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Friday January 4, 2008
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Asus will launch two new "M" series notebooks, the M50 and the M70, at the Consumer Electronics Show this week, each containing a pair of Hitachi Travelstar 5K500 disk drives. Prices and other configurations weren't available.
It's not quite clear whether the notebook will actually contain a terabyte of storage, or whether the two 500-Gbyte drives will be aligned in a RAID 1 (mirrored) array that will make available to the user just 500 Gbytes of storage.
Some of you may differ with me, but I'd consider a redundant 500-Gbyte hard drive, well, redundant. RAID is a wonderful thing, and having had several disk drives crash on me over the years, I know that backup is essential. I'm just not sure whether redundant drives in a weight-, power-, and cost-sensitive notebook is actually the right decision, or whether a USB drive or offline backup would be a better option. It'll be up to the customer, apparently.
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January 4, 2008 9:20 AM
Redundant drives would be quite useless : they will be the same model, made at the same time. They'll work exactly the same way, and they have a good probability to crash at the same time too.
Go for an external one you keep in a safe place, that would be my advice ;)
January 5, 2008 12:53 AM
What are you talking about? Two drives are not more likely to *crash* at the same time simply because they are made at the same time.
Note, though, that these 500GB drives are slightly bigger than you're typical 2.5 inch drive, thus the new ASUS notebook platform.