Verbatim launches a quad interface external hard drive

January 6, 5:37 PMGadgets ExaminerDan Appleman

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Gadgets Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

New quad interface drive from Verbatim

External hard drives have become indispensible as backup devices and are an inexpensive way to add capacity to a system. Verbatim’s new line of quad interface hard drives are being announced at CES, and support USB, Firewire 400, Firewire 800 and eSata interfaces, making them compatible with virtually any system.

The drives are promoted as having massive storage capacities, high performance and ultra reliability. Let’s consider those claims.

Yes, they have massive storage capacity – a terabyte is enough space to hold some 500 feature movies. The drives they are using are high performance, and the availability of the higher speed interfaces (Firewire 800 and eSata) allows you to take best advantages of them. But what about reliability?

The key factor for reliability of an external drive is choice of drive and how well the case cools. Assuming Verbatim chose their drive based on anticipated reliability, the good news is they also put a fan in the case, so the drive should run cool.

But even with the cooling, will the drives be “ultra-reliable”?

No

Hard drives fail.

Sooner or later, they almost all fail.

So take Verbatim’s claim of “ultra-reliability” with a grain of salt, and remember that ultra-reliability is not perfect reliability. If you put anything critical on this, or any other external drive, be sure to back it up.

For added reliability, consider a Network Attached Storage (NAS) system that uses RAID (Redundant array of inexpensive disks). These can be configured to store all information on two drives at once, so if one fails, the other preserves the data.