The Hindu : National : Now, you are just a touch away from a terabyte

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Sunday, Jun 01, 2008
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Now, you are just a touch away from a terabyte

Anand Parthasarathy

The Maxtor OneTouch external disk can back up 1000 GB of data

— Photo: Special Arrangement

Jumbo storage: Maxtor’s OneTouch 4 Plus.

Bangalore: With average personal computers coming with hard disk storage of around 160 gigabytes (GB), a terabyte or 1000 GB, we might think, is something only large enterprises should be interested in. And we would be wrong. Consider the explosion in digital content available to lay users: movies run to a couple of GB each... and film fans tend to accumulate hundreds of them. Their size will go up nearly three fold once the new high definition formats become more common. Digital cameras and movie handycams allow us to click a thousand pictures or a few hundred minutes of video, on a single memory card.

The challenge is: How and where do we safely store or archive all this precious stuff?

So, it is good news that the first one-terabyte portable external disk device tailored for the consumer market, reaches India this week.

The Maxtor OneTouch 4 (1TB) comes from disk storage leaders Seagate and clearly they had lay users in mind, when designing this starkly simple-looking product.

Like a paperweight

It sits alongside the PC like a sleek, but oversized 1-kg aluminium paperweight. All its sockets, which allow you to link to a PC using a USB connector (or a Firewire if you are a Macintosh user), are at the back.

But connect it to your computer — and the OneTouch software kicks in to reduce most operations to a mouse click or two…like downloading and backing up the various disk partitions of your PC, or even retaining an exact mirror image of all the files on your desktop or laptop, using the “SafetyDrill” Recovery CD provided.

Data protection utility

The Hindu received for review, one of the first units to reach India and its ease of use shows that it is seemingly ‘made for dummies.’ However, its pre-settable back-up and data protection utility (using state-of-the-art 256 bit encryption) will appeal to many small and medium-sized businesses.

The asking price for the 1TB model is Rs. 14,000, though you can also buy lesser-capacity units starting at Rs. 5,200 for 250 GB, if a terabyte is still too much for your current storage and back-up needs. But be warned, if 1 TB seems like infinity now, it may be barely adequate next year! That’s how fast the consumer appetite for storage is growing.

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