Data security and protection from drive crashes remain sore spots for business users, who find these issues far more critical to solve than do individuals. Without some kind of workable storage solutions, in fact, business simply can't proceed as usual. As a result, the storage solutions market continues to boom.

Available servers depend on the administrators who set them up and manage them to also establish and maintain RAID arrays. But this means buying and working with expensive disk controllers and drives, to enable hot-swapping of key components while disk arrays remain online and available. Also, it's impossible to change out multiple drives in succession or to add additional drives or arrays without incurring expensive and painful downtime. This makes other, more workable solutions incredibly attractive.

External hard drives offer stellar price/performance ratios, but also leave a lot to be desired when it comes to data security and protection. Any drive defect poses a high risk of rendering a drive unreadable, and its data unavailable. Though disk recovery services can usually rescue what's been lost, those costs can be considerable.

As an alternative, organizations can turn to classical methods for backup, such as tape drives or removable media like the Iomega REV. But most of these solutions either involve proprietary components (typically the storage media) or require specific backup software that may not offer all the features and functions an organization needs or wants.

To provide a different type of solution, Taiwanese manufacturer Accusys offers its Acuta 4S. This hard-disk based offering is designed to be easy to deploy, and uses conventional components and standard interfaces.