News: Computer Hardware for Small Business

Maxtor's 1 TB RAID 0 or 500 GB RAID 1 external hard drive

High-speed, high capacity vs high reliability, lower capacity

by Keith R. Wheeler

3/12/2006

The growing popularity of external hard drives as a backup tool has reached a new level of sophistication. Maxtor is now offering a model which in recent years would have been the envy of every network server storage system. The Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo comes in a couple of flavors. The most exciting options feature of choice of RAID, redundant array of inexpensive (also independent) disks. There are many different versions of RAID some requiring several separate drives, but Maxtor offers either RAID 0 or RAID 1 since there are only two drives inside the OneTouch III Turbo. RAID 0, also called striping since it uses a technique which allows both drives to be writing or reading different files or blocks at the same time, is meant to improve performance. In this case RAID doesn’t really mean redundant since there is no data redundancy, just an effort at greater read and write speeds. With two 500 GB drives in the case, the usable storage capacity becomes 1 TB (terabyte). In order to get data redundancy using two drives, RAID 1 implements a mirroring concept to make an exact data copy on both drives. In this case, reliability is improved by having all data in two separate data storage devices. Writing to the mirrored set runs at roughly the same performance as a single disk. However, RAID 1 does get a performance boost when reading since it can read different blocks simultaneously due to its mirrored status. Naturally, with both 500 GB drives being used to store the same data, the storage capacity is limited to 500 GB. Aside from the RAID explanation, Maxtor is offering a higher level of performance and reliability for external storage devices. This is not being portrayed as a network attached storage (NAS) device since it has no direct network connection. Communication between the drives and the PC is handled by either, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, or USB 2.0. Maxtor supplies EMC’s Retrospect backup software to be used with its OneTouch button to initiate the backup process. With a street price tag in the neighborhood of $800+, the OneTouch III Turbo is aimed to be a favorite of the video editing professional crowd due to their high performance and substantial storage demands. Since small businesses are urged to employ a backup concept which includes offsite media storage, the OneTouch III Turbo isn’t a complete backup solution (unless one is purchases multiple drives and is willing to lug the 5.8 pound device home every night). This very impressive drive system from Maxtor should be considered a strong component of a comprehensive backup strategy.