A Terabyte for Your Desktop

Maxtor’s new external drive places a terabyte of storage space on your desktop — that’s 1000 gigabytes of digital real estate ready to house your business data, MP3s, digital images, video and just about any other electronic file you might have. But seriously, folks, who needs this kind of space? After all, it’s not an Ethernet networked drive that multiple employees can access and share; it’s designed to plug in to one PC or Mac.

Actually, a lot of independent contractors and sole proprietors could benefit. The amount of data small business has to retain nearly doubles every year, and it’s even worse for people in financial, medical and other industries subject to federal compliance regulations that require them to save every e-mail, file and instant messages they generate. Also, creative professionals who edit huge video files could benefit from both the drive’s speed and the capacity.

Beyond Storage
Besides being a giant repository for all things digital, it seems that Maxtor’s imbued the OneTouch III with several features designed to improve data protection — an issue that should be at the top of every small-business owner’s mind.

According to Ben Castro, a senior product manager at Maxtor, the OneTouch III is the first consumer storage product that lets you set up the drive in either RAID 0 or RAID 1. “RAID 0 and 1 offer two distinct advantages. The OneTouch III consists of two 7,200 rpm, 16MB cache SATA hard drives inside the casing, and RAID 0 stripes your data across both drives,” said Castro. “The advantage of a RAID 0 configuration is speed. You get the high performance required for multiple-video streaming without dropping frames, which is what you need to edit video.”








Maxtor OneTouch III, T                                        urbo Edition
Big Byte — Maxtor’s OneTouch III holds up to one terabyte of data on your desktop.

“The advantage of RAID 1 is that it mirrors your data across the two drives,” Castro continued. “It protects critical data by making an exact copy on the other drive. If one of the drives should fail, you can recover your data from its functioning twin.” Castro said this feature could be especially helpful for small businesses that don’t regularly backup their data.

More Data Protection
The OneTouch III has the same data backup and restore capabilities as the OneTouch II. Features include:



  • Backup ready upon installation
  • Automated backup schedule (default)
  • Automatically saves historical file versions
  • Automatically manages backup storage
  • Wizard interface to restore files, folders or a complete system
  • Recover a complete system to a specific point in time

The drive’s system rollback capability is a PC-only feature designed for times when your system performance starts to decline, either from a virus infection, registry errors or spyware infestation. It lets you roll your PC’s settings back to a time before the trouble started. Castro said the roll back changes program and operating system settings but the documents and files you create remain unchanged.

Technical Details
The Maxtor OneTouch III, Turbo Edition offers three connection interfaces: FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. The device contains two 7,200 rpm 16MB cache SATA drives and works with MS Windows XP, MS Windows 2000 and Mac OS 10.2.8 and higher.

Pricing and Availability
This product will be available starting in December 2005.



  • Maxtor OneTouch III, one terabyte capacity: $899.95 MSRP
  • Maxtor OneTouch III, 600GB capacity: $549.95 MSRP

Lauren Simonds is the managing editor of SmallBusinessComputing.com





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