Monday, November 28, 2005

Terabyte home storage

Iomega announced the release of their Desktop Hard Drive XL Series, a small form factor drive enclosure for four hard drives, with a storage capacity of 1 Terabyte. The new device touts 4 250GB SATA drives internally, with a default configuration of RAID-0 for 1TB of fast storage. It connects via Firewire 800/400 or USB 2.0/1.1, although to really make any good use of the available transfer speed, Firewire 800 is your only option. USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 are both limited to a transfer rate that is well under what a single modern HDD can achieve. The device is pretty small, at 6.42x7.99x12.52 inches, making it easy to put anywhere as an addon storage device or a backup unit. It joins a growing crowd of other high-capacity multi-drive portable storage devices, and of course is geared primarily towards home theater and video enthusiasts, as well as home file storage.

"Projects like video editing push the limits of today's storage drives, particularly as the market shifts towards high-definition video, so Iomega created the XL Series to erase the bottleneck that a single drive represents in terms of power and performance," said Lee Williams, Vice President, Product Generation, Iomega Corporation. "Whether it's editing and managing digital video, photographs, music or work files, the Iomega XL Series hard drive takes advantage of today's fastest interfaces and most advanced storage technologies to deliver a uniquely powerful device for the next generation of applications."

It is already available, retailing at around $900. It lists compatibility with Windows 2000, Windows XP and Mac OS 10.1, and features disk imaging and archiving software as well as compression.

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