[MW Forums]

Seagate has announced their new Maxtor Shared Storage II network attached storage system, available in 1 terabyte capacity. more

[macnews]

This sounds very interesting. Price is a bit high for most home users but with more and more things becoming stored on our personal computers I see the need for solutions like this. Kind of like a server-in-a-box solution simplified for home use.
My only issue with stuff like this is how long will it last and be reliable? I don't want to lose digital files of my children growing up, music I paid for, home documents, etc to go up in smoke. A file system like this is basically a back up and these back ups need to be more reliable than some of their current hard drive offerings. I have had several external hard drives and basically try to replace them every 2-3 years before they die on me. It just gets expensive and at this price and with the increasing need for this kind of storage space (digital movie files, photos and music) it isn't something you can or should have to expect to replace every 2/3 years.

[Peter Cohen]

It may not be something you expect to replace every few years, but hard disks are mechanical devices, and are going to wear out eventually. I've already had to replace the hard disks in my PowerBook G4 and my Power Mac G4. Amazingly, my Quantum SnapServer, which is about as old as the Power Mac, is still going strong (though it's much noisier than it used to be).
Fortunately, I think that Seagate/Maxtor has thought about this with the design of the MSS II -- it features two USB ports, so you could easily connect another system to back this one up to; you can also use RAID Level 1 to "mirror" the two disk contents to each other. This will halve your available storage capacity from 1TB to 500GB, but it would give you redundancy in the event one mechanism fails.

[Nobody]

I am curious why they did not release a 750 x 2 = 1.5 TB. In fact. Seagate makes the 750 GB (single 3.5-inch drive). I think it may be because the 750 GB models gets too --and I mean TOO, TOO, TOO-- hot. On the other hand, 1 TB single drives are around the corner by Hitachi and likely by Seagate using perpendicular technology (already available on the 750 GB nodel). So, the single-drive-TB era is about to start...

[Nobody]

So, $900 for this drive. LaCie has a similar one for just 699 (save $200):
http://www.lacie.com...t.htm?pid=10188
Amazing, because LaCie buys the mechanisms from Seagate and other vendors.

[Nobody]

And for $29 extra ($729) get a real 1 TB disk with Triple interface with FireWire 800 (2 ports), FireWire 400 and USB 2:
http://www.lacie.com...t.htm?pid=10128
Definitely, the Seagate offering is not so good after all!

[Peter Cohen]

MacworldUser -- neither of the LaCie devices you posted links to are network attached storage systems. Both of them are intended as large desktop drives; they feature USB 2.0 only. They don't have Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and they don't have the software that this device comes with, either.
LaCie does offer an Ethernet Disk, with some similar capabilities to the Maxtor offering, in a 1TB capacity for $799. It's considerably larger, however, designed to be rack mounted, and lacks the UPnP streaming media capability and other features of Maxtor's product.

[tomtom]

At this moment in time, that is.

[Nobody]

Peter,
Thanks for the clarifications!
:-)

[mr_rsu]

What's the point of buying and keeping a 1 TB drive with ancient technological mechanism when the new wave of the future is the flash-memory storage drive with up to 1 TB around the corner in few years?

[jmincey]

"What's the point of buying and keeping a 1 TB drive with ancient technological mechanism when the new wave of the future is the flash-memory storage drive with up to 1 TB around the corner in few years? "
Answer: Because some organizations and companies cannot wait "a few years" to upgrade their storage.

[Nobody]

1 TB flash memory? --Really?
When?
Which read/write speed?
How much?
How big in size?

[SGP_MacUser]

1 Terabyte is a large capacity by today's standard.
Question: Why use USB instead of Firewire for a 1 Terabyte capacity?
Assumption: I assume that a 1 Terabyte users' would have lots of data to backup/save. For such users, a Firewire would match such users' demands instead of USB.

[heisetax]

Cost & Time Frame. In a few year hard drives will be Multi-TB to keep up with the current storage requirements.
Bill the TaxMan