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.

This news article was written on October 16, 2005, quoting Maxtor.