1.6TB net drive for homes and offices

Intel has launched a network-attached storage unit with a capacity of up to 1.6TB, with a price and features that could find a market in homes and businesses.

The SS4000E takes four hot-swappable hard disks of any capacity between 80GB and 400GB, and will cost around a euro (68p) per gigabyte – so a 1TB drive will cost around £680. But the device will only be sold through resellers, probably rebranded.

It supports Raid levels 10, 5 and 1, though Dennis Stutterheim, product manager for Europe, said a simple GUI allows users to set it up for speed, maximum capacity, or failsafe data security even if they know nothing about Raid.

‘You can put it off site, so you have a backup even if your place burns down,’ Stutterheim said.

The box can act as a file server or media streamer, making it suitable as a repository for home video, TV recordings and family photographs. It will also mirror a disk on a laptop or desktop, or perform scheduled backups, and two USB2 ports allow USB drives to be shared across the network.

Clive Longbottom, service director of analysts Quocirca, liked the SS4000E so much that he bought one when Intel showed it off at a Netevents forum in Darmisch.