Maxtor today unveiled its new OneTouch III "Turbo Edition" external drives at the Digital Life Expo in New York. The device comes with with RAID 0/1 and file synchronization capability and extends the consumer OneTouch line of drives into high-end consumer and professional markets.

The OneTouch III will be offered in 600 GByte and 1 TByte capacity versions and will actually contain two individual Maxtor harddrives in one case. The devices support USB2.0, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 connections and enable the user to protect data by using either RAID 0 striping or RAID 1 mirroring. Striping allows for faster read and write access by splitting up the reads and writes to both drives, while mirroring puts an exact copy on the drives. With mirroring, no data is lost if one drive fails, but the downside is that effective storage capacity is cut in half.

Maxtor OneTouch III

Three new features will be added to set the OneTouchIII apart from its competition and the older OneTouchII drives. A "Sync" feature, will synchronizes files between two or more systems. Maxtor will also offer a system rollback function that will bring a PC back from a spyware or virus infection and "DriveLock" will password protect the drive. According to Maxtor, contents of the drives cannot be accessed with a password, even if they are removed from the housing.

Maxtor's closest competitors, Seagate and Western Digital also have external drive solutions, but they currently max out at 500 GByte and do not have on-drive password protection. LaCie, known for their high-end desktop storage products, currently offers a 2 TByte "Bigger Disk Extreme' for $2000.

The Maxtor One Touch III, Turbo Edition will be available in early December and will cost $550 as a 600 GByte model and $900 in the 1 TByte configuration.