Seagate launches terabyte storage for the home
The price of data storage is dropping all the time and, just to prove it, Seagate announced a new drive on Tuesday aimed at small businesses and what it dubbed "family technology officers" — tech-savvy home users. The new drive will cost only $899 (£486), yet offers one whole terabyte of data storage.
The 1TB Seagate's Maxtor Shared Storage II comes in a dual-drive configuration with two 500GB drives. This configuration can be set up for Raid 1 (disk mirroring), the simplest form of protection for disk drives as all data is backed up on a second drive immediately.
According to the company, the Shared Storage II system includes two USB ports to connect and share two USB printers or two additional external storage solutions, or one of each. It includes Maxtor Drag and Sort software for organising files, which can identify and sort a range of different file types and put them in specific music, photo, movie, Web, software or documents folders.
But if the problems of arranging and sorting more than one terabyte of data is too much to bear, the Maxtor Shared Storage II comes with an EasyManage CD which provides desktop icons to make it easier to organise our lives.
The problems with large storing and retrieving large volumes of data usually centre on issues around the speed of the connections between the storage drive and the system using it. In this case, Seagate has assumed that most people will use the drive with more than one PC or other device, and so support up to 10 connections. To keep things moving, the company has what it calls a new high-speed Gigabit Ethernet connection.
A built-in IT administrator called SimpleView provides detailed information on backup and storage status at a glance, Seagate said.
Users can automatically copy content stored on the Maxtor Shared Storage II solution by scheduling an additional backup to a connected Maxtor OneTouch or Seagate Pushbutton USB external storage system, for off-site data rotation.
Seagate's Maxtor Shared Storage II solution is scheduled to start shipping this month. UK pricing was not immediately available.