Laptop Thoughts: CES 2011: Seagate's 'Data 'Lunchbox' Prototype Hard Drive

While at CES 2011, one of the more interesting things I saw was a Seagate product that's in the prototype phase - it's affectionately called the "Data Lunchbox" product. In short, it's two 7mm Seagate Momentus hard drives (320 GB or 500 GB capacity) in a single external USB 3.0 drive chassis, along with a RAID controller chip. When configured in RAID 0 for speed, the product - remember it's still in the prototype stage - can hit 235 MB/s read and 228 MB/s write speeds. That out-guns the Intel SSD they were benchmarking it against, which hit 203 MB/s read and 154 MB/s write speeds. If you've ever needed to move big files in a hurry, you'd appreciate that level of speed. Alternatively, the product can be configured for RAID 1, which would mean as you put data onto it, you'll have a duplicate of every file.

What's particularly exciting to me about this product is that it's exactly what I've wanted for quite a while - when I travel and I shoot photos and HD video, hard drive space runs out quick...especially when I only have a 128 GB SSD in my laptop. The ability to put that media content on an external drive, and have it backed up to a second disk, would be fantastic. Add in Seagate's GoFlex technology - which allows you to swap out different cables for connectivity - and you have a solution that I think a lot of photographers and videographers would be excited to purchase.

Want to see this product come to market? Send a message to @seagate on Twitter and tell them that you want to see the Data Lunchbox product get released. Let's make this happen!