External storage is the Rubbermaid of the digital content world
Sales for external drives should grow over the next 12 months.
How, you might ask, can any consumer electronics category expect growth this year, given economic uncertainties and a consumer spending freeze? It’s not because they look cool or have new features:
Consumers will delay new PC purchases.
Consumers will continue to buy and create new content (DVDs and iTunes gift certificates will be low-cost but still fun gifts for recession-weary givers).
Consumers will run out of space on their computers.
Consumers can now get a roomy external drive for less than $100.
Personal content growth is being driven by trends that are mostly recession-proof. External drives are the electronic equivalent of the storage containers we all regularly buy when our physical stuff overflows at home.
External storage will shift from a “that’s cool” accessory to a “keep my stuff organized” staple for many consumers.
Seagate’s dockable drive has spawned a new storage category: desktop companion
The Seagate FreeAgent Go is our favorite portable hard drive to date and takes our award for Editors’ Choice. The drive is well designed and fast, and you won’t find a better value for the price.
CNET’s review and video names the Go as their biggest bang for the buck. For me, the dock rocks. It gives the drive a bimodal function: mobile storage (the thinnest drive on the planet) and a desktop drive (up to 500GB – more than enough to act as my PC’s backup drive).
Computerworld reviewed the new Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme drive. They liked it well enough, but what turned their heads was the extreme speed of the eSATA port – more than twice as fast as their Firewire 400 test results.
Future-proof your next PC
eSATA stands for “External SATA”. This relatively new standard brings the performance of SATA – the internal PC hard drive interface - out of the box. eSATA connectivity is worth watching for on your next PC, as it will be increasingly available on external drives.
I added up all the data storage in my home office, just for kicks: 652 gigabytes. Two thirds is disk-based, most of the other third is optical.
Pretty pedestrian quantities - I mostly work out of a Seagate office, so our home office is literally that.
I’m satisfied for now with my manual disaster recovery system – although I don’t rotate my offsite backups nearly often enough. As I download more video, I’m considering a move to online backup to complement my backup drive.
How much storage is in your home office? I’m sure you can top mine.
Content comes first, opening up new uses and usefulness
Seagate announced Maxtor CentralAxis today, a really cool New Thing in home storage. Until now, external storage devices have mostly been storage add-ons for a PC. Even the NAS devices out there have focused on providing a “PC drive for the home”. It’s shareable storage, but shackled to the PC model.
CentralAxis puts the content first, rather than the PC. That opens up uses that until now have been reserved for the techies among us:
OS-independent content sharing. Content doesn’t have to decide to be Windows or Mac OS X, and can be used by either one.
File sharing with DLNA-compliant devices like Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 systems. Easily watch videos and view photos on TV screens instead of a PC.
Access content directly via the web. CentralAxis allows this with a simple username and password, without going through a PC or compromising a network firewall.
CentralAxis does all the “home storage” basics as well: 1 TB capacity, centralized backups from PCs on the network, etc. But it’s the new approach to content that makes it a game changer.
Where to look when times are tough? Two words: SMB storage. Why?
SMB tech spending remains strong. VARBusiness’ Robert C. DeMarzo quotes Goldman Sachs: “…SMB spending will not be impacted by economic slowing to the same degree as large corporations…”
Storage continues to expand in all segments driven by the digital explosion we’ve all seen. I’ve posted on this many times because it just keeps coming up as a major, persistent trend.
Take advantage of hungry vendors
So check in with your favorite SMB customers today and find a way to meet a few more! Don’t think that the storage vendors won’t help you, either. For example, here’s a current offer in the States and Canada on Seagate external storage , one of the hottest and easiest sells for SOHO and small business storage.
Help your customers get control while helping yourself!
As always, comments are welcome. Do you see your SMB business remaining strong? What’s driving external storage sales most – backup or application storage?
