Meet the Maxtor Personal Storage 3200. It’s a cheap, quick, and dirty way to add storage to your PC, and it’s ilk is becoming the surprise hit of the holiday season, lifting the stock of Seagate and Western Digital, and making Hitachi, LaCie and others fight for a piece of the market.
I’ve bought two 3200’s and a Western Digital MyBook (500 GB each) over the last 9 months, adding 1.5 TB to my home environment without opening a computer case or spending a fortune. The MyBook (which has eSATA) is connected to the Series 3 TiVo, one of the 3200’s is connected to my NSLU2 for home server duty, and the other is doing backup duty.
And, yeah, the most recent 3200 had that Chinese virus problem, but Avira’s AntiVir blocked it and a quick reformat wiped it clean… It’s kind of amusing to be personally affected by a tech meme, isn’t it?
With the advent of “quick enough” USB 2.0 and blazing fast eSATA, I wouldn’t be surprised if these external drives change the face of the PC. I already know of a few folks who have switched to the Mac Mini and are hanging these drives outside instead of buying a big empty case to house internal storage. And the laptop market is booming, threatening to replace the traditional desktop PC. Perhaps the idea of a Lego brick PC wasn’t a bad one after all – it was just waiting for USB to ramp up the speed…
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