, plus the fact that a Thunderbolt cable is included, makes the My Book VelociRaptor totally worth its $850 street price.

And since the drive can offer top performance only when its two internal drives are set up in RAID 0, you should get two of them, daisy-chained together, for backup purposes. Read the full review of the WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo.

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Promise Pegasus J4 The Pegasus J4 is a somewhat smaller version of the LaCie 5big Thunderbolt above. This is because it uses 2.5-inch (laptop) drives, and while it's a four-bay device, it also doesn't support RAID 5. Instead, it also a JBOD storage device that relies on the Mac operating system to offer RAID 1 or RAID 0.

The advantage of the J4 is the fact that's very compact, just about the size of the
Mac Mini. It offered very fast performance in my testing, considering it supports laptop hard drives, which tend to be slower than desktop drives. Advanced users can also use it with solid-state drives (SSDs) for even faster performance. Read the full review of the Pegasus J4.

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WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo
The WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo is the first Thunderbolt storage device from Western Digital. The drive is basically the Thunderbolt version of the My Book Studio Edition II. It has two drive bays accessible from the top. Inside, you'll find two SATA hard drives of 2TB, 3TB, or 4TB each, so the Duo can offer 4TB, 6TB, or 8TB of storage space when formatted in RAID 0. In RAID 1, you'll have half of that.

The My Book is shipped with low-powered hard drives, an in my testing, it was the slowest Thunderbolt storage devices on the market, although still much faster than any other non-Thunderbolt external hard drive. What makes it one of the best deals, however, is its pricing. At $800 for 8TB, it's the most affordable among all Thunderbolt storage devices, in terms of cost per gigabyte. Read the full review of the WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo.

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Promise Pegasus R6
The Promise Pegasus R6 is the thoroughbred of the Thunderbolt standard. It's the first Thunderbolt storage device, and up to now it's still the fastest of its type. On top of that, it's one of the only two multiple-bay Thunderbolt storage devices (the other being the four-bay Pegasus R4) on the market that has built-in hardware RAID and therefore offers all types of RAID configurations, including advanced RAID setups such as RAID 5 or RAID 6. The device's six included hard drives are user-serviceable and can be hot-swappable in case failure occurs.

The negatives of the R6 include its high cost (about $2,200 for 12TB), and the noise and the vibration it generates during operation. But if you want something that's for now the be-all and end-all of Thunderbolt-based storage, this is the one. Read the full review of the Promise Pegasus R6.

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Looking for specs and pricing? Compare these storage devices head-to-head.

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Asteroid to Make Closest Flyby in History

Talk about too close for comfort. In a rare cosmic encounter, an asteroid will barnstorm Earth next week, missing our planet by a mere 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers).

Designated 2012 DA14, the space rock is approximately 150 feet (45 meters) across, and astronomers are certain it will zip harmlessly past our planet on February 15—but not before making history. It will pass within the orbits of many communications satellites, making it the closest flyby on record. (Read about one of the largest asteroids to fly by Earth.)

"This is indeed a remarkably close approach for an asteroid this size," said Paul Chodas, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near Earth Object (NEO) program office in Pasadena, California.

"We estimate that an asteroid of this size passes this close to the Earth only once every few decades."

The giant rock—half a football field wide—was first spotted by observers at the La Sagra Observatory in southern Spain a year ago, soon after it had just finished making a much more distant pass of the Earth at 2.6 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) away.

This time around however, on February15 at 2:24 pm EST, the asteroid will be passing uncomfortably close—ten times closer than the orbit of the moon—flying over the eastern Indian Ocean near Sumatra (map). (Watch: "Moon 101.")

Future Impact?

Chodas and his team have been keeping a close eye on the cosmic intruder, and orbital calculations of its trajectory show that there is no chance for impact.

But the researchers have not yet ruled out future chances of a collision. This is because asteroids of this size are too faint to be detected until they come quite close to the Earth, said Chodas.

