Enhanced Security Makes Seagate Portable Hard Drive a Winner

The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas always dazzles with an assortment of cutting-edge products and cool technologies, but one announcement that caught my eye this morning, while not earthshaking, does portend good things for data transfer in insurance and other businesses.

At CES, Seagate unveiled the BlackArmor PS110 USB 3.0 portable external hard drive performance kit for notebook computers. This all-in-one USB 3.0 toolkit packages a 500GB 7200RPM 2.5–inch portable hard drive, power cable and PC express card, to deliver data transfer speeds up to three-times faster than its USB 2.0 predecessor, making it “one of the fastest portable hard drives available,” the company said.

According to Seagate, the new super speed USB 3.0 interface allows easy transfer of large files to and from the external drive at sustained transfer rates of 100MB/s. The company added that a 25GB file, for example, could be transferred in only four minutes, versus the 14 minutes it would take using a traditional USB 2.0 drive.

This is certainly good news for insurance workers who must often deal with voluminous files that include digital images of accident scenes, wrecked vehicles and even disaster settings. When time is of the essence, worker productivity is certainly enhanced by faster transfer and processing, especially where multiple claims or incidents are concerned. The end result is better customer service, higher customer satisfaction and perhaps a higher customer retention rate.

But—as those smarmy TV pitchmen like to say—that’s not all. Each drive ships with the Acronis business-grade backup suite, an automated full-system backup, as well as SafetyDrill+ software, a bare metal recovery feature that is Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 compatible.

Why is that important? The reason is that as systems become faster, bad things (as well as good) can happen at a faster rate—perhaps so fast that they fly under our particular security radar. How refreshing to see a product that delivers not only speed and efficiency, but serious attention to security risks.

Vendors, take note. This kind of marketing is where it’s at in an increasingly dangerous and unstable Internet and systems environment. To put it in real world terms, I would love my taxi driver to blow past the speed limit when I’m late getting to the airport, but it would also make me feel a lot better if said driver had some training in driving at what might normally be an unsafe speed. That will probably never happen with taxi drivers, but it can be a reality with new, faster technology products.

Seagate said The BlackArmor PS110 USB 3.0 performance kit contains all that is needed to upgrade a laptop to take advantage of USB 3.0 speeds. It is also backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and can be purchased from Seagate.com for a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $179.99.

Faster, yet safer. What a concept!