Seagate launches terabyte storage for the home
Company says $899 drive is perfect for small businesses and tech-savvy home users who want more space.
Seagate's Maxtor Shared Storage II, announced Monday, 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, Seagate said.
According to the company, the Shared Storage II system includes two USB (universal serial bus) ports to connect and share two USB printers or two additional external storage products, or one of each. It includes Maxtor Drag and Sort software for organizing 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 arranging and sorting more than one terabyte of data is too much to bear, Maxtor Shared Storage II comes with an EasyManage CD that provides desktop icons for easier organization, the company said.
The problem with storing and retrieving large volumes of data usually centers on issues surrounding the speed of the connections between the storage drive and the system using it. 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 Maxtor Shared Storage II 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 is scheduled to start shipping this month.
Colin Barker of ZDNet UK reported from London.