"There is still a tiny chance that it might hit us on some future passage by the Earth; for example there is [a] 1-in-200,000 chance that it could hit us in the year 2080," he said.

"But even that tiny chance will probably go away within the week, as the asteroid's orbit gets tracked with greater and greater accuracy and we can eliminate that possibility."

Earth collision with an object of this size is expected to occur every 1,200 years on average, said Donald Yeomans, NEO program manager, at a NASA news conference this week.

DA14 has been getting closer and closer to Earth for quite a while—but this is the asteroid's closest approach in the past hundred years. And it probably won't get this close again for at least another century, added Yeomans.

While no Earth impact is possible next week, DA14 will pass 5,000 miles inside the ring of orbiting geosynchronous weather and communications satellites; so all eyes are watching the space rock's exact trajectory. (Learn about the history of satellites.)

"It's highly unlikely they will be threatened, but NASA is working with satellite providers, making them aware of the asteroid's pass," said Yeomans.

Packing a Punch

Experts say an impact from an object this size would have the explosive power of a few megatons of TNT, causing localized destruction—similar to what occurred in Siberia in 1908.

In what's known as the "Tunguska event," an asteroid is thought to have created an airburst explosion which flattened about 750 square miles (1,200 square kilometers) of a remote forested region in what is now northern Russia (map).

In comparison, an impact from an asteroid with a diameter of about half a mile (one kilometer) could temporarily change global climate and kill millions of people if it hit a populated area.

Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that while small objects like DA14 could hit Earth once a millennia or so, the largest and most destructive impacts have already been catalogued.

"Objects of the size that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs have all been discovered," said Spahr. (Learn about what really happened to the dinosaurs.)

A survey of nearly 9,500 near-Earth objects half a mile (one kilometer) in diameter is nearly complete. Asteroid hunters expect to complete nearly half of a survey of asteroids several hundred feet in diameter in the coming years.

"With the existing assets we have, discovering asteroids rapidly and routinely, I continue to expect the world to be safe from impacts in the future," added Spahr.

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Cop Shooting Rampage: Dorner's Truck Found

The truck owned and driven by suspected cop killer Christopher Dorner during his alleged rampage through the Los Angeles area was found deserted and in flames on the side of Bear Mountain, Calif., this afternoon.

Heavily armed SWAT team members descended onto Bear Mountain from a helicopter manned with snipers today to investigate the fire. The San Bernadino Sheriff's Department confirmed the car was Dorner's.

Dorner, a former Los Angeles police officer and Navy reservist, is believed to have killed one police officer and injured two others early this morning in Riverside, Calif. He is also accused of killing two civilians on Sunday after releasing a scathing "manifesto" alleging grievances committed by the police department while he worked for it and warning of coming violence toward cops.

Read More About Chris Dorner's Allegations Against the LAPD

Heavily armed officers spent much of Thursday searching for signs of Dorner, investigating multiple false leads into his whereabouts and broadcasting his license plate and vehicle description across the California Highway System.

Around 3:45 p.m. ET, police responded to Bear Mountain, where two fires were reported, and set up a staging area in the parking lot of a ski resort. They did not immediately investigate the fires, but sent a small team of heavily armed officers up in the helicopter to descend down the mountain toward the fire.

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The officers, carrying machine guns and searching the mountain for any sign of Dorner, eventually made it to the vehicle and identified it as belonging to Dorner. They have not yet found Dorner.

Late this afternoon, CNN announced that Dorner had sent a package containing his manifesto and a DVD to its offices.

PHOTOS: Former LAPD Officer Suspected in Shootings

Police officers across Southern California were on the defensive today, scaling back their public exposure, no longer responding to "barking-dog calls" and donning tactical gear outdoors.

Police departments have stationed officers in tactical gear outside police departments, stopped answering low-level calls and pulled motorcycle patrols off the road in order to protect officers who might be targets of Dorner's alleged rampage.

