Verbatim Unveils Quad-Interface Desktop Hard Drives

By Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek, January 5, 2009, 7:00 AM

Hardware manufacturer Verbatim Americas on Friday launched two external, quad-interface desktop hard-disk drives.

The drives, one 500 GB and the other 1 TB, offer Mac and PC users "plug-and-play" support for the leading interfaces, USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA II, the company said. The drives are aimed at digital content professionals, consumers, and small businesses looking to store audio, video, photos, and graphics files.

"Our new 500-GB and 1-TB Desktop HDDs offer many advantages for editing and storing high-density applications, compared to using two or three smaller HDDs," Charles Klinker, director of marketing for Verbatim, said in a statement.

The 3.5-inch drives feature spindle speed at 7,200 revolutions per minute and 32 MB of cache memory. The drives are housed in a black aluminum case, weigh 3.3 pounds, and measure roughly 9 inches by 6 inches by 1.5 inches.The latest products' multi-interface support simplifies file sharing for designers collaborating on projects from different systems. The bus-powered drives have transfer speeds of up to 50 MBps for FireWire 400 connections, up to 100 MBps for FireWire 800, and up to 3 GBps for eSATA II.

The drives also include Nero's BackItUp 2 Essentials software for automatic backup for Windows systems.

The hard drives support Windows 2000, XP, or Vista, and Mac OS X 10.1 or higher. The products, which come with a three-year warranty, have a manufacturer suggested retail price of $180 for the 500-GB model and $250 for 1-TB version. The drives include cables for the four supported interfaces.

Verbatim also offers hard drives with only USB interfaces, as well as products with USB/FireWire and USB/eSATA interfaces.Verbatim Corp. Inc.