Care For a Little RAID?
By Harry McCracken | Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Last Gadget Standing nominee: Newer Technology Guardian MAXimus Mini
Price: starts at $229.99
Newer Technology’s Guardian MAXimus Mini is an external RAID (0 and 1) storage systen that protects your data by writing it to two drives. Nothing particularly noteworthy about that. But as the “Mini” in its name suggests, it’s small–really small, as you can see by the photo to the right. It also draws its power from its USB FireWire connection, making it truly mobile. It’s meant for Mac users but can be reformatted to work with any OS.
The MAXimus holds two 2.5 drives; a version with two 5400rpm 500GB disks costs $229.99, and there are higher capacity and 7200rpm options. But I’m fascinated by its highest-end versions, which use solid-state disks instead of spinning platters. A model with two 400GB SSDs costs $3299.99. I won’t be buying it, but I think it’s kind of neat it exists. (And I wonder how long it’ll be until falling flash prices make it affordable.)
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October 28th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
I won't run out and buy the $3300 model even after I win the lottery Saturday. SSDs are already invading the data center, with TCO being competitive. But Newer isn't in that market as far as I know.
October 29th, 2010 at 5:16 am
cool beans.. I'm buying one this weekend
October 29th, 2010 at 8:54 am
I had a feeling that the market would create devices like this just after I bought a Mini tower RAID drive set up. I did this to remove the clutter that 3 One Terabyte USB drives creates. Now I can have upto 4/8 Terabyte of movies for my PC or my media player to send to my HDTV.
But these little RAID drives will be great for hooking to my HD Dish system. And almost making it impossible to lose a movie you recorded. The 400Gig units will add an additional 40 to 60 HD movies that can be stored on my Dish 722k system. The only draw back is Dish uses there own data format for the drives it stores movies on so the drives will only plug into Dish boxes until you format the drives again. But it costs less than going out and buying Blue Ray copies of the movies.