IBM Travelstar E Reference Guide

A compact, self-contained, high-capacity, very rugged external
storage solution for mobile computing environments

IBM Travelstar E External Hard Drive

Highlights

Employs a rugged design and
shock damping for drive reliabil­ity and durability

Provides high storage capacities
(up to 10 GB) to meet growing
mobile user requirements

Is plug-and-play compatible with
any PC-format notebook that has
a PC card (PCMCIA) slot

Simplifies operation with self­loading installation, data backup,
and drive mirroring software

Features a self-contained design
that eliminates the need for a
power cord or external storage
media such as car tridges and
diskettes

Provides higher performance—
up to 2.0 MB/sec—than external
devices that use parallel ports

Weighs only 12 ounces (340 g)
and is small for easy por tability

Uses field-proven, award-winning
IBM Travelstar* mobile hard drives

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A better way to keep up with
data growth

If you’re like most notebook PC users, you
probably find yourself having to delete
files that you would rather keep. There
never seems to be as much storage as
you need. With the proliferation of storage­hungry multimedia applications and the
growing reliance on the Internet and
e-mail applications, notebook hard drives
are filling up faster than ever. Today, there
is an easy way to add more storage to
your system—quickly, easily, and
affordably. With the new IBM Travelstar E
External Hard Drive, you don’t have to
make the difficult decision of which files to
keep and which to delete.

The IBM Travelstar E External
Hard Drive

Notebook PC users who need more
storage have generally had three options:
they can swap their internal hard drive
with a higher capacity model, purchase a
new PC with a higher capacity drive, or
install external storage devices that use
removable cartridges or CD-ROMs. All of
these options have drawbacks. Installing
a new hard drive in a notebook PC often
requires expert assistance; purchasing a
new PC can be rather expensive; and
most external storage drives are expen­sive, have a greater susceptibility to shock
and vibration, and rely on an external
power source and media.

On the other hand, the IBM Travelstar E
External Hard Drive is a self-contained
mobile storage solution designed
especially for notebook PC environments.
It provides superior ruggedness, capacity,
and performance in a smaller form factor
than desktop drives. And it is much more
affordable than purchasing a new PC or
external removable media drive of
equivalent capacity. Because the IBM
Travelstar E External Hard Drive is a
complete self-contained system, you
don’t have to carry around an extra power
cord or a stack of cartridges or disks.

The plug-and-play IBM Travelstar E
External Hard Drive is an easy-to-install,
easy-to-use solution for adding mobile
high-capacity storage to any notebook
PC with a PCMCIA card slot. Two
capacity points are available—8 GB and
10 GB—both of which provide an
impressive price per GB. With superior
shock and vibration performance, fast
data transfer, and quiet operation, these
drives are ideal for even the most
demanding environments.

The IBM Travelstar E External Hard Drive
with PCMCIA attachment

A versatile external
storage solution

The versatility of the IBM Travelstar E
External Hard Drive enables it to fulfill a
variety of user needs, such as data backup
and archiving. Backup is simple with easy­to-use preloaded software tools. And you
can easily transport large data files
simply by plugging in the IBM Travelstar E
External Hard Drive to another PC.

The high storage capacities enable you to
store today’s popular MP3, video, and
multimedia files that can quickly consume
all the storage in many hard drives. As a
bonus, you don’t have to worry about
shuffling through a pile of cartridges or
CDs to find the specific files you want—
they can all remain in one place on the
IBM Travelstar E External Hard Drive.

The IBM Travelstar E External Hard Drive
can also help reduce security risks. For
instance, if you are presenting a series of
presentations at a conference, you can
store sensitive data as encrypted files on
a single IBM Travelstar E External Hard
Drive rather than printing it in hardcopy or
storing it on various cartridges, CDs, or
notebook PCs.

Easy installation and use

The IBM Travelstar E External Hard Drive
is a complete plug-and-play solution that
you can set up in just a few minutes. In fact,
no driver diskettes or CDs are needed for
the installation.

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The one-time installation
takes only a few minutes and offers the
choice of installing “lite” preloaded
software, such as popular MP3 “ripper”
software and data backup/archiving
applications. With the preloaded software,
you get a fast, reliable data backup or
drive mirroring solution right out of the box.

IBM Travelstar E External Hard Drives are
also very easy to use. The small form factor
and light weight make them easy to
transport. And there are no external power
cables or cartridges to worry about. You
simply attach the PCMCIA card to the
notebook and you are ready to begin.

The increasing demand for storage capacity

In the past few years, several trends have combined to drive up the need for higher
storage capacity:

Memory-intensive applications—Most PCs running a Windows** operating system
and standard Internet browser, word processing, spreadsheet, and organization
software require 500 MB (or 0.5 GB) of storage just for those applications. Add a
few more applications, and you can quickly fill many smaller hard drives.

Proliferation of data from new sources—The Internet, intranets, extranets, e-mail,
multimedia, and other digital audio and video applications (such as MP3, 3-D
design, 3-D animated graphics, and photography manipulation) have become
commonplace for most notebook users. As a result, storage requirements have
increased almost exponentially. For example, just one minute of uncompressed
video requires 1.6 to 2.0 GB of storage.

Increased reliance on information as a tool—Through business intelligence, data
mining, and data warehouse applications, more businesses are turning their raw
data into valuable information. In order to do this more efficiently, many businesses
are setting up dedicated Storage Area Networks (SANs) and data warehouses
that enable business intelligence operations. In turn, notebook users find them­selves conducting information management tasks in a similar manner with their
own personal databases—which ultimately requires a greater investment in
storage.

Expanded use of mobile hard drives—Many mobile drives are now being used in
non-IT industries where storage requirements have increased due to the growth of
information appliances with computing capabilities, such as printers, fax ma­chines, commercial point-of-sale terminals, and medical testing products.
Because of their lighter weight, smaller size, and superior ruggedness compared
to desktop drives, mobile drives are an ideal choice for handling storage needs for
a wide variety of commercial and industrial applications.

With their ruggedness, high performance, and industry-leading capacities, IBM
Travelstar E External Hard Drives address these varied requirements to provide a
highly reliable mobile storage solution.

Unsurpassed reliability and
performance

Because IBM Travelstar E External Hard
Drives are much faster than other external
drives that rely on removable media, they
are ideal for running real-time online
presentations, games, photo albums, and
videos. The sustained data throughput
rate of PCMCIA channels at 2 MB/sec is
much higher than competitive products
that use parallel port attachment at
sustained throughput rates of only 200 to
300 KB/sec.

A lightweight, high-capacity storage
device for notebook PCs