Say hello to the BytePac. It’s a hard disk caddy made entirely out of 100% recyclable material (yes, cardboard), but before you jump to any rash, mocking conclusions – as half the office did when it arrived – let me explain how it works.

Pull off the outer sleeve and open the box, and inside there’s room for a 3.5in hard disk (or 2.5in with the included card “adapter”) to sit snugly. At the connection end the box has a flap through which you plug the combined power-and-SATA connector, the other end of which goes to both the mains and to either an eSATA or USB port on your PC. That’s all you need to get the drive running, then simply fold back a ventilation flap on the rear of the box, which doubles up as a stand to prop the drive up off the desk.

This video shows it off neatly. For a cardboard box, it’s actually rather elegant.

The question you might be asking is: why? The BytePac is billed as an alternative to external hard disks, but it’s not as robust as proper external drives, nor is it particularly thin and light. Few people will buy a disk specifically to use in a BytePac when far sleeker solutions are so common.

However, it’s best viewed as an attractive and simple archiving system. Once you’ve bought your first kit with its power box and set of cables (three empty boxes, one cable set, £34), you can simply buy more empty boxes (around £4 each) as and when you need them. Put an old disk in each, sensibly label the side of the box and stack them on a shelf as you would a collection of books. When you need some old data, just pull out the relevant BytePac and plug the cable in – the disk itself need never see the light of day.

You may already have your own archiving setup, and you may be wary of entrusting your valuable data to a cardboard box. But the BytePac is a cheap way to archive a large number of disks, it’s environmentally friendly, and it won’t look like it’s worth nicking if the burglars come round.

I’ve got one here that I’ll be playing with this week, and several people in the office have already made their minds up one way or the other, but I’m interested to hear what you think. Is the BytePac a neat archiving innovation or a piece of cheap tat?

An increasing number of laptops these days boast SSDs, but capacities are rising quite slowly. For some people, 128GB as your main drive might be enough, but if you want more, is it worth shelling out the huge fees charged by manufacturers to upgrade to a higher capacity SSD, or can you make do with alternative storage?

To find out, we ran our standard file transfer tests – first between a RAM disk and the SSD of a brand new laptop, then between a RAM disk and a variety of external storage devices. The results are in the table at the bottom of this post.

The SSD

The tidiest upgrade is to a larger internal SSD, and there’s no doubt this is also best for performance. With a single 1.5GB file, the SSD in our test MacBook Air delivered read and write speeds of 187MB/sec and 156MB/sec. More importantly (you’ll see why later), with 1.5GB of tiny files its read and write speeds were a healthy 87MB/sec and 75MB/sec.

The big problem is the hefty price of a bigger SSD, with Apple charging £250 to step up from 128GB to 256GB in its 13in MacBook Air, and Sony charging £410 for the same upgrade in the VAIO Z. That’s a lot of money.

The external hard disk

The first alternative is an external hard disk, and it’s a cost-efficient way of adding storage, particularly for files you won’t always need to hand. The winner of this month’s USB 3 hard disk Labs (issue 204, in shops now!) costs only £51 inc VAT for a 500GB drive.

In our tests with a single 1.5GB file, it achieved identical read and write speeds of 82MB/sec. With 1.5GB of tiny files this figure fell, but only to 60MB/sec read and 51MB/sec write; not as fast as an SSD, but significantly cheaper.

Of course, not all laptops have USB 3 ports – the MacBook Air being one such example. In our last USB 2 hard disk Labs, the winner achieved 32MB/sec read and 28MB/sec write speeds with a single 1.5GB file, and 26MB/sec and 12MB/sec with 1.5GB of tiny files.

The SD card

Adding external storage is cheap and fast, but if you prefer the convenience of having something you don’t have to carry around, you could make use of the SD card slot. Now, SD cards aren’t built for the kind of constant writing that you do on your main hard disk. They have a limited number of guaranteed write cycles before the card risks failing, so they’re best considered for storing files you don’t update often – a media collection, for example.

There are also several speed categories of SD cards. Look for a class rating on the packaging: this refers to its minimum non-fragmented sequential write speed. So, Class 2 will do at least 2MB/sec, and Class 10 at least 10MB/sec. To confuse matters, some manufacturers use “x” ratings that have minimum rates even higher than Class 10.