"We've made certain modifications of our deployments, our deviations today, and I want to leave it at that, and also to our responses," said Chief Sergio Diaz of the police department in Riverside, Calif., where the officers were shot. "We are concentrating on calls for service that are of a high priority, threats to public safety, we're not going to go on barking dog calls today."

Sgt. Rudy Lopez of the Los Angeles Police Department said Dorner is "believed to be armed and extremely dangerous."

Early Thursday morning, before they believe he shot at any police officers, Dorner allegedly went to a yacht club near San Diego, where police say he attempted to steal a boat and flee to Mexico.

He aborted the attempted theft when the boat's propeller became entangled in a rope, law enforcement officials said. It was then that he is believed to have headed to Riverside, where he allegedly shot two police officers.

"He pointed a handgun at the victim [at the yacht club] and demanded the boat," said Lt. David Rohowits of the San Diego Police Department.

Police say the rifle marksman shot at four officers in two incidents overnight, hitting three of them: one in Corona, Calif., and the two in Riverside, Calif.

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Today on New Scientist: 6 February 2013

Open Richard III DNA evidence for peer review

A good case has been made that a skeleton unearthed from a car park is that of the last Plantagenet king of England - it's time to share the data

Universal bug sensor takes guesswork out of diagnosis

A machine that can identify all bacteria, viruses and fungi known to cause disease in humans should speed up diagnosis and help to reduce antibiotic resistance

Choking China: The struggle to clear Beijing's air

As pollution levels return to normal in China's capital after a record-breaking month of smog, what can be done to banish the smog?

Genes mix across borders more easily than folk tales

Analysing variations in folk tales using genetic techniques shows that people swap genes more readily than stories, giving clues to how cultures evolve

Sleep and dreaming: Slumber at the flick of a switch

Wouldn't it be wonderful to pack a good night's sleep into fewer hours? Technology has the answer - and it could treat depression and even extend our lives too

Closest Earth-like planet may be 13 light years away

A habitable exoplanet should be near enough for future telescopes to probe its atmosphere for signs of life

Lifelogging captures a real picture of your health

How can lifelogging - wearing a camera round your neck to record your every move - reveal what's healthy and unhealthy in the way we live?

Musical brains smash audio algorithm limits

The mystery of how our brains perceive sound has deepened, now that musicians have broken a limit on sound perception imposed by the Fourier transform

Magnitude 8 earthquake strikes Solomon Islands

A major earthquake has caused a small tsunami in the Pacific Ocean, killing at least five people

Nuclear knock-backs on UK's new reactors and old waste

Plans to build new reactors in the UK are stalling as yet another company pulls out, and there is still nowhere to store nuclear waste permanently

Amateur astronomer helps Hubble snap galactic monster

An amateur astronomer combined his pictures with images from the Hubble archive to reveal the true nature of galactic oddball M106

Nightmare images show how lack of sleep kills

Fatigue has been blamed for some of worst human-made disasters of recent decades. Find out more in our image gallery

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Canadians protest Tunisian opposition chief's death

MONTREAL: Hundreds of people gathered late Wednesday in Montreal to express their outrage over the shooting death of Tunisian opposition leader Chokri Belaid.

The protesters, mostly youths, held candles and some wrapped themselves in Tunisian flags under bitterly cold temperatures.

The Tunisian Collective of Canada, which backed the Arab Spring movement that triggered the fall of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's regime two years ago, accused Tunisia's current government of failing to "combat corruption and criminals."

"Tunisian justice remains hostage to executive power," the group said, calling on the government to conduct a thorough investigation into Belaid's death.

Belaid, whose funeral will be on Friday after the main weekly prayers, was a populist known for his iconic smile and black moustache.

A lawyer who spoke with the working class accent of northwestern Tunisia, he defended human rights, was jailed under Ben Ali and ex-president Habib Bourguiba, and was a member of executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's defence team.

His death sparked deadly protests, attacks on offices of the ruling Islamist Ennahda party and pledges for a new government of technocrats.

