NAS Devices:

Seagate's Black Armor 440 will support up to four hard drives, totaling 8TB of data. This NAS (Network Attached Storage) device is designed with the end user in mind. Each of the drives is hot swappable, plus most of the device is user replaceable. If something happens to the power supply or the internal fan, Seagate has made it so the end user can easily replace these. Finally, if 8TB of storage is not enough, you can get additional Black Armor 440 NAS devices and daisy chain them together. It will be interesting to see how many you can daisy chain together, personnel on hand was not aware of a limitation.



If a NAS with four hard drives is too much for you, Seagate does offer smaller NAS devices. The Black Armor NAS 220 and NAS 120 will support two hard drives and one hard drive, respectively. This will allow the user to choose which Black Armor device will best suit their needs / budget.



USB 3.0

Everybody wants their external hard drives to go faster, and USB 3.0 is expected to greatly increase the speed of external hard drives. Seagate's first USB 3.0 drive is the Black Armor PS110 kit, which not only includes the drive, but also a USB 3.0 express card to give your laptop the needed compatibility. Of course power is needed, and a USB 2.0 port can be used to provide this power.



While USB 3.0 is expected to provide a massive speed boost, what we see in the real world is usually different. Seagate was using a common benchmark that many of us are familiar with, CrystalDiskMark 2.2. The image below shows the speed difference between USB 3.0 (on the left) and USB 2.0 (on the right). While this shows only 3x the difference in speed, when USB 3.0 is integrated on the motherboard they expect to see a much larger difference in speed.



To show what they expect to see when USB 3.0 is integrated on the motherboard, Seagate also had a demonstration of a SATA hard drive compared to a USB 3.0 drive; however this was in a RAID 0 configuration with 2 hard drives. The difference in speed here is much greater than the previous benchmark. With the USB 3.0 drive coming around 4.5x the speed of USB 2.0, and faster than the internal hard drive (which I felt was slow, perhaps it was only running as SATA 1, not SATA 2).



For those wondering what USB 3.0 will do for file transfers, Seagate provided an overview of what they expect.

Transferring a 6GB movie, USB 2.0 takes approximately 3.3 minutes. USB 3.0 should take about 1 minute (3x faster)!

Look for a review from Bigbruin.com on the Black Armor USB 3.0 PS110 some time soon. The PS110 is currently available with a suggested retail price of $179.99, which is a little expensive for a 500GB external hard drive, however you do get the USB 3.0 ExpressCard, and currently it is meant for those wanting the fastest speed possible.