Sure enough, in the large file test a Class 10 card saw read and write speeds of 30MB/sec and 23MB/sec. For Class 6 this was 18MB/sec and 15MB/sec, while Class 4 saw 16MB/sec and 6MB/sec. You wouldn’t want to write 64GB of data regularly, but for a one-off the speeds are fine.

With small files those cards had healthy read speeds too, from 44MB/sec on Class 10 down to 20MB/sec with Class 4. But the big problem with using an SD card in this way is writing multiple small files: transferring 1.5GB of files to a Class 10 card pummelled the speed down to below 1MB/sec, and that fell even further with lower classes. If you’re going to regularly write a lot of small files, these cards are a terrible choice.

The value question

For data that will be written once and largely stay unchanged, however, does an SD card offer a value alternative to an SSD upgrade? At the kind of large capacities where it’s feasible, we found several 32GB Class 10 cards on sale for less than £40 inc VAT, and 64GB Class 10 cards at around £100. That’s for basic cards; those rated faster and with a higher number of guaranteed write cycles can cost up to several hundred pounds, so you can pick and choose to suit your needs.

You’ll need an SDXC slot for 64GB cards, and some slots don’t accept the card fully inside – on the MacBook Air it protrudes by 8mm, ripe for the snapping. But if your laptop meets the requirements, and if you’re after only a quick boost in capacity for non-critical files, the sheer convenience of being able to leave an SD card in there at all times makes it a great way to save money. And at lower capacities we really are talking pocket money.

(Click to enlarge)

So Microsoft has decided to kill off the Drive Extender technology in the next release of Windows Home Server, codenamed Vail (and the other concotions of the same basic recipe: Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, codenamed Aurora).

This was the one bit of cleverness in Windows Home Server that really appealed to the home user. Buy a four-bay server like the cute little HP Home Server, and add more discs when you needed more space.

The underlying drive manager tools just added the space into the pool for you, rather like a Drobo does. And you could mark important files and directories so they were put onto more than one spindle, just in case of drive failure. It was simple, it worked, and the users loved it.

For the 2011 version, Microsoft decided to rejig the technology and came up with the refreshed version called Drive Extender. Now, after a very embarrassing 24 hours — in which they claimed we really didn’t need it, indeed that we were calling on Microsoft to pull it out and junk it — they have had to admit that it didn’t work properly so it’s been junked.

The howls of protest are reverberating around the world.

I’ll dig into this more in my next column, but here’s a thought for the meantime. Microsoft, or rather the brilliant team led by David Cutler, came up with NTFS in 1991. Since then, just about every storage technology that Microsoft has tried to bring to market has failed.

Cairo’s Object File System never happened. Structured storage deconstruction to NTFS streams in NT 3.51 never made it to release. Drive M: in Exchange Server was canned because it was way too easy to break. The WinFS object file system promised for Vista. And now Drive Extender. Thats one attempt every five years, give or take.

I was chatting with one corporate IT director recently who lovingly stroked the floor to ceiling rackspace of his huge Storage Area Network. We were musing about Microsoft and file systems. He said “NTFS is very solid, but Microsoft doesn’t do storage. Not even slightly. And can’t innovate in the space either”.

Hard to disagree with his view, to be honest.

“Dude, someone’s snapped the end off your USB stick.” That’s what you’d probably say if you saw the new Lexar Echo ZE flash drive sitting on my desk.

Yet I can assure you, as one dude to another, that no one has. What you see above is the whole thing. Somehow, while I was briefly looking the other way, flash drives have become so compact that the entire device is now basically the size of the plug.

Billions of bits

And this isn’t a little 512MB drive either — not that 512MB is actually little. In these days of terabyte hard disks we’ve become accustomed to thinking of anything less than a gigabyte as piddling small change; but 512MB is still 4,294,967,296 binary cells. That’s a lot of cells. If each one were a mere millimetre in size, 4,294,967,296 of them in a row would stretch from here to Baghdad. Don’t ask about latency.

Yet what we have here is even more impressive. The Lexar Echo ZE is a 32GB device, which according to Excel means it holds an amazing 2.74878E+11 bits. At one millimetre per bit, that’s enough bits to reach three quarters of the way to the moon.