- AFP/xq

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Tesla rolls out remote app for Model S

Tesla's new app will let Model S owners view their cars' charging status.

(Credit:
Tesla)

When we reviewed the Tesla Model S, we came away very impressed by the driving character and the cabin electronics, but some features, common on other high-end or electric cars, were missing. Tesla made up for one of those features by making a smartphone app available that will let Model S owners view their battery levels.

These types of apps have become common for electric
cars; Ford offers MyFord Mobile for the Focus Electric and Honda has its HondaLink EV for the Fit EV. The electric car includes a mobile data connection, which owners can use to view everything from battery status to the car's location. These apps often include features such as remotely starting or stopping charging, if the car is currently plugged in, and locking or unlocking the doors.

Tesla's app does not seem to be as expansive in its utility as some. In a blog post, the company says drivers can monitor charging, start climate control, and honk the horn. The mobile data connection means that the app will work anywhere the phone has coverage, although if the car is parked somewhere with no mobile data coverage, the app will not work.

An image of the app released by Tesla also seems to show the car's location.

Tesla demonstrated one of the virtues of the Model S in its implementation of the new app, its ability to deliver software updates to the car remotely. Past updates have covered bug fixes and the addition of voice command.

The Tesla app is available for iOS and
Android.

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NTSB to Challenge 787 Battery Tests

The National Transportation Safety Board will publicly question at a news conference planned for Thursday morning in Washington whether the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing adequately tested the lithium batteries that have caught fire on Dreamliners in the U.S. and Japan, ABC News has learned exclusively from a government source.

The NTSB will say its investigation into the fire on the 787 at Boston's Logan Field showed gaps between what happened with the battery in testing and what happened with the battery confiscated by the NTSB in Boston, a source told ABC News.

The NTSB investigation followed the mid-January announcement that the FAA ordered the grounding of all Boeing 787 Dreamliner jets until their U.S. operator proved that batteries on the planes are safe.

The pre-certification test results were found to be different than what happened during NTSB investigation, the source said. The agency, charged with investigating civil aviation accidents in the U.S., is expected to question whether the Boeing tests certified by the FAA were "robust enough."

The NTSB told ABC News that its investigation is looking at the battery failure and what caused it, as well as the certification processes, emphasizing that the FAA has been "very cooperative in allowing our investigators access to the certification review that they are undertaking on their own."

Akio Kon/Bloomberg/Getty Images

787 Dreamliner Grounded, Passengers Forced to Evacuate Watch Video

Boeing 787 Dreamliner Deemed Safe Despite Mishaps Watch Video

Both the airplane maker and the FAA are responsible for the testing, the government source said.

This morning, the chairwoman of the NTSB, Deborah Hersman, told reporters at a breakfast briefing that the initial investigation into the batteries found "multiple cells where we saw uncontrolled chemical chain reaction," including short circuiting and thermal runaway, "and those features are not what we would have expected to see in a brand new battery, in a brand new airplane.

"We're evaluating assessments that were made, whether or not those assessments were accurate, whether they were complied with and whether more needs to be done," Hersman said. "We want to make sure the design is robust, that the oversight, the manufacturing process, that those are all adequate -- and so that will be a part of our continuing investigation to determine the failure modes, what may have caused it and what can mitigate against that in the future."

The lithium batteries, one power source for the 787, have never before been used in commercial airliners and were a source of concern from the beginning because of they operate at high temperature.

"I would not want to categorically say that these batteries are not safe," Hersman said. "Any new technology, any new design, there are going to be some inherent risks. ... I would say that, in the past, the NTSB have expressed concerns about the risks and recommended mitigation measures."

Hersman added that the fire seen on board the JAL Dreamliner in Boston in "shows us some risks that were not addressed."

In a statement to ABC News, Boeing said: "Lithium ion batteries were selected after a careful review of available alternatives because they best met the performance and design objectives of the 787. We've used them successfully in other applications, such as satellites, for nearly a decade, and they are used on other aircraft, spacecraft and naval vessels.

