SimpleTech Pushes External Drives to 3TB

The company's Duo Pro drives stack two 1.5TB drives for up to 3TB of total storage, or half in a redundant RAID array that keeps mirror images of data on both drives.

Notebook users looking for a little extra storage will find plenty with SimpleTech’s giant new Pro 1.5TB and Duo Pro 3TB external drives, announced on Monday. Both offer capacious internals, four different ways to connect, andMac-styled exteriors.

The single-drive Pro 1.5TB can be can connected with eSATA, Firewire 800, Firewire 400, or USB 2.0, giving it theoretical operating speeds of up to 3 gigabits per second when connected in an eSATA configuration. The larger Duo Pro 3TB drive doubles up on 1.5TB drives, giving it twice the storage, as well as RAID options. It can either be set to RAID 0 to write faster and make use of the whole 3TB, or RAID 1 for redundancy, ensuring all data is copied on both disks in case one fails.

The entire Pro and Duo Pro lines come with 2GB of free online backup from SimpleTech’s parent company Fabrik, and the option of purchasing unlimited remote backup space for $5 a month.

Although SimpleTech has announced that both drives will go on sale in the fourth quarter, pricing hasn’t been set for either drive. The 2TB version of the Pro Duo currently retails for $550 and the 1TB version of the Pro goes for $260.