Zetera, a start-up based in Irvine, California, outlined its vision for "Personal Network Drives" that will be needed in home multimedia networks to meet the storage needs of the digital lifestyle. As the digital revolution continues, Zetera believes storage will take center stage. With a single MP3-encoded song occupying about 4 Megabytes (MB) and a typical DVD-video occupying almost 5 Gigabytes (GB), consumers require more storage than ever. High definition (HD) video will stretch the envelope much further.
Zetera's vision of the Personal Network Drive includes the following:
- 1. Personal Network Drives must connect directly to the network router, switch, hub or wireless access point/router, making digital content available to any user regardless of the status or activities of other PCs on the network. Directly connecting Personal Network Drives to the network ensures there are no bottlenecks between the user and their digital content.
- 2. Personal Network Drives should appear to the user as additional local disk drives with drive letters. Consumers have been conditioned to access digital content stored on a drive letter ("C" drive) or a My Documents folder, and should be able to do the same with shared storage. To the user, Personal Network Drives appear, behave and are managed in the same fashion as a local disk drive with its own drive letter, simplifying access to data and management of software settings.
- 3. Personal Network Drives should provide enough performance to stream multiple DVD-quality movies simultaneously, and users should be able access digital content from multiple devices simultaneously. Personal Network Drives must be able to accommodate delivery of DVD-quality video, MP3 music and miscellaneous business applications simultaneously.
- 4. Personal Network Drives should enable capacity expansion by adding capacity to existing disk drives and without changing software settings. Users should be able to add storage capacity without changing software settings. Personal Network Drives enable users to add storage devices to any empty network port and allocate additional storage to existing volumes.
- 5. Personal Network Drives should provide access control to protect sensitive files. Users need to be able to share public content and keep privates files out of reach of other network users. Personal Network Drives enables users to allocate storage for public ("shared") or private use.
- 6. Personal Network Drives must protect digital content and critical files without additional software or user intervention. Digital content should be protected in the event of hard disk failure. Personal Network Drives provide users with the option of local or remote, continuous backup ("mirroring") to protect digital content and precious files.
