Seagate unleashes home terabyte

The price of data storage is dropping all the time -- and just to prove it, Seagate Technology has announced a new one-terabyte drive for $899 (£490) aimed at small businesses and tech-savvy home users.

Seagate's Maxtor Shared Storage II, announced on 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 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 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 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 organisation, the company said.

The problem with storing and retrieving large volumes of data usually centres 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 it supports up to ten 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.