"With that said," Boeing added, "we constantly challenge our assumptions and decisions across all of our products when new information becomes available. Nothing we learned during the design of the 787 or since has led us to change our fundamental assessment of the technology. It merits emphasis that the 787 has extensive protections in place to ensure the ability for safe flight to continue even in the presence of a battery failure."

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Today on New Scientist: 5 February 2013

Engineering light: Pull an image from nowhere

A new generation of lenses could bring us better lighting, anti-forgery technology and novel movie projectors

Baby boomers' health worse than their parents

Americans who were born in the wake of the second world war have poorer health than the previous generation at the same age

New 17-million-digit monster is largest known prime

A distributed computing project called GIMPS has found a record-breaking prime number, the first for four years

Cellular signals used to make national rainfall map

The slight weakening of microwave signals caused by reflections off raindrops can be exploited to keep tabs on precipitation

NASA spy telescopes won't be looking at Earth

A Mars orbiter and an exoplanet photographer are among proposals being presented today for how to use two second-hand spy satellites that NASA's been given

China gets the blame for media hacking spree

The big US newspapers and Twitter all revealed last week that they were hacked - and many were quick to blame China. But where's the proof?

Nobel-winning US energy secretary steps down

Steven Chu laid the groundwork for government-backed renewable energy projects - his successor must make a better case for them

Sleep and dreaming: Where do our minds go at night?

We are beginning to understand how our brains shape our dreams, and why they contain such an eerie mixture of the familiar and the bizarre

Beating heart of a quantum time machine exposed

This super-accurate timekeeper is an optical atomic clock and its tick is governed by a single ion of the element strontium

A life spent fighting fair about the roots of violence

Despite the fierce conflicts experienced living among anthropologists, science steals the show in Napoleon Chagnon's autobiography Noble Savages

Challenge unscientific thinking, whatever its source

Science may lean to the left, but that's no reason to give progressives who reject it a "free pass"

Need an organ? Just print some stem cells in 3D

Printing blobs of human embryonic stem cells could allow us to grow organs without scaffolds

Ice-age art hints at birth of modern mind

An exhibition of ice-age art at London's British Museum shows astonishing and enigmatic creativity

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8.0 quake strikes off Solomon Islands

WASHINGTON: A major magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck off the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean and a tsunami warning was issued for South Pacific islands, US officials said.

The US Geological Survey said the quake struck at 0112 GMT near the Santa Cruz Islands, which are part of the Solomon Islands nation, with a depth of 3.6 miles (5.8 kilometers). The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center warned that the large quake could trigger a "destructive tsunami" near the epicenter.

- AFP/ck

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Zillow's new Digs app offers remodeling ideas, advice

Zillow Digs, the real estate aggregator's new app for home improvement information.

(Credit:
Zillow)

Online real estate listing aggregator Zillow launched an app today that aims to help home shoppers and home buyers with their home improvement projects.

Available for the
iPad and the Web, Zillow Digs is a free app designed to offer inspiration as well as information about remodeling projects. The free app lets users browse thousands of photos of bathroom, kitchen, and outdoor projects, as well as get estimates on the cost of the actual project based on the user's location.

The app also allows users to create, save, and share Pinterest-like boards containing their ideas and interact with other users who may have similar ideas. The app also offers connections to local industry professionals, such as architects, contractors, and designers.

"Tens of millions of home buyers shop for homes on Zillow each month, and home improvement is a natural next step for us in consumer empowerment and transparency of information to help people make smarter decisions," Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff said in a statement. This first-of-its-kind remodeling cost estimate algorithm was created by Zillow's industry-leading team of economists and data analysts who produce extensive housing data and research."

Founded in 2004 and launched as a Web site in 2006, Zillow has a sales and rental database on more than 110 million U.S. homes. The company's revenue comes from real estate professionals' subscription fees and advertising.

In 2008, the company launched Mortgage Marketplace, which lets prospective borrowers get quotes anonymously and lenders get leads for free.

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