Adam's Edge: Keep a handle on your hard drive storage with TreeSize Free

You would think with todays hard drive capacities you would not need to worry about wasted space.  Think again.  If you ever want to know what all of your hard drive storage is being eaten by, check out TreeSize Free by Jam Software.  This tool has been around for years and it still comes in handy

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OS X Error -36 While Copying Files

If you receive error -36 while copying files from one hard drive to another, the source drive is probably going bad and should be replaced ASAP. I received this error while backing up my iTunes and iPhoto libraries.  For both libraries, I needed to backup chucks of the library until I found the corrupt files.

You can confirm hard drive issues by downloading Smart Utility of OS X.

EU Rules Against Piracy Tax On Media Devices

ipodnn reports the European Court of Justice has ruled that EU countries cannot charge consumers levies on gadgets that play digital content.  This would apply to the iPod and other mp3 players, smartphones, printers and other electronic equipment.  The law was originally created to help compensate digital rights owners from people using blank media to pirate content.  It was quickly adopted to gadgets and assumed all users of the devices were pirating material.  The ruling still needs to be codified by the European Commission but we are keeping our fingers crossed for our friends in Europe!

WD TV Live Hub Leaked

There is a great thread at the AV Science Forum detailing the currently unreleased Western Digital WD TV Live Hub.  Apparently, one forum member was able to purchase a unit when Best Buy mistakenly put the product live on its website.  The product has been pulled from both Best Buy's and Western Digital's sites, but can still be viewed via Google cache.  One of the biggest improvements over previous WD TV releases is the improved user interface and remote!

Unannounced product details

• 1TB internal hard drive


• Copy, move, delete files stored on internal, external, or network drives via WD TV interface


• Can stream content to WD TV Live, WD TV Live Plus, or other DLNA/UPnP devices


• iTunes server


• HDMI, composite, component connections


• Ethernet connection, optional wireless adapter


• Accuweather, Blockbuster, facebook, Flickr, live365, Mediafly, Netflix, Pandora, Youtube

Seagate Releases 1.5TB Portable Hard Drive

Now you can carry 1.5TB of data on a portable hard drive.  Seagate has released a 1.5TB version of their FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-portable drives.  The drive has a 2.5" hard drive inside the enclosure and supports USB 2.0 & 3.0 out of the box.  Seagate also offers connectivity via Firewire 800 & eSATA through optional accessories.  The 1.5TB drive is currently priced at $230.

Product page

Seagate's 3TB Hard Drive

Seagate has released the world's first 3TB hard drive.  Currently, the drive only comes in an external version; an internal model is expected to be released later this year.  Seagate is able to get 3TB in a single drive by using 5 600GB platters inside the drive.

Specs:

• Model: Seagate Freeagent Goflex Desk 3 TB External Drive STAC3000100


• External enclosure


• USB 3.0 & 2.0, Firewire 800, Ethernet connectivity


• 7200RPM


• 32MB Cache


• 5 - 600GB Platters 

Anandtech has a full review of this drive.  If you are thinking about buying this drive and cracking it open to use it internally, definitely check out the review.

Securely Delete Data From Old Hard Drives

If you are thinking about selling or disposing your old hard drives and computers, you need to make sure data cannot be retrieved from the drives.  Darik's Boot and Nuke is a great free resource for this.  Download the file and create a bootable CD and nuke those drives. Just be careful to select the correct drive!

Western Digital Launches WD Elements Play

Western Digital has released the WD Elements Play, a product that combines an external hard drive and WDTV media player.  Most of the basic features of the WDTV are available in this model, however this drive does not appear to be network compatible.  The Elements Play is available in a 1TB or 2TB version.

Specs:

• 1080p resolution


• Supported video codecs:

AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4)
MPG/MPEG
VOB/ISO
MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264)
MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4)
TS/TP/M2TS (MPEG 1/2/4, AVC)
FLV (D1 resolution only)
RM or RMVB 8/9/10

• USB ports for extra storage


• Digital camera compatible for viewing photos from camera


• Can play video, music, photos from hard drive


• HDMI & composite video connections

WD Elements Play User Manual

QNAP App Allows Multimedia Streaming To iOS Devices

QNAP has launched an Application in Apple's iOS App Store that allows multimedia streaming from their NAS products.  To enable the feature, the NAS needs to have the QNAP v3.3 NAS management utility update applied to it.  The App is a free download, and allows you to stream your music, photos, and videos over WiFi or 3G.  QNAP also includes MyJukebox, a feature that enables browsing for playlists created on the NAS, without using iTunes. 

Source: Hot HardWare

My Love / Hate Relationship With iTunes

iTunes, Apple's hub to its digital media player empire, is seriously broken.  The only way to sync an iPod, iPhone, or iPad to a computer is through iTunes.  As the software has "improved" over the years, it seems to have actually got worse.

