I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Asus is hot. At CES they are set to unveil their latest offering: the world’s first laptop with a terabyte of storage. They’re going to use two of the brand-new Hitachi 500-GB drives to make worrying about space a thing of the past — or at least for those of us without 4,000 gigs of porn like some of my friends.
They’re also offering it in both RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations, which would be handy for power users editing hi-def video or some such. The screen will be 17 inches, with an impressive resolution of 1920×1200, so you won’t be downrezzing that 1080p video. Sounds pretty awesome, but it also sounds pretty expensive. We’ll have more info once we see it down in Vegas.
Asus unveils terabyte laptop [Infoworld]
I love Asus, but this thing is a disaster waiting to happen for anyone who uses the RAID 0 configuration. Haven’t they learned from the horrible RAID 0 external hard drive setups that it doesn’t belong in consumer-level products? They fail more often than a single hard-drive setup, and when they do there is no chance of data recovery. Let’s not even get into the battery life ramifications, unless this thing eats up two of those as well…
More on why RAID 0 external hard drives are awful:
http://www.devindra.org/tech/2007/07/18/why-you-should-never-buy-dual-drive-raid-0-external-hard-drives/
The RAID 1 functionality is sort of nice, granted. Still, backing up on a laptop is always done better with an external drive. It may not be as convenient, but it’s helpful to have your data sources in separate locations.