The Echo ZE crams its 274 billion cells into a tiny nub roughly a quarter of a cubic centimetre in volume

Of course, one millimetre per bit is a wholly imaginary scale, which I made up simply because a millimetre is pretty much the smallest unit of measurement I can visualise. In reality, the Echo ZE crams its 274 billion cells into a tiny nub roughly a quarter of a cubic centimetre in volume. If my GCSE maths hasn’t wholly deserted me, this means that, on average, each cubic millimetre of this thing stores around 131MB of data. If you’re old, like me, you may enjoy visualising that as 373 5.25″ floppy disks, teetering in an unlikely column.

An archive in your pocket

Though this advance in storage density is strictly speaking only quantitative, it opens up whole new possibilities. The Echo ZE is marketed as a backup drive that’s compact enough to leave plugged in at all times, and that’s a pretty ingenious angle — look out for a review soon.

But personally, as soon as I saw the Echo ZE I started thinking about how convenient it would be to keep multiple OS distributions in my pocket, not to mention applications, perhaps a copy of the PC Pro benchmarks, even – why not? – a whole library of books, films and TV shows.

(Eventually the idea of carrying data anywhere will be absurd, of course, because it’ll all be floating about in the cloud, ready to be accessed from wherever you happen to be. But if you think that’s viable today, click here and let me know when you get bored. For bonus points, try it over a 3G connection.)

Size and capacity

To be fair, the Echo ZE isn’t the most capacious USB flash drive we’ve seen: that would be Kingston’s 256GB DataTraveler 300. I shudder to think how many bits that one holds. But the Kingston drive is, by the standards of these things, a comparatively chunky device. If I were to keep it in my pocket I would be inviting an unending stream of comedy from my hilarious colleagues with respect to the bulge in my trousers. Since the DataTraveler 300 still sells for over £600, I would also be inviting a well-deserved mugging.

The Echo ZE, by contrast, is so tiny and light that you can stick it in a pocket and genuinely forget about it until you need it. Plus, since it costs little more than £60, losing it wouldn’t be quite such a disaster.

Having said that, since it has no sort of clip or cord to attach to a key-ring, I would lose it. And the loss wouldn’t be merely financial: think of the data! 274 billion bits gone, just like that, fallen through a hole in my pocket, or accidentally swept into a friend’s bin.

But to me that is, in a slightly cussed way, perhaps the most inspiring reflection of all. How fantastic it is that we live in a world where you can so easily misplace ninety thousand floppy disks’ worth of data! And it makes me wonder — what might we be able to lose tomorrow?

This is by far the smallest NAS drive that I, or any of the handful of PC Pro staffers I’ve shoved it in front of have ever seen. Inside lives two 500GB 2.5in laptop hard disks, giving a massive total of 1TB storage.

The case is just 135 x 40 x 81mm – that’s just 437 cubic centimetres – that’s over 2GB per cubic centimetre – that’s amazing. If data was a liquid, you could pour 600GB into the mug sitting on my desk. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m impressed.

A full review will be on the way just as soon as I stop wasting my time on these sums.

But this flash drive needs seeing to be believed. It’s been passed all round the office, where it’s invariably been greeted with ooohs and aaaahs of grinning appreciation, and it’s already been suggested that we buy up a job lot of them to use in the Labs.

The reason for all the fuss?

Well, the Corsair Flash Voyager Mini is barely bigger then a 10p piece; it weighs so little we hardly even noticed it in our hand, let alone a pocket; it’s rubberised for durability, and holds a perfectly reasonable 4GB of data via its retractable USB connector.

Oh, and did we mention it’s going on sale for less than £16 inc VAT?

Considering our components editor paid £50 for a single gigabyte of bulky storage just a couple of years ago, the inexorable march and miniaturisation of USB storage is plain to see. And if this is how things are going it won’t be long before we’re carrying our entire hard drives in a pocket with our front door keys – for better or worse.

The ludicrously tempting 4GB Corsair Flash Voyager Mini is available here.

UPDATE: The Corsair is almost exactly the same thickness as a standard USB connector. And for those who reckon it blocks adjacent USB ports…