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Documenting has always been an integral part of every human’s life, whether it is recording of historical facts, jotting down of ideas or simply fulfilling a need to pen down emotions. In a nutshell, documentation is all about communicating and recording. If it hadn’t been for our instincts of documenting we woulc have never known many of the historical facts and researches. Worse still, us writers wouldn’t have existed at all

In this day and age when everything has started to exist in the digital form, why should document creation be any different? There are several software that brings out the creativity in us and aids in the process of writing

The software for document creation is usually refered to as Office tools or suites These are a collection of applications, each designed to perform specific tasks. For instance we have word processors, spreadsheet creator; presentation tools, e-mail clients-the first thre are core document creation utilities

At present we have a variety of such office suites available as Shareware or Freeware Shareware usually offer more features and functionality as compared to its free counterpar but it wouldn’t be wise to underestimate the latter for now they are so well-equipped that they can pose serious competition

When you need to choose amongst hundred of applications, it becomes tough, so we present you with the best of applications so yoi decision can be made simple

On the commercial front, we have Microsoft’s latest office warhorse-Microsoft Office 2007-a hugely popular Office suite, whose tools such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint have become synonymous with a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation tool respectively.

LOWER CAPACITY RAID

If you are on a conquest for a low capacity storage drive for your small office or SOHO business where you can take your backups and you need that storage to be portable while providing data reliability, then the Buffalo DriveStation Duo HD-W500IU2 is an ideal solution for you

Features

The Buffalo DriveStation Duo features two Western digital hard drives running at 7200 RPM. These hard drives feature 8 MB of cache and use the SATA interface. This device provides 500 GB of storage capacity which is more then enough for backing up entire hard drives of most computers. One of the unique features of the DriveStation Duo is that it supports disk mirroring. This means that when you write any data to this external hard drive, the data gets written to both the hard drives simultaneously. In the scenario that either of the drive fails, it means that the drive still remains online and that none of the data is lost. Performance of the device is slightly degraded if you use the RAID mode. Also, if you use the RAID feature, the total storage capacity of this device is reduced to half (250 GB). A backup software solution called memeo is provided that

can be used to backup your documents, e-mails, favorites, etc. It also supports full and incremental backups so that you do not have to copy the whole data all over again and only the items that are changed get copied. In the event that your primary hard drive fails, you are never left without a backup of your applications or data. With data reliability, also comes data security in the Buffalo DriveStation Duo in the form of SecureLockWare software. This software supports both 128-bit or 256-bit encryption and it can be used to encrypt either ndividual files or a whole disk. You encrypt data by specifying a password that must be subsequently entered in order to access the protected file, folder or disk.

Layout and Design

The drive is shaped in the form of a small black box that looks like a sandwich toaster. A fan is provided on the rear for active cooling of the hard drives to keep them cool. A USB 2.0 connector along with 2 Firewire 400 ports that use either the 4 pin or the 6 pin interface are bundled with the drive

Performance

Everest showed a consistent read speeds of 22-23 MB/s which we feel is just average. Other external hard drives reach speeds of about 28-29 MB/s. Also data transfer rates over the Firewire 400 interface were only marginally better at 26 MB/s. The write speeds were rated at 18 MB/s which is average at best

Verdict

For a price of Rs 19,999 we feel that this device is priced on the higher side. You can have 2 external hard drives though configuring them to sync same data would be time consuming and not for novice usage, but surely can be done FOR: Support for RAID 1, 500 GB of storage AGAINST: Capacity reduces to 250 GB when used in RAID mode, No way of checking SMART status of hard drives