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Monday 23 October 2017

External storage with a display

I was thinking about all the games I have moved on to an external hard drive to free up space on the internal storage of my Xbox One. That led me on to think about how best to keep track of what's on a disk that is not connected to a machine.


At the moment I only have one external drive for the Xbox but lots of similar drives with other things on. When those drives are in a cupboard, unused, I need to know which of the drives has what on it. It would be handy to have a tidy way to display what games are on what external storage device that could be easily changed. At the moment I stick a bit of tape on the drive and hand write a list.


With the display technology used on things like the Amazon Kindle, where no power is needed to maintain the image, it would be possible to have an easy to read and easy to update visible list. Easier to change than crossing out and writing a new name on a paper list on the outside.

I had a search and was surprised that no one had produced one. The nearest I could find was an LCD touch panel for security.


The same could be applied to USB keys, perhaps with only room for a title. The technology can't be that difficult because they are already USB as are external hard drives. Adding a completely separate board to update the display would just show two USB devices when it is plugged in.  Even easier would be to get the device to read a text file with a known name and use the contents of that for the display on the outside.

With so much data that needs backing up hopefully this idea will get picked up by someone.

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