Questions about Surface Pro 2

[Deleted member 10837]

Correction: Free "indefinitely" until the service either goes under or is bought by another company or they decide to start charging a fee. (Though it starts at 15GB.) Under no circumstances is your data truly safe "indefinitely" while on a third party's servers. Websites get hacked. Copy had a nice backdoor that made client data viewable, discovered earlier this year (fortunately closed).

At least MS is still beholden to corporations (SkyDrive), but we store our data on local company-served clouds for a reason.

Indefinitely means undefined amount of time. Of course no online data is truly safe which is why I also have local backups. I'm not one of those crazy paranoid conspiracy theorists. My Android Nandroid ROM backups would be no good to anyone else anyway.

 

[oion]

Indefinitely means undefined amount of time. Of course no online data is truly safe which is why I also have local backups. I'm not one of those crazy paranoid conspiracy theorists. My Android Nandroid ROM backups would be no good to anyone else anyway.

Of course my head translated to "infinite." Oops.

For large files like video, though, I imagine USB3 local storage is going to be faster than streamed over wireless bandwidth anyway.

 

[Szadzik]

If you need all the storage, maybe use 1TB portable drives with a powered hub and a portable battery?

Use portable battery to power the hub, connect drives when you required them. Get a small Pelican case and cut out foam to fit the drives, hub and battery and have a travel kit ready for when you travel.

 

[ecbritz]

The idea I picked up here that the Surface Pro 2 is meant to be used for "short term" projects requiring a minimum of storage is nonsense. It is a miniaturised PC. The Surface Pro is more than a PC, in a sense, but nothing less than a PC. Some users require a huge amount of files to be available to them when they do their work. Other users require a large number of huge files available to them. The Surface Pro 2 is able to access a huge file store, when required, so a huge file store is fine to work with on a Surface if you need it.

The two main options seems to be $360 per year for Skydrive storage of 600GB, or a small 1 terabyte external hard drive with portable power supply, backed up on another hard drive at home. The total cost would be less than $360 I think. The drive should last at least five years. 512 GB installed flash storage would also help, but it's rather expensive. I'm not sure about the reliability of flash data storage over 5 years. Skydrive requires an internet connection, which could also be a factor in some situations.

As long as we know the storage options well enough, we can use the Surface Pro 2 with confidence.

 

[shazada]

There is no storage problem on this device..... 512GB is what's being shipped by even the larger laptops. I've replaced the DVD drive with an extra hard drive, which isn't normal.

Get a cheap USB 3 1TB mobile storage and your good to go.
Sent from my Nokia Lumia 920 using Board Express

 

[oion]

The idea I picked up here that the Surface Pro 2 is meant to be used for "short term" projects requiring a minimum of storage is nonsense. It is a miniaturised PC. The Surface Pro is more than a PC, in a sense, but nothing less than a PC. Some users require a huge amount of files to be available to them when they do their work. Other users require a large number of huge files available to them. The Surface Pro 2 is able to access a huge file store, when required, so a huge file store is fine to work with on a Surface if you need it.

Here? No, you missed the point. It's not that either Surface is "only good for short small projects" due to small storage space; it's that your use case requiring that much constant storage while mobile is a rare outlier. If your use case was actually normal by any means, believe me that ultramobile devices would have a whole lot more storage. Mobile use is going to be "light" on storage for the vast majority of people; my collection of Word and PDF documents altogether do not take up much space. When traveling, I'll have hundreds of mp3s and a few movies, but nothing drastic because travel, by nature, is temporary.

The Surface Pro is still a MOBILE device though it's a mini PC. The only time it is a primary replacement is when it is docked to all sorts of things: external inputs, multiple monitors, external storage.

The two main options seems to be $360 per year for Skydrive storage of 600GB, or a small 1 terabyte external hard drive with portable power supply, backed up on another hard drive at home. The total cost would be less than $360 I think. The drive should last at least five years. 512 GB installed flash storage would also help, but it's rather expensive. I'm not sure about the reliability of flash data storage over 5 years. Skydrive requires an internet connection, which could also be a factor in some situations.

As long as we know the storage options well enough, we can use the Surface Pro 2 with confidence.

There are plenty of USB-powered portable hard drives for travel use. I would not use SkyDrive or any cloud solution in this case, short of setting up your own server.

 

[starstreak]

I have the SP1 128GB. The main thing that annoyed me to no end was how hot the unit got just by doing normal things like using word, playing solitaire, reading websites. Does anybody know if the Haswell chipset in the new SP2 handle heat any better? The other deals with the pressure pen. I wish they would find a way to fix the corner tracking. And from what I hear, its a hardware thing, but still annoying.
I can't figure out besides annoying people, and forcing them to buy the 256GB version of the SP2 to get the 8GB of RAM. In this day and age, ram SHOULD be considered cheap enough to add 8GB to any system.

 

[deldalton]

I've just pre-ordered the SP2 64GB model.

I don't use a lot of storage (at the moment). That is, I use less than 60GB (including the OS installation) on my day job laptop and it's not much more on my desktop at home. And, I could easily remove at least a handful of unnecessary applications to free space. But, I do expect my storage requirements to expand exponentially. So, I did have a slight concern that the 64GB model wouldn't be sufficient (and the lack of an option to add 8GB RAM to this system upsets me!).

Fortunately, for me, I wouldn't need to access all of my data all of the time so a portable drive would meet my requirements for archiving data. And, if there is anything that I'm working on that I need direct access to I can utilise the SD slot and add an additional 64GB of storage space.

But, I appreciate that the OP needs access to his data all the time. My only recommendation, in this case, would be to take advantage of portable storage devices. Of course, it does mean having to plug it into the USB port (unless anyone is aware of a secure, portable wireless or Bluetooth enabled storage solution) making your SP2 slightly less portable.

 

[CrippsCorner]

You could also run a NAS drive at home with all your media and files on and access it from elsewhere if you know you're going to be at places that have wifi. Well, you could still tether but I'm sure it'd hurt your data allowance!

 

[deldalton]

You could also run a NAS drive at home with all your media and files on and access it from elsewhere if you know you're going to be at places that have wifi. Well, you could still tether but I'm sure it'd hurt your data allowance!

That's a very good point. If you know Wi-Fi is available (or you have an unlimited data allowance plan; although I would confirm the service provider's definition of "unlimited") you wouldn't have to worry about carrying any additional devices with you.

 

[ecbritz]

I have added the NAS drive suggestion to my list of options, thanks very much.

Starstreak has startled me (see his posting above). Is it true that one should buy the 256GB version of the SP2 with 8GB of RAM if you don't want the computer to overheat on handling heavy tasks? I don't play games but my son asked me if he would be able to play Battlefield 3 (some game like that). It sounds by what Starstreak wrote as if the less expensive SP2's will get boiling hot if my son tries to play such a game! I believe the 256GB version of the SP2 with 8GB of RAM costs about $1300?

 

[revmike]

All these questions are mute, until someone finally has a SP2 in their hands.