I was first introduced to iTunes almost 5 years ago.  Prior to using iTunes, I used Windows Media Player and Winamp.  I had a small mp3 collection and I still listened to the majority of my music on cds.  One day I heard of an audio recording making its way around the internet called "The Revenge Of The Screen Savers".  As a big fan of The Screen Savers, I had to check this out.  I found the podcast and installed iTunes 6 to listen to it.  I was hooked.  I started finding podcasts through the iTunes store and enjoyed every minute of it.  My wife even bought me a 5th generation iPod with video for Christmas that year.  That is when I started to really notice iTunes' shortfalls.

Now that I had an iPod, I needed to convert my large CD collection into mp3s.  This was a very time consuming task, but it was worth it.  After all, I was going to be able to carry my entire music collection with me at all times.  I plugged in my iPod to sync it with iTunes and it took forever.  My collection was about 10GB, so there were a lot of songs to copy over.  I was surprised that iTunes kept hanging the computer, but I wrote that off since the computer was several years old.

Six months later I bought my first Mac, a 17" Intel iMac.  I was very impressed with the interface and it's overall speed.  It didn't seem to hang on anything and iTunes ran and looked much better than it did on my Windows XP PC.  I had purchased a bunch of used CDs from various sources and imported all of them into iTunes. After a while, my hard drive (only 160GB) started filling up with documents, media, and applications.  I decided to purchase an external hard drive for my iTunes library. Moving my library seemed easy enough. I chose not to back up the library database. Since I didn't use playlists or rate songs at the time, I didn't think I needed to.  Well I was wrong.  There was a bug in iTunes that was preventing the ID3 tag of mp3 files to write to the mp3. All of the music I converted to mp3 on my iMac had it's title, artist, and album information missing. All of the songs were ruined and need to be reimported.  To this day, I convert the ID3 tag of any album I import even though there haven't been any reports of this bug in years!

Apple keeps adding more features into iTunes with every release.  We now have music, podcasts, video, apps, photos, calendar, contacts, bookmarks, books (audio/e-book), and iTunes U syncing with our Apple devices. In addition, there are Genius Playlists, Coverflow, gapless playback, and iTunes DJ running processes and updates in the background. iTunes seems to hang all of the time now.  Unlike other OS X programs, iTunes has the special power to hang my entire system when it freezes.  If I get impatient and force quit the application, I have to wait 15 - 30 minutes the next time I launch iTunes while it verifies my library.

Speaking of iTunes freezing, iTunes routinely seems to hang while syncing my 3rd generation iPod Touch.  I’m not sure if the software is really hanging or actually syncing my data because iTunes only displays the status of “syncing iPod”.  The status bar needs to be more descriptive so users actually know what is occurring with their devices. 

Below are a couple of key issues Apple needs to address to improve iTunes. 

• Better support for large libraries.


• Improved performance & lower memory usage


• Smart Playlists syncing doesn’t work on iOS devices


• Better descriptions in the status bar


• Improved interface for creating playlists

For being the portal for all of Apple’s profitable “i” devices, it doesn’t seem the company spends too much time improving the performance of iTunes.  In it's current kluged together state, iTunes seems more like a product from Redmond instead of Cupertino. Hopefully, the application will be completely rewritten in the next major release.

Will The Optical Disc Die Already!

Optical discs have been available to the general public since the 1980’s in the form of music CDs and have evolved into Blue-Ray video discs today.  As much as some things have changed, many have stayed the same.  Optical discs stink.  They scratch too easily, proper storage of the discs takes up too much space, and the capacity is too small.  

I remember playing CDs in my car, something I haven’t done in the last 5 years.  I’m cruising down the street and hit a bump.  Woops, my song just skipped and my CD is now scratched.  Oh well, the music industry will be happy to sell me another.  Anybody that has young children probably has experienced what they can do to DVDs.  The DVD player won’t read your child’s favorite disc anymore.  You take it out of the player and look at the bottom of it.  I’m not sure what the substance is on the disc, but it is nearly impossible to remove.

Look around your house at all of those CDs, DVDs, Blue-Ray, Game Console, and backup discs.  It may look like you have a small library in your house.  You can trade in that wall of DVDs for a 2TB hard drive that is the size of a paperback book and can hold almost 1000 DVD quality movies.  You can probably store all of your music in MP3 or AAC format on your computer’s hard drive.  My 32GB iPod Touch can hold close to 700 CDs worth of music and it won’t skip in my car.  Plus, it is very convenient not to have to swap discs or browse through all of that physical media.

Accessing your backup data is equally frustrating.  Which disc are the wedding photos on?  Where is that document?  Backup discs are a pain to search through and recovering data is a slow process.  External hard drives are very cheap, $139 for 2TB, and can provide instant access to your data.  A word of caution, if you keep your back up hard drive next to your computer, you will lose all of your data in the event of a burglary or fire.  It is a good idea to have a 2nd drive for off site storage (more on this topic in a future article).

I’m not saying that optical media didn’t have its place in computing history.  Before hard drive capacity soared, they offered a lot of storage.  That time has come and gone so lets stop filling the landfills with the shiny discs.  Speaking of that, I wonder how many millions of AOL discs are in landfills?