Hard drive maker EZQuest recently unveiled its Thunder line of pro hard drives, a product the company said was made specifically for the pro audio customer.
EZQuest showed off the Thunder line at Macworld Expo in January and was one of the only hard drive companies to show products at the NAMM music show. Company President, Ebrahim Zmehrir said he received a lot of interest from musicians and audio editors at NAMM as more people move to digital storage.
The Thunder drives will be available in 160GB to 500GB capacities and will have a quad interface. The hard drives will connect to your computer via 1 eSATA port, 2 FireWire 800 ports, 1 USB 2.0 port or 1 FireWire 400 front-access port.
The Thunder line is available as a RAID product, as well. The Thunder Pro Studio RAID and RAID+ triple interface offers 2 FireWire 800 ports, 1 USB 2.0 port and 1 FireWire 400 front-access port.
The high-end RAID offers many advanced features that pros will find very helpful, according to Zmehrir, including a MegLev ultra quite Smart Fan and thermostat to regulate drive temperature. The thermostat also includes a warning buzzer that will warn of overheating or fan failure before it poses a threat. Storage capacities included for RAID are 500GB to 1.0TB and RAID+ is 1.0TB to 2.0TB.
Going one step further and completing the Thunder product line is the Studio Rack 8, a 3U rackmount unit. The Studio 8 can be loaded with up to eight of the quad interface Thunder drives — when not used in the rack the drives can be used as standalone units on the desktop. The drives can be stripped as RAID 0, used as a mirrored RAID or serve as an archival device.
All drives will be available in May 2006.